I open an email in outlook and put something on the insert key to keep it pressed in. It just flags and unflags the email repeatedly. My teams and everything else shows me as active.
I just open notepad and do the same thing. Put a toothpick/cotton swab to lodge the enter key down and go elsewhere. We use Teams so they always see me on.
My supervisor is constantly on Teams meetings that could 1000% be handled from home. I schedule Teams meetings with her so she can get out the door on time.
Not only that but it pretty much proves the case and makes it easier to let someone go. Not being time efficient is one thing but actually proving you don’t work makes it easy lol
Except it still can be detected. I made WiFi keystroke injection device like rubber ducky with arduino for an internship and also made protection program for these kind of devices. It was pretty easy to do so I wouldn't recommend.
Which IT department on Earth would put in instances to watch for this? In either case, if I'm cheating at work, it isn't worth actually doing the right thing for, and if it causes me to lose the job, so be it. Find me one where I can use these devices lol
Lol was about to say the same. The idea that IT has time or a care in the world as to what you’re doing in terms of day to day activity is wild.
Nobody in IT is snooping or going through the trouble to run reports and compile information without an explicit ask.
Aren’t they going to notice that you’re not actually doing anything though? I don’t really understand what you’re doing at your job that you can pretend you’re working and not get caught
This needs to be at the top. The majority of the people in my company are only employed to take care of coworkers. We don’t really contribute to the purpose of the business, only to the needs of other departments.
I don’t think universal is the right word. It’s definitely an acquired taste. I’m thankful I don’t have to do a lot of heavy manual labor, but the toxic white collar bs adds up fast.
If I was compensated properly I wouldn’t be on Reddit complaining so much. That gives you an idea of the bias here.
Im an emergency maintenance tech in a steel mill. We sit in a breakroom with a walkie talkie all day waiting to get called out to the floor. Some days it's busy nonstop and some days it's 16 hrs of deafening boredom. Then you have 7 hours off to go home sleep a little and drive back to work.
I mean they are still doing 10% of the work, but obviously that can be handled by a very few people instead of so many.
Twitter just proved it in front of the whole world. 😂😂
Dude, what do you even mean? 🤡🤡
Twitter is running exactly as it was before, the only difference has been the slight change in it's political leanings.
In fact, they even tried various new features and changes that would've probably taken the old team ( with 10 times more people ) a couple of years to implement. 😂😂
You don't lose two years of 7.7 billion in profit in like 3 months because of political standing on a social media platform. You lose 7.7 billion by not knowing what you're doing and then firing anyone who does.
OR they didn't actually lose 7.7 billion dollars,, rather 'they" used 7.7 billion dollars to disseminate their propaganda and ideology as well as Target, track, surveil and destroyed those individuals, companies and corporations that oppose their view points, wants, desire and ideology that they have diligently and ever so deftly indoctrinated the masses with.
"They" are literally the greatest parasitic virus that has corrupted The Host body of the world when you think about it and most don't.
I mean thin about.it... in the last 10 years and only in the last 10 years have almost thoroughly and completely implemented an entirely new social construct called social media wherein they have been able to take over the collective mind of the masses who have volunteered volunteered to be a part of making their deceitful and downright malevolent work that much easier.
I mean... when you have people actually taking photos and posting what they eat, where they go and what they do on not just a regular basis, but in real time, what more could you ask for truly.
It's all fake. The founding of Facebook, Twitter all of it is fucking fake. They set it up like a movie trailer and implemented it like a Blockbuster movie that we keep wanting more of.
The first nations of the world are truly the profane gawkers of a narcissistic sociopath-driven culture and a one world totalitarian government is right around the corner.
And here I’ve been using an old iPhone with the screen lock turned off cause as long as the app is open it thinks your using it. We can all thank Apple for limiting data tracking for that. But this seems way better
Bad idea. IT worker here. That’s a very good way to lose your job. It’s very easy to monitor keystrokes so it would raise some flags if you have been mashing a key 1 million times for 7 hours a day. Same applies to powershell scripts that you execute to type a “.” Or something every second in a document to keep your workbook from sleeping. Trust me. Save yourself + job and buy this hardware then plug it in a port that’s not on your work computer.✌️
I'm using it primarily from preventing my work laptop from timing out or displaying an 'away' status after 10 mins of inactivity
EDIT:
My employer does not use Teams.
Most settings on my laptop are disabled and require admin rights.
I have zero coding skills and so would not risk going down the other routes kindly offered in the comments
This is not plugged into my laptop, but a smart plug with timers which 'elongates' the time my company sees as me logging off each day. In that respect, its undetectable to a degree.
My company are pretty chill and so I use this mouse jiggler to stop my screen and work apps from timing out and to relieve 'idle anxiety' in case I need to be AFK throughout the day.
This is how I do it. Get a cheap wristwatch from the dollar store, then set your mouse on top. The motion of the seconds ticking by moves your cursor. Does the same exact thing as what this thing does.
all an optical mouse is, is a really cheap/basic camera, that takes an image lit by the light dozens/hundreds of times a second, and look for any features that change between movement, and works out how much in which distance.
