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Just set the status to something other than active. If it says buy or away 100% of the time, even while on a call, then any crazy manager that’s monitoring it will start to think it’s bugged.
We just all set it to yellow the entire time so people don’t think they can call out of the blue.
I used bots for games 20 years ago, I mean it should be easy to trick mouse movement…
Mouse Jiggler with Adjustable Timer
It’s simple enough to just make one too.
Definitely don’t go on Amazon or Ebay and buy a cheap mouse jiggler. It gets detected as a generic input device and moves the mouse cursor 1 pixel left, then right 24 hours a day. They are available for under a fiver a piece. Plug it in at day’s start and unplug it before you walk away from your pc.
It’s important not to plug in a USB device like that into your work PC. IT can likely see what devices are used on any system.
Instead use a physical mouse mover device that only requires power, like a USB cord plugged into a wall charger instead of the PC.
here nobody uses it anyway, so i dont even log on :3
I learned from my wife that you can start a meeting by yourself using the Meet Now button on the Teams calendar, and that will keep you flagged as Busy.
Set up a solo meeting with yourself. During meeting it doesn’t change the status at all, so after you join that solo meeting in the morning set yourself to available and you will be available whole day.
That is a very Microsoft kind of behavior
This is also the way to put a real meeting your in on hold.
It makes it look like you got interrupted and had to step away.
One of the beautiful things about being able to run Linux at work and use Teams in a browser is that my status is decoupled from what I’m doing on my machine. Obviously if I’m in a meeting or chatting with somebody through Teams my status will reflect that.
I bet my most productive days have me away/idle for hours on end, lol.
Yes. I wrote a script to make me green even though my employer doesn’t give a shit because I want the peace of mind even though I’m in your situation.
This micromanagement via surveillance is counterproductive any way you slice it. The peace of mind script makes me more valuable to my employer even though it might be inconsequential.
Bentham’s panopticon.
meta repost downvote this shit
I’m so glad that I don’t know enough about teams to know what most of this means.
Right?
If you start a chat with yourself click the message textbox and hold down the left shift key the teams will think that your typing and it never changes the status. You don’t need to make any changes to your system or install anything with this. Just place a heavy object on the shift key.
Open outlook and mark yourself as busy in blocks throughout the day.
Or place a 🥄 on your touchpad…
I have a ~10 line powershell script that presses the scroll lock key for 1 second every 60 seconds. Way simpler.
I have a similar one. Much simpler. Here it is:
$wsh = New-Object -ComObject WScript.Shell while(1) { $wsh.SendKeys(‘+F{15}‘) Start-Sleep -seconds 59 }This will show up in process monitoring.
And sit in a log that no one is paid enough to continuously check.
Should be picked up as suspicious behavior and highlighted, your company just isn’t big enough.
Highlight doubt it. Anyway I run powershell scripts all the time when forced onto Windows, so 🤷♀️
I have Java on my machine. So I wrote a small program that moves the mouse one pixel every minute. Forever green.
Much less resource intensive on your dev machine to just use an esp32 and write a program to pretend to be a mouse and wiggle itself. Benefit is it is completely undetectable on every platform as well.
For me it’d be better to just run the stupid Teams app on my work phone, but that’s always been a hassle because it locks itself and then I don’t always get the notifications. My primary work laptop only has 16 gigs of RAM, and having Teams eagerly gobble up a significant portion of that is highly frustrating.
There’s been several occasions where I’ve been building or debugging something, RAM being tight, and the OOM killer correctly deduces that Teams has to go. Makes me laugh every time I finally check back on Teams and realise it’s been dead for a while.
The whole “two minute timeout” is a stupid thing anyway. A non-trivial portion of my job is to read and write documentation. That takes time, and you will sit “idle” for a few minutes while reading and processing. My Windows machine would kill the BT connection to my mouse and keyboard, which would sometimes require re-pairing to get working again. For the longest time I thought the problem was the mouse and keyboard, but those problems vanished once I got a Linux dev machine.
I fucking hate everything Microsoft.
I wrote in another comment too: A friend’s company scans every USB device. He got in trouble for plugging in his private USB stick once. Are you sure this is undetectable?
A USB stick reports itself as a USB stick. A device you set up to report itself as what you want reports itself as what you want. The only thing a computer can talk about a device is what the device reports itself. That’s how computers and peripherals work. The computer provides power and the peripheral tells the computer about itself.
So if you make a device that reports the exact same information as your other mice then yeah the computer thinks it’s the same mouse. But it’s not usable as a USB then. It can’t do other stuff.
Yes your friend plugging in a USB will get them in trouble, cause they can exfiltrate data.
I went the other route: I set to away until 2030. Now they don’t know if I’m really away or not.
You are a fucking master mind! I wonder what other secret knowledge you possess, and I’m serious.
