I kinda wish they’d just reverted the commits rather than nuking the entire translation. Perhaps a Ukrainian speaker could help them get the translation back into a good shape?
Not saying I condone it, but seeing how lifeless and sterile (no pun intended...!) most software has become, and how quick people have gotten to take offense at everything, I almost wish "spicy" stuff like this would show up more often.
Why? Software can be fun without being... this. Easter eggs and humor, that's good stuff but a distribution full of slurs like some 13yo edgelord wrote it? I just don't see the appeal. There's already a bunch of random distros which are basically just themed (see https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/ or https://biebian.sourceforge.net/) and joke distros like Suicide Linux or AmogOS
When people feel frustrated because they can no longer laugh at some communities without people calling them out, they should take a moment to pause and reflect.
Noticing vandalism and fixing it is not the same as taking offence. Wanna get offensive stuff for some immature humour? Install fortune-...-off packages. Nobody is stopping you from experiencing it. But putting insults where other informative text should be is just stupid.
My personal favorite is the "Bush hid the facts" easter egg/bug. Was it a bug or an easter egg disguised as a bug? Given how MSFT does not like to break old functionality maybe the easter egg creator knew this when adding it? A easter egg to survive the generations.
Oh come on, as riddled with pitfalls as Unicode decoding is, you think it's an easter egg when the string "this app can break" or "hhhh hhh hhh hhhhh" can also trigger the bug?
From the manual (https://web.archive.org/web/20080119120948/http://www.redhat...): “The ‘Redneck’ language entry represents a dialect of American English spoken by Red Hat Software's Donnie Barnes, and was used as a test case during the addition of internationalization support to the installation program. It is included solely for entertainment value (and to illustrate how difficult it is actually talking to Donnie).”
Seeing this slip through makes me worry that something more serious could slip through too, e.g., swapping "Allow" and "Deny" on some security-sensitive prompt.
yeah, I get that there'll naturally be fewer people able to double check some languages, but it sounds like online translators would have caught this. Words that wouldn't stand out so clearly might slip by a lot easier even if someone went through the trouble to copy/paste the text into babelfish.com
I'd like to think that bad/naughty/wrong translations of phrases might be hard to catch with automated testing, but changes that would actually leave an install broken or vulnerable would be more likely to be detected... I hope...
Seems more like random Palestinian and Hebrew centric obscenity. Maybe it _is_ anti-Semitic, but seems too weird and purposeless to me.
I admit I might be missing something in this case, but it seems like anything involving ethnicity + rudeness is automatically labelled hate-speech nowadays.
It's not purposeless. This would be used by pro-Russian propaganda to point and say "see, Ukraine is full of nazis, that's why we have to go in and kill everybody".
What do you mean backwards-date? It's how someone would do it naturally. Like when we say one thousand, we do 1000, not 0001, most significant to least significant. I suppose we use mostly little-endian computers, so perhaps you'd expect to see it as 01.32 to correspond, but that would seem quite confusing to everyone, wouldn't it? A point-release would be 1.01.32? And the tenth point-release (god forbid) would be 01.01.32? I suppose we could put it at the end and get 01.32.1 but that then has it go up and down all over the place.
I think what they picked is quite natural: most-sig to least-sig. 23.10.1 has year.month.point-release
Ubuntu wouldn't be the first product to change their versioning system for releases. I don't think we need to get too worried about what will happen in 76 years from now.
It's a VERY time-consuming process to do a thorough review of localization materials. I've spent multiple working days on single massive commits when working with an unreliable translation provider. I can absolutely believe that someone glanced at the diff (linked elsewhere in this HN thread) at thought "that looks good enough". It wasn't a very large diff, and didn't do anything that reviewers will be keyed for (bizarre punctuation, formatting errors, incorrect captured variable references, etc).
Offensive localization strings is not a threat I'd considered when I did my work. I doubt the reviewers of this repo thought it was a concern.
Sometimes they really mess things up when there’s little context.
A few basic examples: “file” in English is both a verb and a noun, but other languages have different words for each. The machine translator will just guess at presenting you the noun or verb.
Other languages have genders for everything, so if a computer is male, but a standalone sentence doesn’t know that, the translator has to take a guess. If it guesses wrong, the sentence will be confusing to the user that thinks it’s about something other than a computer.
Reminds me of a mistake in Spanish in a TomTom device I have around: "AP" stands for autopista (motorway) but it reads "AP" aloud as apartado postal (PO box).
Have the machine translation more as a sanity check than the actual translation: you don't want to blindly trust what the machine produces if it's in a language you don't understand. But going the other way for quality control can eliminate the most egregious cases like this.
Sounds like more fine tuning is necessary. At this point in time with LLMs, I'm really surprised at how auto-translation is still so not natural. I mean, I get why it is that way, but at the same time, it's no less shocking how bad it is.
One of the commits that added the offensive language: https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-desktop-provision/commit...
It seems like the vandal made a test edit three weeks ago, perhaps to see if anyone was paying attention: https://github.com/canonical/ubuntu-desktop-provision/commit.... This is followed up with two, more extensive edits made a few days ago.
I kinda wish they’d just reverted the commits rather than nuking the entire translation. Perhaps a Ukrainian speaker could help them get the translation back into a good shape?