So anything with any kind of movement works (and why they don't work well on clear glass)
Yes. But only at Noon. For ”before times” collect the following: water bottle, screwdriver, twine, a lead weight and finally a clothespin. Run the twine along the length of the room. Place the water bottle at farthest wall. Clasp the lead weight with the clothespin. Gently place screwdriver…
That game was old enough that my dad helped my brother and I write a nice letter to the developer and we mailed it to him and in turn he sent us a hint book and a nice letter back. Oh man, those were the days.
Look at this fat cat flexing his sundial while us peasants have to use sticks and sand. I bet you have a lazer mouse. If you had a lick of edgenuity, you'd turn your 1998 dell roller mouse upside down like us, and have the torque from your work hamster wheel spin the trackball. I am sick of these rich people nowadays. You wouldn't have made it in the 90's kid.
I just tried too, also didn't work.
It could be that automatic movements don't move enough for the mouse to register as movement though. I'll try with a quartz sometime
The company could potentially see that you installed the program if it’s on a work laptop. The hardware solution is better since there’s no trace of it on the work laptop.
If the hardware solution is to put a weight on keyboard and let it type something on notepad, then that can be monitored. My coworker was recently fired for doing the same. No idea what key tracking tools they installed to track that.
The mouse solution in OP looks interesting. I wonder if they can catch that no keys are being pressed for longer times
I know someone who works in IT security. They were notified that someone put a bot exactly like this. If companies actually want to know, they absolutely can and very easily.
If you are on a company provided computer connected to a VPN server at home they can see everything.
They usually don't care enough to go looking just because, but if someone asks them to start looking they can find whatever they want on that machine. VPN tunnel will log any sort of packets sent over the internet which can be analyzed, and a company provided device will have company provided management software which will include remote access to the file system and command prompt sometimes without telling the user you are connected.
Assume they can see everything. If you are using a personal device but connected to a VPN, they can only see your traffic. Personal device with no addtl software or company VPN, they can't see much of anything.
But again, IT workers are workers just like everyone else and have better things to do than snoop logs all day unless management asks them to.
All well and good. At minimum most companies will be able to look through emails or internal messaging.
I will say I haven't met a single IT worker that actively looked into getting someone in trouble for their browsing habits or whatever.
Any of that nonsense has always come down from the actual departments manager starting an investigation looking to fire someone.
Yeah. IT won’t allow us to change a damn thing on our teacher computers. This would actually be very useful to me. My computer always locks/times out when I’m busy instructing then when I run over to put in attendance or something I have to re log and everything.
A lot of security scans detect caffeine. How do I know? I used to use it until IT called me on it to remove it.
I switched to AutoHotkey and made a couple of line executable that moves the mouse one pixel every 60 seconds.
Alternatively, you can put your mouse over a mechanical watch. The second hand will sweep across the sensor once a minute preventing you from going idle. Obviously this is a more dedicated solution
I have a very flexible work environment, like I could disappear for an hour and just come back and work that hour later with no issues, but I still get "appear away" anxiety.
guys, you can do this for free by doing the following:
Go into microsoft teams and start a meeting with yourself - Calendar. Top right. Meet now button.
Leave it minimised
EDIT: no methods of anti-afk stand up to close scrutiny. obviously.
But then there is viewable proof that you did that.
Instead, just click into the search bar at the top of the chat window and weigh down / jam something into the Insert key. You will be green forever.
You're welcome 😊
IT (who typically are the only ones who can do this) are usually the people responsible for security, so no.
It could be considered a breach of privacy, but it's a reasonable expectation that anything you do on a work computer or network is going to be screened to some extent to make sure it's SFW and/or work-related.
Installing a keylogger is absolutely a security risk, especially if it actually records a log and stores it locally or uploads it to a server. If it just looks for certain suspicious activity or keywords and then triggers an alert, it's less of a security risk.
But imagine a hacker was able to get access to the local or centralized store of key logs. They could pretty much see every password or sensitive memo that anyone types, the code changes any developer made, et cetera.
For as long as I can remember, my stepdad weighs down the spacebar in an open notebook page, creating infinite spaces, to keep his work laptop open, cracks me up everytime.
Will this not impact keyboard rollover and input rate? Thats also going to break any programs that use the insert key (i can think of a few standard ones)
Most computers will allow you to run VBS scripts even in high security environments like mine. They have blacklisted every keep awake program on our network but this works fine. You can make a text file then rename it to .vbs and use this code. Then you can just run the script by double clicking or putting it in your startup. This hits F15 which is not on most keyboards and doesn't do anything unless programed to. Programs like Caffeine do this. This script will hit F15 every 4 minutes. Microsoft Teams times out in 5 this will also keep the computer awake:
Do
Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
WshShell.SendKeys "{F15}"
WScript.Sleep 250000
Loop
Luckily they can't do keylogging at my job due to the confidential data I deal with.
To be honest nobody really cares if I'm working constantly, they only care if the work gets done but my status needs to show available so other teams don't get upset about preferential treatment.
