The decision to withdraw the Mantic Minotaur ISO was taken after it was discovered that a contributor had inserted malicious translations into the installer. Although Canonical has not revealed the content of the user-submitted translations for the Linux distro, it has been described as “hate speech”.
According to Canonical:
“Shortly after release we identified hate speech from a malicious contributor in a specific set of translations of the Ubuntu Desktop installer UI and have taken immediate action. These translations are being removed and an updated ISO will be available to download once we have replaced the offending material.
It is important to note that these translations are not part of the Ubuntu Archive and we believe the incident is contained only to translations provided via a third party translation tool we use for a subset of applications.
The affected images that have been removed are Ubuntu Desktop 23.10, Ubuntu Budgie 23.10 and the Ubuntu Desktop daily images.”
We have identified hate speech from a malicious contributor in some of our translations submitted as part of a third party tool outside of the Ubuntu Archive.
The Ubuntu 23.10 image has been taken down and a new version will be available once the correct translations have been…
— Ubuntu (@ubuntu) October 12, 2023
Though it’s unclear exactly what might actually be considered hate speech these days (means different things to different people), we can be sure that there were things in the translations that Canonical saw what they thought might detract from the integrity of the latest ISO build and took immediate action to rectify the situation.
Other than the so-called translation issue here, the Ubuntu OS remains as solid and as stable as ever — there were no security issues found.
You can give the Ubuntu Desktop 23.10 OS version a try by visiting https://releases.ubuntu.com/mantic/ to download the ISO.
