Ubuntu has been spotted again, but this time on American TV

Sep 5, 2014 09:09 GMT  ·  By

Spotting Ubuntu in the wild should be promoted to a sport and records must be set for the most interesting places where the distro has been seen. It looks like NBC and the Today Show have used Ubuntu to illustrate the nefarious practices of the hacker that release some nude pictures of various celebrities.

This week we saw the release of a number of raunchy images from the iCloud accounts of numerous celebrities and the suspicions for this major leak seem to point towards the work of a lonely hacker. This individual hasn't been apprehended yet, and as far as everyone is concerned, he remains unknown and at large.

Now, let’s suppose for a minute that you are a producer for NBC and you have to illustrate somehow what the supposed hacker was using when he was doing the hacking. In this case, the Today Show used images from an Ubuntu operating system to show how the devilish hacker is using Linux to break into people's iCloud accounts.

The image you can see in the far right is pulled from the Today Show and this is practically what the vast majority of people out there think about Linux and Linux users. A guy standing in a hunchback position over a keyboard, a terminal, and line upon lines of codes is pretty much the general idea.

The image used is from an Ubuntu 12.04 (probably) version, it's basically the stock installation without any kind of customization done (because this is how Ubuntu users like it), and it's not even updated. To make things even funnier (and sadder at the same time), that particular Ubuntu OS seems to be running in VirtualBox, inside a Mac OS host, because this is what every hacker dreams of.

The information was provided by a Google+ user and it's fair to say that it's one of the most interesting places where Ubuntu has been spotted. It's also interesting to think that Ubuntu is now in the public conscience as a recognizable Linux experience and that says a lot about the OS.

Ubuntu has been spotted in a number of weird and interesting places and we got to report on some of those situations, whether it was in a NASA flight, used by NASA for a robotics-related project, or even on the space station.

In any case, if you happen to spot a Linux (or Unix) operating system in an interesting place, don't be shy and give us a message.