A buddy of mine at work refuses to ever accept or decline invites - even 1-on-1s with his boss.
That way it’s always a surprise if they are going to show up.
I know a guy like that. It’s infuriating because it’s a waste of everybody’s time when they don’t show up. Just decline for fucks sake! At least I can tell the PM that we tried unsuccessfully to schedule and that we have to delay and I can play some video games!
If I schedule a meeting and someone doesn’t accept that invite I just assume they’re not showing up and act accordingly. Might send them a ping a few minutes before hand but if they’re a stakeholder and needed for the meeting and choose to ignore the invite(s)/email … That meeting gonna get cancelled or rescheduled.
Not that that very often happens but I’d just start bothering said guy about it with pings or email follow ups until they get the picture. Or just cancel the meeting(s) if no response 24 hours before scheduled. Something like that.
Not even to be petty or annoying just because they should be accepting or declining for the simple fact that everyone else has schedules to keep too. Obviously this advice may be bad or not applicable but yeah that sucks.
Unfortunately my PM will say “let’s meet and see if X joins otherwise we end earlier”. Which means wasting a lot of time. Because X won’t join, the PM will start talking about irrelevant stuff, and if we’re lucky we waste 15 minutes, or more.
I just hate this PM.
What you say is reasonable and is also how I would have handled it. But in this project I have no power and the PM is…just not very good at it.
That sucks. I feel like a lot of stuff is easier and just better without even dealing with a PM - good ones can be worth their weight in gold though if you’re dealing with multiple folks on a project and they do their job right.
Unfortunately, that’s very rare.
That sadly doesn’t work for my workstation, the VDI still locks after 5 mins and I need to 2 factor authenticate again. So I bought a physical mouse Jiggler for 7ish euros and I’m happy again.
I got roasted by friends calling me lazy because of it, fast forward 3 months and half of them asked me where I bought it. Now most of them have it, including several of my colleagues.
For the computer it’s an actual mouse since the input is external, so it just works. I’m always green baby ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
powershell script that toggles the scrolllock key every 3 minutes.
Powershell is locked down on our machines via AD policy. I used to run a tool from the Windows Store, but they locked that down too. They didn’t come for the JVM yet.
If you have Excel you can use VBA to send keycodes too. :-)
I was in a similar situation so I bought a usb mouse wiggler, shows up like a standard usb mouse once plugged in and costs like nothing on AliExpress.
It really baffled me though, shut down all tools, on a developer machine, why?
I used to hate it too but once you realize how clueless most devs are it becomes more and more understandable.
At a friend’s company they scan every USB device, he already got in trouble for plugging in his private USB Stick once. Would this still work?
I just use teams-for-linux which has auto-online built-in.
Auto-online? 😯 I’m very curious: how do you know it has that? It hasn’t been working that great for me, Microsoft won’t always sign it in.
It’s listed as a feature and you can see it in action if you’re like me and keep displays on for 10+ mins of inactivity… I think the only conflict to it would be if your computer put itself to sleep for power saving.
I’ve had no issues with it; can’t even recall one. Sign-in issues could just be your company SSO being shit as Microsoft’s SSO so often is…
It also eats up to 1,5gb of ram sitting idle as a chat program. So yeah it’s not running unless I need it and then it gets to shut down again. Luckily we don’t use it as our primary chat tool.
With all these “IT can see when you connect a USB device” comments, I must ask has anyone ever actually worked for an IT department that made you micromanage/snitch on people like that? It all sounds like a bunch of hypothetical scare mongering to me. Granted, I’ve never been company IT for a fortune 500, but I’ve been outsourced IT for dozens and dozens of other companies all across the spectrum, and the notion that we were monitoring USB devices connected to each workstation is laughable. We monitor for the presence of malicious files, files with names like passwords.txt, and suspicious logins to your account. That’s pretty much it. People change mice all the time. I’ve used an arduino-based jiggler on my own work PC.
Furthermore, and this is the more important detail for myself, I’ve known many many different IT people working at every level and I don’t think I’ve ever met a single one who gives half a shit if employees aren’t being productive. Just don’t break your computer please, and if you do, for the love of God don’t try to fix it yourself. Personally, I’ve never seen any instance of any worker ever trying to circumvent arbitrary productivity metrics with easy workarounds because I’m not a fucking snitch. In IT, we also have bullshit “productivity” targets that are completely decoupled from actual productivity. We get that it’s bullshit. If there’s an IT department out there that’s full of snitches trying to catch workers slacking, that sounds like a genuinely awful place to work.
We definitely do not look at any Teams activity data - SMB environment though
Generic USB HID Device driver on a microcontroller with commercial USB IDs and IT doesn’t see shit. Looks like an old USB mouse with no support.
And slightly wet
Go on
