I have my KDE screensaver set to "Random". To my horror, I returned to my computer after a break to see very raunchy porno photos in a screensaver collage. The culprit was the "Webcollage" screensaver under the "Banners and Pictures" section. It pulls photos from anywhere on the web, some of them indecent.

My question: Why has not the xscreensavers team removed this embarrassing time bomb from their product?

Who and how to petition that this inappropriate stuff not be available by default?

Imagine your making the effort to convince a business or non-profit organization or school or grandmother to use Linux -- and six months into the deployment this "Webcollage" screensaver rolls around!
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My workaround:
$ cd /usr/share/xscreensaver/config
$ su
...
# mv webcollage.xml webcollage_no.xml
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The first few times the random screensaver kicks in, you get a blank screen -- and no automatic putting the monitor to sleep. It seems that after a few usage sessions, the random screensavers act correctly and the monitor goes to sleep properly.

Yikes!

Depending on the client though... it might just score you points.

I had my own fright the first time I used xscreensaver. It defaults to random as you know, and when I returned to my computer there were all sorts of error messages on the screen. I thought: "What the heck happened to my beloved Slackware machine?" But as soon as I moved the mouse I discovered it was just the screensaver messin' with my head. LoL.

Gave me a bit of a stir for a second though.

Dig

Oops! Just came back upstairs, and my screensaver was displaying "Webcollage" again -- and a very unacceptable picture, indeed.

Help!

Try moving (or deleting) /usr/share/applnk/System/ScreenSavers/webcollage.desktop. That removed it from the list of available screensavers for me. That is a very odd one -- the configuration file even warns of porn. And, since 90% of the internet is porn (making that number up), it's very likely to find some. I just do things the easy way and set my screensaver to blank the screen, but the above solution should work.

In the settings for Web Collage, in UPPER CASE, it has a clear warning about pr0n.

There has been somewhat of a movement for some distros to remove this xscreensaver.

It would be niftier to get a graphic representation of the day's (or week's) events by scraping images from Google News, for example -- then it may actually be useful. I'm not one for needlessly removing options, but I wouldn't be at all upset if this screensaver was not present in the next release. (But I wouldn't be offended if it was, either, since I don't use random screensavers)

Just uncheck webcollage in the xscreensaver-demo list of screensavers.

Thanks, T3Slider. I just tried it.

When I select "Webcollage" as the screensaver, the screensaver does not kick in -- the screen just stays the same, burning in whatever is up. So, I guess that is the test.

Now back to "Random".

Yep, I've been bitten by that one at work before. Pretty embarasing

If it happened at a Linux set-up in a school or youth facility, the administrators would probably blame the well-meaning geek who introduced the software -- and maybe press criminal charges.

Whoa, thanks for the heads-up! Very good to know! I wouldn't want my children to see that! I set my screensaver to blank out the screen after 10 minutes.

This is all news to me, but when I use random screen savers I only select the ones I like and not all of them.

This is good to know though, in case I have to make sure people on my machines don't accidentally come across this.

Last time I checked (awhile ago), there was an option to filter out adult photos. I can't speak for the effectiveness of this option.

Cheers,
Jacob

Don't usually bother with screensavers (is there any need to, with modern monitors?) - but I might do now.
Some time later...mmmm, no porn yet. Ah, well, patience, Brian.

LOL, who the hell thought of such a program. Man, there's no way they were well-meaning. I mean, random images off the net, madness !!! Maybe random images from your computer (although that may also not be safe ). I can hardly believe they actually made such a program. I had to check the date just now to make sure it's not April fools ... it's not.

EDIT: It would probably be ok if it picked out tasteful softcore, but random images from the net will likely give you the nastiest sh*t you've ever seen. I don't even want to think about it ... I just can't believe it, who made this program ?