If the only indicator that these employees "needed" to go was the simulated keyboard activity then either:
a) the employees met all required KPIs and delivered well and were just meeting some dumb policy while actually being totally fine, and therefore shouldn't have been fired; or
b) the company has literally no way to tell if someone is actually useful and many of the people not using such devices could easily be far worse performaers.
In either case, firing someone based on this sort of monitoring or information should be illegal.
Do people directly work on the KPIs on your org? As in there is individual KPI for each person without any outside blocker etc.? And is the KPI so evenly distributed to each team member? What about other unknowns in the KPI.
At least in the companies I worked with, KPIs are manager/lead level items and it is divided into tasks that is handed out to individual team member.
its a fine argument made well, but no.. the job description and the work as directed are the agreement between the employee and the company. IANAL it seems that the fundamentals here are abusive or unwinnable terms of employment, fundemental labor rights that may not be overridden, and yes, slacker or cheating employees who may be gaming their supervision and what to do about that.
History is full of outrageous "agreements" by the powerful applied to the powerless, so there have to be labor laws that set an even playing field. Distributed work across legal jurisdictions is an opportunity to push those labor agreements and avoid consequences. On the other hand, there have always been cheaters among workers and that wont go away, either.
Modern technology has opened a pandora's box of constant surveillance that was not practical or even possible previously. There have to be new agreements on labor practices. It is a political problem. Compounding the urgency of this situation in an advanced economy is the looming implementation of AI to replace workers, and to enable a few workers to do the work of many, many more of the past. This time around, middle-managers are included in those that are replaceable, or perhaps even mid-level leadership i.e. "your boss is an AI"
Even if the employee is excellent, the deceit is enough to justify the firing. There is a requirement in the financial industry of being of good character and even minor things could result in loss of employment. There was a story a few years ago of a UK banker being banned from the city for fleecing train fares, even after he offered to repay the train company.
There was an even crazier detail to this story. While he thought he's fleecing tfl, he ended up paying more than he would have if tapping out properly.
Right; it's not necessarily that they weren't working, but that they lied about it. The fake customer accounts scandal is also in Wells's recent memory, so this can make sense.
> the company has literally no way to tell if someone is actually useful
You say this like it's easy, but it's actually very hard for most white-collar jobs.
Is that guy who's closing lots of tickets just picking the easy ones - or fobbing off customers with unhelpful responses?
Is that guy who took two weeks to make a two-line change incredibly unproductive? Or did they explore hundreds of avenues to finally stamp out a bug that had stumped dozens of other engineers for months?
Is that guy who's overseeing an external project and hasn't raised any issues a veteran with the foresight and initiative to solve problems early, and the expertise not to need hand-holding? Or are they simply not looking for issues?
Is that guy reviewing grant proposals taking the time to carefully read through every last one and fully comprehend all the technical details? Or are they skimming a few then funding the famous researchers at the well known universities, same as last year?
For a great many jobs, the main form of monitoring is how productive the worker's line manager feels they are. An extremely flawed measure.
Any manager worth their pay should be able to address all of these scenarios without much difficulty. I definitely don't classify any of your scenarios as "very hard".
Between talking to your reports, auditing some small portion of their work, and reviewing historical data, you'd be able to answer all of your hypothetical situations with fairly high confidence. Certainly higher than just vibe-based feelings or how many keys were pressed per minute.
If the managers don't get taken in by charismatic bullshitters, sure.
If the managers don't have super busy schedules, leaving them little time for "auditing work" and "reviewing historical data"
If the managers aren't managing workers who know much more than them, meaning they're poorly equipped to understand how hard a given task is.
If the managers have perfect vision into untracked work like prioritising tickets, helping people in other teams, interviewing, coaching new starters, performing code review, working on cross-team standardisation efforts and so on.
If the managers don't feel looking over people's shoulders or demanding webcams be turned on in meetings would seem distrustful and intrusive.
If the managers have time to keep track of everyone's health, wellbeing and equipment so when a spot check finds periods of low productivity it can't be explained away by a broken keyboard or wifi problems or having the flu that week.
If the managers think firing one person is guaranteed to let them hire someone better, with no hiring delays or freezes.
If the managers don't feel they're buddies with the people on their team, who they eat lunch with every day, and they have far greater affection for the corporation they work for.
And if the managers don't benefit from having a larger empire, incentivising them to respond schedule slips by hiring more people
Then yes, the manager could indeed address many of these scenarios.
They shouldn’t be managers if they are unable to manage for these reasons. Either they are not suited to management, not properly trained, or the organization is not set up to support management. They should not have a manager title if they aren’t prepared to sometimes have uncomfortable conversions with people.
Visit /r/overemployed on Reddit and you’ll find a large community of people teaching each other to do stuff like this so they can collect 2-3 full-time salaries.
