Viral 'I'm Not a Cat' Filter Is Decades-Old Software

Footage of a Texan lawyer denying he was a cat as he appeared with a feline filter on a live call was created using a decades-old piece of software pre-installed on some Dell laptops. The BBC reports: The Live Cam Avatar software was also available for people to download. It is not clear how the lawyer found himself speaking through the face of a worried-looking cat. But it seems even in its heyday, there was a history of people becoming trapped as the avatar and finding it hard to remove.

One, ChemBark, describes in a blog how he appeared "as a sad kitten" during a job interview via Skype. "I started frantically scrolling down all of the menus in Skype, trying to remedy the situation," he writes. Tweeting now the filter is back in the news, he says it "was the default setting on Dell's webcam software." Another blog, written in 2010, offers a detailed explanation of how to remove "the stupid white cat." The company behind the filter, Reallusion, described it as a "customizable emotive facial animation that gives you much more fun that the conventional video chatting." Reallusion now provides sophisticated real-time 3D animation software -- but the cat filter seems no longer to be available in its online shop.

The lawyer says: "I'm not a cat"

[Anonymous Coward]

Best quote ever!

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[K. S. Kyosuke]

But cats are the best bird lawyers, aren't they?

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[Krishnoid]

The cat with a beak [youtu.be] is, anyway.

LOL

[Aighearach]

I want the rest of the story. It was his secretary's computer. Does this mean they're doing legal work with no computers, and he borrowed an old laptop that hadn't been used in years?

So he doesn't do any legal research at all? He just wings it, and types out some BS filings on an electric typewriter?

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[K. S. Kyosuke]

Maybe the work computers are somehow restricted?

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[Anonymous Coward]

Well this is Alpine, Texas. You would understand if you had ever been there...

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[phaedryx]

My suspicion is that he has a decent laptop, but doesn't really know how to use it. His secretary has the old, hand-me-down laptop because that's how lawyers think about their secretaries. He didn't know how to set things up on his laptop, so he had his secretary do it. She set everything up, but had never used the webcam before. Hilarity ensued.

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[Anonymous Coward]

My suspicion is that he has a decent laptop, but doesn't really know how to use it.

No, in that case he would be a doctor.

Re:LOL

[Known Nutter]

The Cattorney explains briefly...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE4Fierod1Q

Re:LOL

[Known Nutter]

Linkify the linkinator:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

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[Aighearach]

Thanks, so the spoiler is that he has more than one office, doesn't have a laptop, and apparently only has a computer in one office. Almost as bad as I imagined.

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[Calydor]

Maybe the laptop is used daily for various tasks, just never video conferencing before now?

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[dfm3]

In my experience, the lawyers I've known tend to not be a very tech savvy bunch. Could be that they have come to prefer paper for CYA or record-keeping reasons... or, maybe it's a generational thing - after all, many of the more experienced lawyers I've known are older, and they tend to be the ones who are more apt to avoid technology and insist on paper everything.

Another group that's just as bad is real estate agents. Not too long ago, for instance, we worked with one (the seller's agent) who insisted o

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[cusco]

Not very tech savvy? That's the understatement of the week. The IBM salescritter sold my mom's bosses an AS400 with Word Perfect as a networked word processor well after Windows for Workgroups and NT 3.51 had made networking easy.

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[91degrees]

Some people use desktops which don't have built in webcams.

Only the best news here on Slashdot

[Vomitgod]

Only the best news here on Slashdot

Re:People who are technically incompetent

[Calydor]

Let's be fair here; if either one of us is set down in front of a program we haven't used before, and the first thing that happens is this program starts embarrassing us in front of coworkers or bosses (best analogy I have for a video stream to the judge) how quickly can we find the one obscure setting that is causing this behavior?

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[vlad30]

how quickly can we find the one obscure setting that is causing this behavior?

Well written software you'll find it in seconds, However with the garbage put out by most companies these days,

After searching through the menus and dialogs for something that might resemble setting then googling and getting Ads for more cat video's and software to do the same, finding a tech forum that will may answer after you pay a fee then give you an incorrect answer, then finding the company that supplied the software no longer exists or if they do tell you to upgrade to the latest version which do

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[cellocgw]

how quickly can we find the one obscure setting that is causing this behavior?

Like the old TNY cartoon, "How about never?"

Many's the time my fingers slipped and hit some key combo which caused a page to completely reorganize itself or hide panels or display new panels, etc etc. Good luck figuring out what keyboard shortcut I accidentally hit, let alone which abstraction layer (app, OS, webbrowser, webpage-with-embedded-pseudoapp) intercepted it.

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[Calydor]

Hah. That reminds me of trying my hands at Linux many years ago. I was writing something in ... vi, I think, probably some early attempts at learning to code in C, and then the trouble happened. You know what an experienced Windows user does when satisfied with a piece of text? He hits Ctrl-S.

As a friend later explained to me, Ctrl-S locked the current session. All I knew was suddenly nothing was responding anymore after trying to save what should basically be a simple text file.

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[laie_techie]

Hah. That reminds me of trying my hands at Linux many years ago. I was writing something in ... vi, I think, probably some early attempts at learning to code in C, and then the trouble happened. You know what an experienced Windows user does when satisfied with a piece of text? He hits Ctrl-S.

As a friend later explained to me, Ctrl-S locked the current session. All I knew was suddenly nothing was responding anymore after trying to save what should basically be a simple text file.

For most of my career, I was o a Windows box while occasionally using Linux. I've been bit by ctrl-s a few times. Always need to google on how to unlock the screen,

I don't believe my lawyer

[OrangeTide]

I think he may be a cat.

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[Ostracus]

Names Catbert.

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[Tablizer]

Yip, it's the only way I'll ever "get pussy".

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[Comrade Ogilvy]

Who are you gonna to believe, me, a lawyer? Or your lying eyes?

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[hawk]

you found the only lawyer in town who accepts payment in kibbles and catnip, and you're *complaining*?

you just can't satisfy some people . . .

hawk

Decades old?

[paul_engr]

Decades old? Like we used to do video conferencing on our webcams back in 1998? The fuck, you are an idiot

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[drinkypoo]

Only SGI users, and even then, mostly just with Indys

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[Gavagai80]

2010 is 1.1 decades old.

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[catmistake]

I agree with you completely. But technically were [youtube.com] wrong [ebay.com].

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[nickersonm]

I can confirm: I used a QuickCam Pro for videoconferencing (via Netmeeting [wikipedia.org]!) last millennium.

Still audible to the judge after adjournment

[Anonymous Coward]

He said he was using his legal assistant’s computer in his office and believes her daughter may have swapped in the filter before he logged on. Since the start of the pandemic, Texas courts have held more than 1 million virtual hearings, leaving [Judge] Ferguson often in charge of guiding others through technical difficulties, he said. “That’s part of my job now in the pandemic — to fix everything that can go wrong,” he said. The 394th Judicial District has no IT department,

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[cusco]

The 394th Judicial District has no IT department

And every script kiddie reading that just started keyboarding . . .

Who Recorded?

[laie_techie]

The video clearly states that anyone caught recording is guilty of contempt of court and subject to a $500 fine.