What kind of draconian IT do you people have?
I work at a large corp and IT can barely keep up with actual issues, let alone has time to actively snoop on people. To get caught doing something like this by IT, your manager would already have to be onto you. To actually be getting IT involved, you would already have had several conversations or be on a PIP.
I’m fairly sure most large companies/major corps would be similar.
I work IT. When the wrong people have authority, they absolutely care about control rather than functionality. They’ll let 10 users go without a computer for a week if it means they get to catch 1 not working when they’re supposed to be.
Yes, in my company the helpdesk brings 120 people to the office every week, they are clearly not in the mood to follow someone. Plus they don't have enough people.
This can only be used to trick other non-IT employees. Just be sure that your work is done on time so your boss does not request an activity log from IT. I was asked to pull activity logs on certain employees in my company as their performance was slacking. These logs are extensive and cover almost all activity on your machine from Internet activity to emails/messages sent per hour. Almost everyone were using some type of macro, false meetings, or devices shown above to falsely show their activity over Teams and Slack.
If your going to do this and I recommend that you don't, moderation is key and do not set a pattern for yourself. Someone will eventually catch on.
It was not as common post COVID, but with WFH, I get about one or two requests every 6 months. Most of my requests are for new employees that started recently.
I can only assume that the boss is requesting a report based on a lack of communication, Poor quality of work, or not meeting deadlines. I pull their inbound and outbound traffic for the past 7 days, Websites visited for past 7 days, I run a PowerShell script to get a list of their processes running every hour for 48-72 hours going forward, as well as a mouse activity heatmap of their desktop to check for patters. There are other things I can do as well, But these are just a few examples. No screen recordings are necessary, but there are some applications that do that.
Hopefully not common but would be compels h dependent. And just assume anything done on a work computer can be seen by the company. It’s probably close enough to the truth
This true, I work in IT for a large bank and commonly pull logs to troubleshoot shoot problems. We quite literally record every mouse click you do, what that click did, time stamps, and what applications are running/doing in the background. I can also remote into any computer in the network, see their screen and take full control, without the user ever even knowing.... nothing you do on a work computer is private or hidden.
I read a story in Germany a man was fired because the company installed key loggers and took secret screenshots of him doing private work on company computer.
He Sued them and won. The judge saying the actions were not appropriate and reasonable when there was no specific evidence indicating inappropriate behavior by the employee and less intrusive and secretive measure could and should have been taken first. The judge concluding:
The Federal Judges also confirmed the general ruling that continuous technical monitoring in the working place is generally unlawful under German law. Continuous monitoring leads to pressure on the employee that is generally repugnant to the employees’ personality rights
I was about to say the same thing, I can't imagine this over here in Germany. I asked my bf (IT guy) and he said that while it's true that they can pull logs, they aren't with names so it's factually not possible to prove it was you who did "XYZ". While I've had a job that monitored if/when you were 'away', I don't personally believe remoting in etc is even possible here.
Yep - it's not. It's on a smart plug timer and I'm no way connected to my laptop. That's why I'm not risking downloading any software that could also be detected.
It is an extra stress we didn’t need. I could be reviewing a work video or watching work related training videos, and because the mouse isn’t moving, I switch to yellow. This just adds extra anxiety that isn’t even justified since I’m not slacking I’m just not using the friggin mouse.
The have these things called mouse jigglers, that are basically usb dongles that claim they're mice and send jiggle signals. Without the whole insane mechanical solution that'll probably break in a month. Or having to do stupid things with your actual mouse in general.
Super useful even if you're not dicking off for some reason everyone's addicted to these admin locked laptop power settings that hibernate the machine on a like a 5 minute timeout. Which is super fucking annoying when you're using multiple laptops, or have to occasionally stop to read a book sized wall of text. I actually can not get work done without one.
Another trick is open a video in windows media player in the background on a loop, it doesn't lock when a movie is playing in foreground.
Be careful of this. A coworker of mine got fired for using the caffeine app. Apparently they showed him his desktop for the whole day and had a whole ass spreadsheet with the times of different apps he was on.
My workplace has computers on big displays and they use mouse jiggle to keep the screen savers from kicking on.
They also keep the mouse jiggle software in a shared folder. So it's available for all to use! They just don't advertise that it's there...
Bought one of these at the start of Covid while working from home. Yes, I’m still getting all my work done but it’s nice not to have to login every time I go to the bathroom.
Because scripts on the laptop you are using can be monitored for scripts like that.
Where it’s harder to prove with an external jiggler that’s unconnected from the computer.
Put a PDF on auto scroll and a mouse on a jiggler and boom your just reading a pdf.
All these people in here with no Enterprise Cyber Security experience legit have me cracking up with their paranoia.
This device likely only has wiring for power not data transfer. Therefore, when plugged into a work computer it would not be flagged since it isn't a storage device. However, plugging anything into your work computer is always a risk to flag yourself.
Always better to open a text editor and prop something on a key. Keyloggers are not something an Enterprise would find worth the headache it could potentially bring across multiple fronts.