I wouldn't want to work with anyone who thought an activity faker was a good idea. I also wouldn't want a work environment where someone would think they needed that.
But this is really the least of behavioral problems at Wells Fargo:
It's not really clear from the article if the employees who were fired were faking activity/work or if they were just trying to keep their computers from locking.
Man, that list went on a LOT longer than I expected it to. I’m on a mobile device, so no scroll bar - I kept thinking that I must be nearing the end of the List of Horrible Things and being wrong. Also learned the term “redlining”.
I know the answer is “they’re big and integrated into the financial system”, but still, how are they still in business?!?
Using a mouse jiggler, as I'm on meetings most of the day, and inactivity timeout is 5m, so that while looking at the screen it'll lock up and takes almost a minute to come back up (external connection to docked, closed macbook). Mac just sucks at recovering with an external display and the laptop closed.
Not "pretending" anything... just one pain over another.
edit: For clarity, it's a relatively locked down system, and even then, I'm generally connected to a remote Windows based VM for working "inside" a secured and more locked down environment. I can't use a software solution for this.
This simulates one press/depress of the command key (0x37). The rest of the key codes can be found in Events.h in the location of your MacOS SDK library (deep in Xcode usually).
Or, the ultimate zero-software solution ... just rest your mouse on top of a running analog wristwatch; bonus points if said watch is mechanical ::grin::
Really? I've had mine connected to 2 external monitors for years and it's always closed. I never have a problem getting it to wake back up. You can change the inactivity timeout settings under preferences. Should be under Displays or Power settings I think.
The settings in question are locked down, and I don't have the ability to change them... I've had similar experiences with prior macs. In any case the hardware jiggler works. I shut it off when I am away/done... mostly just a "keep alive" method without having to install software.
It could be the display device through the thunderbolt dock I'm using...
I have a corner of my screen as the dedicated "do not turn on the screensaver" corner, and the rest as dedicated "screensaver NOW" corners. OS X supports this natively.
When I interview for remote jobs, I increasingly ask about this kind of surveillance. I ask them if this is the kind of remote job where I'm required to be at my desk 8 hours a day straight or if it's more flexible
This. Some days I work one hour. Other days I work from sunrise to sunset. I'm always available during office hours, but I'm not going to be surveilled in my own home. If I'm doing my job, let me keep it, and if not, tell me how to improve, but I am not a rat for some middle manager to prod to justify his salary.
If my well-done work is not good enough for an employer, than we are an impasse that will not be resolved, and there are plenty of other places to work.
It seems like most of these devices (example: https://hackaday.com/?p=683252) have a fixed and unusual USB vendor+product ID that will surely come up in the system log.
People could always just use a device that physically moves the mouse around or pushes a button on the keyboard instead. Companies could of course react by requiring employees to solve a captcha every once in a while to work around that, but here's a controversial thought:
What if the "proof of work" that companies use to "detect employee presence" was just... Actually accomplished work? That should solve the problem at the correct layer.
Unless, of course, objectives and goals are poorly defined, and requiring that would result in huge embarrassment to the management layers above the mouse wigglers.
What’s going to happen is they’re gonna ask a Microsoft-provided AI whether employees’ data from Microsoft Recall looks like work, on a scale, and fire the lowest percent or two of that scale every quarter. If running it over data from all the days is too expensive, they’ll pick a day or two to sample and you’ll be retained or fired based on that.
At least I’ve been assuming that’s the main reason MS is making Recall. To issue spyware-reports on corporate workers.
I wish I could find it again, but I was impressed by a study of remote work around 2010 that showed that remote work improved the results of teams with good managers and (further) degraded the results of teams with bad managers.
A key difference between the good vs bad managers was that the good managers focused on specific tasks being accomplished whereas the bad managers focused on the usual indicators of work such as as time of butts being in seats, which has only an incidental and often inverse relation to quantity or quantity of work produced.
This 'tech' is simply attempting to enable bad management with remote workforces. A good sign that remote is winning the war and here to stay. A bad sign that bad mgt will make it suck more (at least until AI eliminates those jobs for good).
Not familiar with WF but I've seen large corps in the past where HR mandates N number of reportees to get promoted. It goes up the chain, so your boss is pushing you to hire and you are pushing to hire, etc.
The problem is then, people get hired but there is no work for them, especially during lean times.
There is a wide chasm between well-run large companies and poorly-run ones. You can look at sector-level revenue/employee to get an idea of efficiency/waste.
Empire building is a well-known phenomenon in organizations, but that still begs the question: Does it matter whether employees largely hired and retained for payroll metrics actually wiggle their mice or not?
One obvious alternative is to use a real optical mouse, but move the surface next to the sensor. This would be easy with any of several motorized mechanisms, e.g. a turntable -- but that would be bulky, most people do not actually have a turntable, and many cheap implementations would make noise.
