Friday, July 22nd, 2005, 12:58 pm
Pornographic Screensavers
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Dr. Irving from the University reported a ‘critical’ issue with the Linux distribution that had been installed in student clusters. The following message was posted yesterday afternoon to the Linux-users mailing list. I believe it is worth quoting:
Several of our students have been complaining about a pornographic screensaver on Redhat Fedora Core 3 desktops. After a bit of rooting around I’ve tracked this down to the
webcollage.desktopscreensaver which picks random images off the internet and displays them within the screensaver. Not a very responsible inclusion in a desktop environment but it can be found in/usr/share/applnk/System/ScreenSaversshould anyone receive similar complaints.
July 24th, 2005 at 12:07 am
Paul Bain was using that screensaver until he realised that migth be a problem on the (apparently) very heavily monitored internet connection in halls.
It is at least in part little things like that that are are stopping Linux being any more wide adoptted. Yeah, sure, random images from the internet in a screensaver is cool and it would be good if you wrote a script to do it on your own computer but there is no reason to include in in main stream distro that wants to be run on Average Joe’s desktop.
July 24th, 2005 at 6:30 am
I fully agree. I think this might be negligence among the Redhat team. Probably wouldn’t happen with SuSE though…