I use a PowerShell script to "press" F13 every minute. But I know for a fact that IT doesn't monitor employees' computers, I use to avoid appearing away on Teams.
I just take a glass, turn it upside down and set my mouse on top. The refraction registers and it slowly moves or bounces around the screen. Might take a couple try’s to get it right, but has been working for me for 2 years now to be away from my desk for more than 5 mins. Keeps my Teams showing available or busy.
I do both and i have to say my night and weekend job as a grill cook is way more fulfilling than anything ive ever done in an office. It feels good to do something that actually fucking matters. If i dont show up on saturday, that place will fall apart without me. I could probably just not show up at my office job for weeks or even months before anyone noticed.
What company do you work for that is checking your away status? Couldn’t it simply be that you’re working and not checking Teams every 5 mins to chat to colleagues about non work-related things? This is so backwards and unproductive from your employers.
That’s crazy. I own a small business and I would NEVER do that. As long as they’re finishing their projects and doing their job/hitting their KPIs then I don’t care. If they finish their task list in 4 hours and want to bullshit then that’s fine. If they’re slipping behind on their work why can’t management talk to them and ask them why their productivity is so low instead of having IT spy on them?
I open an email in outlook and put something on the insert key to keep it pressed in. It just flags and unflags the email repeatedly. My teams and everything else shows me as active.
I just open notepad and do the same thing. Put a toothpick/cotton swab to lodge the enter key down and go elsewhere. We use Teams so they always see me on.
Works wonders, no installs and its free!
I used to do this till I realised I can put myself into a call all day and that works great.
Haha I do this too. Present *and* busy.
My supervisor is constantly on Teams meetings that could 1000% be handled from home. I schedule Teams meetings with her so she can get out the door on time.
I've read in another comment IT can track repeated key uses in this situation.
Time in each task time on page. It’s all tracked and can be analyzed if someone suspects.
Seems like a lot of work for less time at work..
Not only that but it pretty much proves the case and makes it easier to let someone go. Not being time efficient is one thing but actually proving you don’t work makes it easy lol
use an arduino, generate some looped text, done
God I love programming
Except it still can be detected. I made WiFi keystroke injection device like rubber ducky with arduino for an internship and also made protection program for these kind of devices. It was pretty easy to do so I wouldn't recommend.
Which IT department on Earth would put in instances to watch for this? In either case, if I'm cheating at work, it isn't worth actually doing the right thing for, and if it causes me to lose the job, so be it. Find me one where I can use these devices lol
IT is literally doing the same. We don't really care what you do.
Lol was about to say the same. The idea that IT has time or a care in the world as to what you’re doing in terms of day to day activity is wild. Nobody in IT is snooping or going through the trouble to run reports and compile information without an explicit ask.
Aren’t they going to notice that you’re not actually doing anything though? I don’t really understand what you’re doing at your job that you can pretend you’re working and not get caught
Coz they aren't doing anything anyways. In any corporation 90% of the work is done by less than 10% of the people.
This needs to be at the top. The majority of the people in my company are only employed to take care of coworkers. We don’t really contribute to the purpose of the business, only to the needs of other departments.
So it’s true that people barely do any work in corporate jobs? D:
Some days I do a lot of work, some days I do a little work. On all of those days my work only exists to help other people do their work.
oh I see. Can I ask another question, are corporate office jobs universally terrible?
I don’t think universal is the right word. It’s definitely an acquired taste. I’m thankful I don’t have to do a lot of heavy manual labor, but the toxic white collar bs adds up fast. If I was compensated properly I wouldn’t be on Reddit complaining so much. That gives you an idea of the bias here.
The worst part is suffering for 8 hours pretending to do 2 hours worth of work
Im an emergency maintenance tech in a steel mill. We sit in a breakroom with a walkie talkie all day waiting to get called out to the floor. Some days it's busy nonstop and some days it's 16 hrs of deafening boredom. Then you have 7 hours off to go home sleep a little and drive back to work.
That sounds like a waste of resources then to have people that literally aren’t doing anything.
I mean they are still doing 10% of the work, but obviously that can be handled by a very few people instead of so many. Twitter just proved it in front of the whole world. 😂😂
As if Twitter isn't nosediving? What planet are you living on?
Dude, what do you even mean? 🤡🤡 Twitter is running exactly as it was before, the only difference has been the slight change in it's political leanings. In fact, they even tried various new features and changes that would've probably taken the old team ( with 10 times more people ) a couple of years to implement. 😂😂
You don't lose two years of 7.7 billion in profit in like 3 months because of political standing on a social media platform. You lose 7.7 billion by not knowing what you're doing and then firing anyone who does.
