My Cat

• ordered extra socks from Muji

• retweeted¹ tweets, ‘favorited’ tweets, and deleted draft tweets on Twitter

• clipped whole pages in Evernotes

• deleted a dozen photos

• turned off sound in MATE

• chatted on IRC

• killed Emacs

• killed Firefox

  • disabled Firefox by laying against the side of the keyboard & holding down some no-op key so long that Firefox hung for the next hour at 100% CPU, apparently trying to process all the key-down events.

  • crashed Firefox by similarly laying & pressing the Escape key

• crashed R inside Urxvt

  • crashed Stan inside R inside Urxvt

• made Urxvt unusable (terminal escapes?)

• deleted directories of docs (but fortunately, versioned)

• hard-locked XMonad (by opening arbitrarily many windows)

• permanently disabled weather forecast widget in MATE status bar, which remained broken even after being manually re-added (?)

• crashed X.org (the Synaptic driver for my Acer laptop would segfault whenever he stepped on the trackpad; I never figured out why but chalk it up to perhaps he was touching it in too many spots and triggered bugs)

• turned off monitor via keyboard

  replicating this, I disabled my monitor a second time but it didn’t come back up when I pushed the hotkey apparently responsible; I had to push the power button on the PC itself to bring it back up, and network was disabled afterwards! A check of dmesg system logs suggests that the system had fully suspended and apparently that can’t be undone from the keyboard?

• made my external monitor a ‘mirror’ display

• turned off external monitor, forcing reboot of MATE to restore access to both external & laptop monitors

• shut down laptop

Other Cats

Things other peoples’ cats have done:

• crashed a datacenter:

  In March 2012_13ya, Google responded to an unusual power outage at one of its Belgian datacenters that ultimately led to local data corruption. Investigation revealed that a cat had damaged a nearby external power supply, triggering a series of cascading failures in the building’s power systems.

  Eaton’s Blackout Tracker series notes additional US power-related examples:

  • 2012: “Must have been his ninth life: A cat was to blame for a Christmas outage that struck El Paso in 2012_13ya. The two-hour blackout left 760 residents opening presents in the dark on Christmas morning. Officials found the cat at rest on one of the power lines.”

  • 2013: “On Jan. 20, a cat shorted out a Philadelphia transformer. The four-legged feline caused power to go out in all three buildings of the West Park Housing Complex…On Nov. 11, a cat got into a place where it shouldn’t have been and caused an equipment failure, knocking out power to 1,800 in Harper’s Ferry.”

  • 2014: “A cat apparently got into some substation equipment on July 30, knocking out power to about 6,200 customers on the south side of Wilmington.”

  • 2018: “The cat’s meow: A cat that made contact with a piece of substation equipment left 1,758 customers powerless for two-and-a-half hours on March 26 in Maui. Similarly, some 7,500 New Orleans customers woke up without electricity Sept. 17 after a feline was found inside a substation, leading many to question the resiliency of the city’s power grid. Dozens of businesses reported problems from the loss of electricity. Entergy acknowledged while precautions are taken to keep animals out of substations, they aren’t foolproof.”

  • UK, 2013_12ya: “Cat got your power? Oct. 16: St. Cyrus, Scotland: An entire village lost power for 2 hours after a cat got stuck on a utility pole.”

• screwed up monitor display settings by making display resolution too large or too small, rotate it, or change to monochrome

• turned on loud Microsoft “Narrator” screen-reader functionality

• broke Macbook laptop screen by laying on it

• disabled Mac, Window & Ubuntu OSes by apparently pressing & holding the “Print Screen” button long enough

  • disabled them by making logging-in impossible through too many keypresses

• triggered Linux kernel panic by laying on laptop keyboard while human used an external keyboard

• damaged NASA’s ultra-smooth “Flat Floor Facility” by playing on it at night

• temporarily banned someone from Gmail for rapid page reloading causing “excessive automated requests”; blocked an email address

• Twitter thread: 1 examples include: printed 58 pages of a Twitter feed; flipped laptop display & changed language to Arabic; delete everything on desktop, open YouTube to cat videos, & texted mother via WhatsApp; broke a brandnew printer; spammed Slack & rebooted; caused random text inputs by laying on wireless keyboard in another room; turned a pub sound system to 11

• put a Japanese city on alert after falling into a vat of hexavalent chromium

• historically: broke marine chronometers; cf. “Cat fugue”, “Kitten on the Keys”

Fuzz Testing

This ‘fuzz testing’, aside from demonstrating that the first AI with the intelligence of a cat will take over civilization (crashes like Stan/R/X simply should not happen in the first place much less be triggered by legal input like random keypresses), also shows a lot of bad user-experience (UX) design in FLOSS programs.

Here, the problematic software includes Emacs, Urxvt, MATE shutdown interface, MATE external monitor handling, and the Twitter UI. Destructive irreversible operations like shutting down a computer should require prompts which cannot be faked by a cat sitting on a keyboard; in the case of MATE’s external monitor handling, it is reversible by the same key pressed—but only partially, as MATE forgets the external display settings like the orientation & relative positioning of the two monitors, requiring me to again manually set all the options.

Perhaps more tech companies & software developers should do fuzz testing (given that between cats and real fuzz testing, we are still finding so many serious issues in software)…

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