VA hospital's IT snafu blamed on cat's keyboard surfing
www.theregister.com
US govt confirms outage, leaves feline in a quantum state of uncertainty

A four-hour system interruption in September at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri has been attributed to a cat jumping on a technician’s keyboard.

    • AThing4String@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      371·
      1 year ago

      Many of your points are good, but 4 is pretty weak. I have left my personal laptop for 20 minutes to come back and find that the cat has put me into airplane mode, opened a hexadecimal calculator I didn’t know I had, written a complain to Microsoft that only didn’t send because of airplane mode (error popup and all), opened my family recipes, edited my family recipes to include actual text-symbol emojis among other garbage, and recorded the whole thing as a… Gamer Clip???

      She does this routinely.

      I disable my work laptop keyboard before I even LOOK away from it, I don’t want to find out how much damage she could push to production.

      • Terrasque@infosec.pubEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        I taught my cats not to go on the keyboard. Took a while, but now two of them are very carefully stepping around it, and the third kinda does, but easily forgets when she gets excited.

        Just consistently moving their paws off the keyboard when they try and go there, use “bad” voice, and putting them on floor if they continue. And “a while” was almost a year.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          1 year ago

          I love cats and would like to have one but I don’t because I also like to not have my things moved around or messed with at the whim of a bored animal.

          I wish there was a way to have cat friends rather than pets, so they could come visit and I could let them in for a bit if it’s a good time and then they go off and do their cat things elsewhere.

    • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
      111·
      1 year ago

      You talking about government systems here. Most were built before safeguards were a thing.

      My wife works for a tax authority and she still has to use a green text on black background terminal with keyboard only interaction to review people’s taxes. Being one keystroke away from blowing away a database is not surprising.

    • msage@programming.devEnglish
      6·
      1 year ago

      I always open up files in Vim because I can work with text much better than cat or less or whatever else.

      But also I use git. For everything that is important.

    • Osa-Eris-Xero512@kbin.social
      4·
      1 year ago

      This could be a case of the reporting not being 100% accurate though. I could easily see some cat-like typing going unnoticed in the wrong kind of config file mangling a config for a critical process and requiring recovering a server (or, say, a remote firewall >_>) from backup.

    • brygphilomena@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Guy was changing config, got up to get coffee, cat walked across keyboard, tech didn’t notice what the cat did and saved and reloaded?

      Or config was in some gui and not from a bash terminal?