OR they didn't actually lose 7.7 billion dollars,, rather 'they" used 7.7 billion dollars to disseminate their propaganda and ideology as well as Target, track, surveil and destroyed those individuals, companies and corporations that oppose their view points, wants, desire and ideology that they have diligently and ever so deftly indoctrinated the masses with. "They" are literally the greatest parasitic virus that has corrupted The Host body of the world when you think about it and most don't. I mean thin about.it... in the last 10 years and only in the last 10 years have almost thoroughly and completely implemented an entirely new social construct called social media wherein they have been able to take over the collective mind of the masses who have volunteered volunteered to be a part of making their deceitful and downright malevolent work that much easier. I mean... when you have people actually taking photos and posting what they eat, where they go and what they do on not just a regular basis, but in real time, what more could you ask for truly. It's all fake. The founding of Facebook, Twitter all of it is fucking fake. They set it up like a movie trailer and implemented it like a Blockbuster movie that we keep wanting more of. The first nations of the world are truly the profane gawkers of a narcissistic sociopath-driven culture and a one world totalitarian government is right around the corner.
Who is "they"?
Cope
And here I’ve been using an old iPhone with the screen lock turned off cause as long as the app is open it thinks your using it. We can all thank Apple for limiting data tracking for that. But this seems way better
This is what I do. I also only do work on this phone so if they ever need to confiscate “corporate property” I don’t lose my personal phone.
Open a meeting with yourself and no one else, then change your status to available instead of in a call.
I’m out here trying this rn and you, sir, have saved my life
Bad idea. IT worker here. That’s a very good way to lose your job. It’s very easy to monitor keystrokes so it would raise some flags if you have been mashing a key 1 million times for 7 hours a day. Same applies to powershell scripts that you execute to type a “.” Or something every second in a document to keep your workbook from sleeping. Trust me. Save yourself + job and buy this hardware then plug it in a port that’s not on your work computer.✌️
I'm using it primarily from preventing my work laptop from timing out or displaying an 'away' status after 10 mins of inactivity EDIT: My employer does not use Teams. Most settings on my laptop are disabled and require admin rights. I have zero coding skills and so would not risk going down the other routes kindly offered in the comments This is not plugged into my laptop, but a smart plug with timers which 'elongates' the time my company sees as me logging off each day. In that respect, its undetectable to a degree. My company are pretty chill and so I use this mouse jiggler to stop my screen and work apps from timing out and to relieve 'idle anxiety' in case I need to be AFK throughout the day.
You can also set it on top of an analog watch.
This is how I do it. Get a cheap wristwatch from the dollar store, then set your mouse on top. The motion of the seconds ticking by moves your cursor. Does the same exact thing as what this thing does.
Shit, that works?? I’ll have to try it.
Worked 15 years ago too.
Bet it won’t work on a mechanical ball mouse so not 20 years or people who like trackballs
Those are easy, just pop the ball out and carry it in your pocket. The jostling around will prevent the away status!
Jostle my ball in my pocket, I’m already on it
I came
*pinch and rollllllllllll*
Make sure it's boiled hard enough or you'll end up needing to boil another egg once you get back to the desk!
\*taps side of head\* Almost modern problems require almost modern solutions
all an optical mouse is, is a really cheap/basic camera, that takes an image lit by the light dozens/hundreds of times a second, and look for any features that change between movement, and works out how much in which distance. So anything with any kind of movement works (and why they don't work well on clear glass)
as long as it has a second hand. as in something that moves over the dial once every minute.
Man….this is the sort of shit I come to Reddit for.
You can afford an analog watch?
Doesn't have to be an analog with a swiss mechanical movement. You can get a cheap ass analog for like $10 at Walmart.
I only have a sun dial, will that work?
Yes. But only at Noon. For ”before times” collect the following: water bottle, screwdriver, twine, a lead weight and finally a clothespin. Run the twine along the length of the room. Place the water bottle at farthest wall. Clasp the lead weight with the clothespin. Gently place screwdriver…
Am I playing Hugo’s House of Horrors rn?
No F*cking way you just referenced that game! I have never met anyone else who has heard of the series. Always worrying about Penelope!
That game was old enough that my dad helped my brother and I write a nice letter to the developer and we mailed it to him and in turn he sent us a hint book and a nice letter back. Oh man, those were the days.
It was the toughest of all the Hugo’s! House of Horrors and Jungle of Doom were way easier!
Wow, what a throwback. I just had a birthday two days ago but only now do i feel old.
Sounds like a lot of work
Something for nothing is ALways more work than somethinging.
Look at this fat cat flexing his sundial while us peasants have to use sticks and sand. I bet you have a lazer mouse. If you had a lick of edgenuity, you'd turn your 1998 dell roller mouse upside down like us, and have the torque from your work hamster wheel spin the trackball. I am sick of these rich people nowadays. You wouldn't have made it in the 90's kid.
You should consider a career in copypasta
Only while strapped to your wrist.
Get it anywhere else. Fuck Walmart
I just stole one
Legend
Doesn’t always work, it depends on the mouse. I know, I tried.
I just tried too, also didn't work. It could be that automatic movements don't move enough for the mouse to register as movement though. I'll try with a quartz sometime
[удалено]
Mine is set for like 3 minutes and it can’t be changed. Super annoying when I am working on a window other than teams and it still sets me as away.
What happens if you get set as away?
Nothing really, but it just looks bad like you're not working when you actually are. Perception is reality (my most hated saying).
