Keyboards and Kitties (stub)

Disclaimer:

The following ramble does not result in any code. It provokes the desire, but does not include the performance.

My friend recently related to me the mischief their little kitten causes. A mad dash across the keyboard can close a playing movie, move a file, or open programs at random. I think this is pretty funny. This is an ancient problem, with well-established solutions. The easiest to implement are ‘kitty-traps’, which can be as simple as a cardboard box near your computer.

There are also software solutions, which try to detect cat-like key-presses. For Windows there is the commercial Pawsense, and for Mac there is Catnip. A boring alternative for Windows and Mac is Catslock, which simply provides a key to disable the keyboard. I could not find anything for Linux. In any case, I do not have quite the same motivation as the people who find this a problem.

In fact, my motivation is mischievous.

Making trouble

I think it is great that a silly fluff-ball can disrupt whatever you are doing¹, and in general, add some noise to a normally very proper, ordered, and sensible human-computer interaction². I see a shortcoming though. The effects of a keyboarding cat are generally random; one time the kitty might close a window, another time it might ruin your last paragraph. Wouldn’t it be more entertaining if the cat caused the same effect each time? How much better would it be if the chance of such an effect was also particularly remote?

Yes, and much better.

I recall being young³. We learned to do quick key-press chains to disrupt our friends computers (or the shared class computer). Ctrl + Alt + arrow was a favoured combination; rotating the screen any which way. For the uninitiated victims this meant navigating awkwardly to display settings to fix it. Prime entertainment.

I propose that a software is created that detects cat-like keyboard activity, and then instead of helping the hapless owner by locking the keyboard, rotates the screen. Bonus points for sneaking it onto a friends computer then waiting for stories of their infuriatingly and ridiculously coordinated cat.

Unfortunately, the basic technology used for this is a key-logger. A key-logger is something I would not put on somebodies computer without their permission, even if it was designed not to keep any permanent logs. It seems like an undue security risk to give a joke program the privilege to access all keyboard input.

Making a program I can never use

Determining keyboard activity

Logkeys is a Linux utility. Unsurprisingly, it is a key-logger.

Being kind-of/incompetently/sometimes security concious, I want to be somewhat sure I won’t accidentally share key-logs. I trust Logkeys because the source is available, and it appears high-ranking in web searches. The program does have an inbuilt upload feature, which I don’t trust myself to not accidentally use. To fulfill my desire for some ‘cheap’ peace of mind I looked for ways to ensure a program does not access the network. I found the neat unshare program can be used to deny a program network access. Using:

unshare -n program

allows us to run program, while denying it network access.

The first problem I encountered with Logkeys is setting up a keyboard layout. How to do this is documented in the project read-me, or the programs man page.

Using the logs

Possible paths ahead are modifying the Logkeys source to include additional processing of the key-presses. Alternatively, a program might be written to watch the log file for changes. I am not so sure about the latter because the logs are necessarily serial, and do not appear to indicate simultaneous key-presses - information which might be useful for kitty detection. Perhaps there is another interface to Logkeys that is more useful? I do not know.

This is where the task stopped being easy, and I gave up.

Giving it up

Understandably⁴, I am not motivated to write software that has so little utility.

Other ideas for responses to cat-like key-presses:

• Use the key-presses as a source of entropy. I have no knowledge in this area so I can only suspect that this is not safe. Possibly related: I found clobbering the keyboard in the hopes of generating enough entropy for a PGP key was futile. There would be fewer key-presses from a cat.
• Trigger a randomly generated screen-saver and use the key-presses as a influencing factor (Ala music visualisations).
• Connect to an ‘Omeagle for cats’⁵. If a cat is on the keyboard then it can be connected via video-link to other cats on keyboards⁶.