Comment by GFischer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GFischer | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My freaking cat installed Windows 10 on my laptop - he pressed enter on one of those dialogs with his paw and Windows started updating.

I was more or less resigned to do so anyways, so he didn't do anything I wasn't going to do eventually, he just hastened it.

I wonder if EULA's accepted by a cat have any validity though :)

PD: I googled that and Slashdot has a story on a hardware to have cats accept EULAs :)

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/02/18/1817221/dont-li...

But no, it's not a good anti-lawyer method, a comment says, regarding children and cats "The child is an instrument of your will. Note - they are not acting as your agent, as a child cannot be an agent. Instead, they are your instrument, much like a pen signing your name or a cat clicking a button for you is an instrument. "

That seems to imply that you pick up your cat and have him press the button so you can say "it wasnt me!"... whereas in your case, you did not coerce the cat to press the button for you, so was it truly your instrument, or random occurence.

I feel like you would be responsible for any key presses on your laptop, regardless if made by the cat or not. Maybe someone can give an expert opinion.

I don't think that's entirely true. If an acquaintance used your laptop in front of you to hack into a bank, you might be responsible.

But if Microsoft automatically downloaded BankHacker 3.11 to your machine and set it to pop up a dialogue box so that hacking into a bank was so simple your cat could do it — and if then your cat "used your laptop to hack into a bank", then common sense says that Microsoft would be responsible.

Intent figures greatly in legal circumstances. If you intended for your cat to accept a EULA by installing special hardware to enable it, you're almost certainly responsible. If the cat did it accidentally, maybe not - the hard part would be proving it was the cat and not yourself.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com