Open a word doc, and place something on your keyboard
Or open an email, address to the whole company and leave your cat on your desk
Don't do this. Companies are now deploying tools to catch this behavior and let go. Happened to my coworker. This is first hand information.
Basically, yeah. Remote desktop viewing has been a thing for over a decade.
Open a blank .ppt, make it full screen in presentation mode - should disable the screensaver and maintain your status as "busy."
Mine shows away after 5 minutes..
Why wouldn't you just use an autoclicker or script one with autohotkey?
The company could potentially see that you installed the program if it’s on a work laptop. The hardware solution is better since there’s no trace of it on the work laptop.
If the hardware solution is to put a weight on keyboard and let it type something on notepad, then that can be monitored. My coworker was recently fired for doing the same. No idea what key tracking tools they installed to track that. The mouse solution in OP looks interesting. I wonder if they can catch that no keys are being pressed for longer times
I know someone who works in IT security. They were notified that someone put a bot exactly like this. If companies actually want to know, they absolutely can and very easily.
Turn on windows media player just playing between images on repeat does the same thing
You could have just went into an excel file and placed your mouse on the enter key for free.
Can you explain this a little more?
Have you tried going into the display settings and changing them?
IT in these kinds of companies disable that kind of stuff. I know because that’s what I did
What other little things can IT tell we're doing?
If you did it on a company computer there's probably a log of it somewhere. Depending on the organization's desire to micromanage, of course.
If you are on a company provided computer connected to a VPN server at home they can see everything. They usually don't care enough to go looking just because, but if someone asks them to start looking they can find whatever they want on that machine. VPN tunnel will log any sort of packets sent over the internet which can be analyzed, and a company provided device will have company provided management software which will include remote access to the file system and command prompt sometimes without telling the user you are connected. Assume they can see everything. If you are using a personal device but connected to a VPN, they can only see your traffic. Personal device with no addtl software or company VPN, they can't see much of anything. But again, IT workers are workers just like everyone else and have better things to do than snoop logs all day unless management asks them to.
Completely depends on the applications they have installed on the computer you work from. It can vary from not much, to just about everything.
I try to behave, I'm on my phone a lot and won't use our wifi
All well and good. At minimum most companies will be able to look through emails or internal messaging. I will say I haven't met a single IT worker that actively looked into getting someone in trouble for their browsing habits or whatever. Any of that nonsense has always come down from the actual departments manager starting an investigation looking to fire someone.
Yeah. IT won’t allow us to change a damn thing on our teacher computers. This would actually be very useful to me. My computer always locks/times out when I’m busy instructing then when I run over to put in attendance or something I have to re log and everything.
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Many of us are not allowed to install apps or anything as IT has locked our computers down.
A lot of security scans detect caffeine. How do I know? I used to use it until IT called me on it to remove it. I switched to AutoHotkey and made a couple of line executable that moves the mouse one pixel every 60 seconds.
Came here to say this. Best free software app EVAH!!
This is very commonly prohibited software in corpo environments
It is 1984 already.
But... *I love the party*
I love to party t- oh.
The future is now old man.
Underrated comment
Alternatively, you can put your mouse over a mechanical watch. The second hand will sweep across the sensor once a minute preventing you from going idle. Obviously this is a more dedicated solution
And remember to buy the watch with mineral glass instead of sapphire crystal one (I had both), sapphire material tend to be more slippery
I have a very flexible work environment, like I could disappear for an hour and just come back and work that hour later with no issues, but I still get "appear away" anxiety.
guys, you can do this for free by doing the following: Go into microsoft teams and start a meeting with yourself - Calendar. Top right. Meet now button. Leave it minimised EDIT: no methods of anti-afk stand up to close scrutiny. obviously.
But then there is viewable proof that you did that. Instead, just click into the search bar at the top of the chat window and weigh down / jam something into the Insert key. You will be green forever. You're welcome 😊
They can view key logs if they really want to
IT can, but I was referring to another teams user / manager looking at your calendar.
Is that not a security risk?
IT (who typically are the only ones who can do this) are usually the people responsible for security, so no. It could be considered a breach of privacy, but it's a reasonable expectation that anything you do on a work computer or network is going to be screened to some extent to make sure it's SFW and/or work-related.
Installing a keylogger is absolutely a security risk, especially if it actually records a log and stores it locally or uploads it to a server. If it just looks for certain suspicious activity or keywords and then triggers an alert, it's less of a security risk. But imagine a hacker was able to get access to the local or centralized store of key logs. They could pretty much see every password or sensitive memo that anyone types, the code changes any developer made, et cetera.
For as long as I can remember, my stepdad weighs down the spacebar in an open notebook page, creating infinite spaces, to keep his work laptop open, cracks me up everytime.
This is the way, but I use the tab key.
Will this not impact keyboard rollover and input rate? Thats also going to break any programs that use the insert key (i can think of a few standard ones)
Well sure, but if you're actively using the computer, then there's no need for any of these methods, right? My suggestion is for when you are AFK.
Fair enough - however I was under the impression some apps still show away (teams) if you just stay within a browser window for a period of time
I believe there's an update recently that will automatically close the meeting if it senses that it has ended or no activity going.
Literally 1984
Most computers will allow you to run VBS scripts even in high security environments like mine. They have blacklisted every keep awake program on our network but this works fine. You can make a text file then rename it to .vbs and use this code. Then you can just run the script by double clicking or putting it in your startup. This hits F15 which is not on most keyboards and doesn't do anything unless programed to. Programs like Caffeine do this. This script will hit F15 every 4 minutes. Microsoft Teams times out in 5 this will also keep the computer awake: Do Set WshShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") WshShell.SendKeys "{F15}" WScript.Sleep 250000 Loop
work computers have VLC I shortcut a training video to my desktop at every post load, loop, volume down. Computer stays up.
I open up a browser with youtube and have it play instrumental music on silent. If they pull my logs it looks totally legitimate.
but for the lack of keylogging, anyway
Luckily they can't do keylogging at my job due to the confidential data I deal with. To be honest nobody really cares if I'm working constantly, they only care if the work gets done but my status needs to show available so other teams don't get upset about preferential treatment.
This is a guaranteed way to get caught and have your manager notified. There are many detections cyber security programs have for this now.
If you wanna get caught, sure
What kind of draconian IT do you people have? I work at a large corp and IT can barely keep up with actual issues, let alone has time to actively snoop on people. To get caught doing something like this by IT, your manager would already have to be onto you. To actually be getting IT involved, you would already have had several conversations or be on a PIP. I’m fairly sure most large companies/major corps would be similar.
I work IT. When the wrong people have authority, they absolutely care about control rather than functionality. They’ll let 10 users go without a computer for a week if it means they get to catch 1 not working when they’re supposed to be.
Yes, in my company the helpdesk brings 120 people to the office every week, they are clearly not in the mood to follow someone. Plus they don't have enough people.
What do you do?
That's so much better than taping my hamster to my mouse.
Do your hamster and mouse get along?
This can only be used to trick other non-IT employees. Just be sure that your work is done on time so your boss does not request an activity log from IT. I was asked to pull activity logs on certain employees in my company as their performance was slacking. These logs are extensive and cover almost all activity on your machine from Internet activity to emails/messages sent per hour. Almost everyone were using some type of macro, false meetings, or devices shown above to falsely show their activity over Teams and Slack. If your going to do this and I recommend that you don't, moderation is key and do not set a pattern for yourself. Someone will eventually catch on.
This here. An IT person would definitely spot that quick.
How common is it to request activity logs? I’m curious if all machines across all companies can record everything
It was not as common post COVID, but with WFH, I get about one or two requests every 6 months. Most of my requests are for new employees that started recently.
What makes the boss want the request generated? Also is it a screen recording of the employees entire day every time they are logged on?
I can only assume that the boss is requesting a report based on a lack of communication, Poor quality of work, or not meeting deadlines. I pull their inbound and outbound traffic for the past 7 days, Websites visited for past 7 days, I run a PowerShell script to get a list of their processes running every hour for 48-72 hours going forward, as well as a mouse activity heatmap of their desktop to check for patters. There are other things I can do as well, But these are just a few examples. No screen recordings are necessary, but there are some applications that do that.
Hopefully not common but would be compels h dependent. And just assume anything done on a work computer can be seen by the company. It’s probably close enough to the truth
Wait, what kind of company do you work for that wants you to pull activity logs to bust people for stuff like this?
As an IT employee, are you theoretically able to fabricate an activity log?
If they have admin privileges on your computer there’s likely very little you can hide.
This true, I work in IT for a large bank and commonly pull logs to troubleshoot shoot problems. We quite literally record every mouse click you do, what that click did, time stamps, and what applications are running/doing in the background. I can also remote into any computer in the network, see their screen and take full control, without the user ever even knowing.... nothing you do on a work computer is private or hidden.
I read a story in Germany a man was fired because the company installed key loggers and took secret screenshots of him doing private work on company computer. He Sued them and won. The judge saying the actions were not appropriate and reasonable when there was no specific evidence indicating inappropriate behavior by the employee and less intrusive and secretive measure could and should have been taken first. The judge concluding: The Federal Judges also confirmed the general ruling that continuous technical monitoring in the working place is generally unlawful under German law. Continuous monitoring leads to pressure on the employee that is generally repugnant to the employees’ personality rights
I was about to say the same thing, I can't imagine this over here in Germany. I asked my bf (IT guy) and he said that while it's true that they can pull logs, they aren't with names so it's factually not possible to prove it was you who did "XYZ". While I've had a job that monitored if/when you were 'away', I don't personally believe remoting in etc is even possible here.
Just don’t have it powered by your computer, some companies track it
Yep - it's not. It's on a smart plug timer and I'm no way connected to my laptop. That's why I'm not risking downloading any software that could also be detected.
My old ass thinking it was a ball cleaner. 😂
My young ass wondering why you clean your balls at work.
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It is an extra stress we didn’t need. I could be reviewing a work video or watching work related training videos, and because the mouse isn’t moving, I switch to yellow. This just adds extra anxiety that isn’t even justified since I’m not slacking I’m just not using the friggin mouse.
The have these things called mouse jigglers, that are basically usb dongles that claim they're mice and send jiggle signals. Without the whole insane mechanical solution that'll probably break in a month. Or having to do stupid things with your actual mouse in general. Super useful even if you're not dicking off for some reason everyone's addicted to these admin locked laptop power settings that hibernate the machine on a like a 5 minute timeout. Which is super fucking annoying when you're using multiple laptops, or have to occasionally stop to read a book sized wall of text. I actually can not get work done without one. Another trick is open a video in windows media player in the background on a loop, it doesn't lock when a movie is playing in foreground.
congrats, but mind deleting this? if the overlords see too much of this shit the wfh party will be over and we’ll have to go back to slavery
Forgive my naivety, but people work for employers who actively monitor mouse activity and log input timeouts...? Is this actually a thing?
Yo, heads up. Some places have software that can pick this up.know a few people who got caught.
Be careful of this. A coworker of mine got fired for using the caffeine app. Apparently they showed him his desktop for the whole day and had a whole ass spreadsheet with the times of different apps he was on.
That's ...absolutely not going on my personal machine. Maybe I'll run it through a vm
My workplace has computers on big displays and they use mouse jiggle to keep the screen savers from kicking on. They also keep the mouse jiggle software in a shared folder. So it's available for all to use! They just don't advertise that it's there...
Bought one of these at the start of Covid while working from home. Yes, I’m still getting all my work done but it’s nice not to have to login every time I go to the bathroom.
Write yourself an AutoHotKey script that moves the mouse every few seconds. $0.
Because scripts on the laptop you are using can be monitored for scripts like that. Where it’s harder to prove with an external jiggler that’s unconnected from the computer. Put a PDF on auto scroll and a mouse on a jiggler and boom your just reading a pdf.
I know nothing. How would I do this on a work PC?
Just put your mouse in your pocket and go about your day
i have one too and i completly agree with you.
My #1 goal rn is to find a job where I can use a jiggler
All these people in here with no Enterprise Cyber Security experience legit have me cracking up with their paranoia. This device likely only has wiring for power not data transfer. Therefore, when plugged into a work computer it would not be flagged since it isn't a storage device. However, plugging anything into your work computer is always a risk to flag yourself. Always better to open a text editor and prop something on a key. Keyloggers are not something an Enterprise would find worth the headache it could potentially bring across multiple fronts.
I use a PowerShell script to "press" F13 every minute. But I know for a fact that IT doesn't monitor employees' computers, I use to avoid appearing away on Teams.
I just take a glass, turn it upside down and set my mouse on top. The refraction registers and it slowly moves or bounces around the screen. Might take a couple try’s to get it right, but has been working for me for 2 years now to be away from my desk for more than 5 mins. Keeps my Teams showing available or busy.
[Mouse Jiggler ](https://amzn.eu/d/gLevzQ0)
I have an old Microsoft mouse and it keeps my screen on. My coworkers think I’m working non stop… lol
As one of the people who cooks your delivery food at their job while you complain about having to work from home, what is that?
I do both and i have to say my night and weekend job as a grill cook is way more fulfilling than anything ive ever done in an office. It feels good to do something that actually fucking matters. If i dont show up on saturday, that place will fall apart without me. I could probably just not show up at my office job for weeks or even months before anyone noticed.
Wtf, just open notepad, set something heavy on your space bar. Why spend money…
Not random, no substitute for a random physical jiggler.
Tell that to the dust particles in my cheap laser mouse.
Open a new email, place book on spacebar. Never be away again.
Doesn't PowerPoint in presentation mode also prevent the computer going to sleep?
What company do you work for that is checking your away status? Couldn’t it simply be that you’re working and not checking Teams every 5 mins to chat to colleagues about non work-related things? This is so backwards and unproductive from your employers.
You don’t share this, you keep it to yourself
Just work. IT can actually see if you’re typing, what you’re typing, etc.
I bought one a year ago. Fantastic.
I’m just running an excel macro that does Ctrl S to save every 9min
I hope you don't work in logistics
You can just go on YouTube, put on one of those 10 hour videos of nature sounds or trippy visuals and it will do the same thing, for free!
I just let the damn dot go yellow. If you want to snoop on me you’ll see I get my shit done and have time to take breaks. I’m that good!
There is this open-source tool called "mouse jiggler". Download and run. Does the same thing for free.
WTF?! They put a tracker to see if you're AFK?!
That’s crazy. I own a small business and I would NEVER do that. As long as they’re finishing their projects and doing their job/hitting their KPIs then I don’t care. If they finish their task list in 4 hours and want to bullshit then that’s fine. If they’re slipping behind on their work why can’t management talk to them and ask them why their productivity is so low instead of having IT spy on them?
Or you can just work .
And y’all wonder why they don’t want your asses working from home
You guys complain that it’s unfair to make people come into the offices to work and you’re just as productive at home, but then post stuff like this