That makes me wonder what would happen with an optical mouse atop a tablet, displaying a slowly-panning video of a texture. However, there are a few obstacles. First, Google tells me that optical mice have frame rates of 1.5 to 5 kHz. That's very fast. It probably makes the optical flow problem easier, since there's less change between frames. But it's also much faster than the, say, 60 Hz refresh of a tablet's screen. I don't know what a bunch of "stairsteps" in the position signal would look like to the mouse. Second, there's the issue of wavelength. Google brings me optical mouse sensors with sensitivities in the 832 - 865 nm range, i.e., in the infrared. Visible red is around 740 nm. Looking at this chart [1] and extrapolating just a tiny bit, it seems that LCDs have almost no emissivity around 850 nm. So this probably would not work. Whether an LCD with an infrared backlight would work is left as a question for another time.
What might be easier still, would be to somehow hack the USB device itself to spoof the vendor and product ID. I don't know how to do that myself, but it might be easy for anyone who's familiar with USB device development.
Of course, this is a silly arms race that it wouldn't actually be worth participating in, but it's amusing to consider what you could do.
I heard a story of an employee health plan that issued pedometers and issued cash rewards for higher step counts. In short order, one employee had put his on a clock pendulum, another had secured the thing to the collar of his hyperactive dog, and a third had hacked the thing to display all nines.
For what it’s worth, the max polling rate for low-speed USB devices (of which mice almost invariably are) is, IIRC, 100 Hz.
I would worry less about stair stepping and more about making the speed and acceleration distributions and auto-correlation look natural: a real human-powered mouse won’t be constantly moving (you have to stop the think about the next step, use the keyboard, etc) and when it is moving will tend to follow a rapid move-pause-move pattern.
Another telltale would be a mouse that moves naturally but never clicks.
Vendor and device ID are the lowest hanging fruit, but I think there are a lot of other giveaways that a mouse jiggler is being used.
How do you get these links, do you have a step by step by any chance? I feel like I've tried to get them on my own and they never seen to work or be a short link like this. Thanks in advance!
Amongst other options, the !ais bang search on DDG will either turn up an existing archive of an article or web page, or start the dialogue for creating one yourself.
Archive.Today takes up to 5--10 minutes to fully complete an archive, as it's waiting for all of numerous related page requests to complete, as opposed to a local browser session which makes a best-guess effort at rendering a page with only partial completion of downloads. Capacity and queue length also seem to be factors here.
The !wayback bang will search or create Internet Archive pages, though this is less successful at byapassing paywalls, as with Bloomberg.
Ghostarchive doesn't seem to have a bang at this point.
True. It sounds better on the innocence/plausible deniability side to just use a tool in the regular corporate environment to get the presentation flag set. For example, viewing a .PPT in presentation mode, then using "Hide presenter view", seems promising.
The previous flight of employees from this part of WF due to unethical activity might suggest those remaining made a choice (perhaps a difficult one, unless they were oblivious). In a situation where someone stayed because they really needed the job, yet the clients have left in droves, keeping-up the appearance of being needed/busy might sound tempting.
I'm definitely not for it, or agreeing with the choice, but I can understand how it might happen. It isn't necessarily that they were being entirely awful (predatory toward their employer).
I don't agree with measuring keyboard activity in the first place, but if some place is going to measure it and employees know that measurement is happening, then it's guaranteed that some of them will game it.
Exactly. The problem employees here weren't the ones moving their mice, it was the IT department who were annoying the employees by constantly locking them out of their machines.
I guess Wells Fargo should have fired all their employees, not only those gaming
it, if they have absolutely no trust in them. Only a company using slaves should reach such a low level of company culture.
If the only indicator that these employees "needed" to go was the simulated keyboard activity then either:
a) the employees met all required KPIs and delivered well and were just meeting some dumb policy while actually being totally fine, and therefore shouldn't have been fired; or
b) the company has literally no way to tell if someone is actually useful and many of the people not using such devices could easily be far worse performaers.
In either case, firing someone based on this sort of monitoring or information should be illegal.
> firing someone based on this sort of monitoring or information should be illegal.
What would be a justifiable (won't get me in jail) firing in your mind?
Consistently failing to meet KPIs.
Do people directly work on the KPIs on your org? As in there is individual KPI for each person without any outside blocker etc.? And is the KPI so evenly distributed to each team member? What about other unknowns in the KPI.
At least in the companies I worked with, KPIs are manager/lead level items and it is divided into tasks that is handed out to individual team member.
Not meeting the job description requirements, failing to deliver, consecutively under-performing KPIs, etc.
My KPI is how much keyboard mashing my monkeys do! More keyboard mashing brings us closer to writing Shakespeare!
FWIW, I’ve decided to let folks go for failing to act in good faith, and for failing (or unwillingness) to learn from mistakes. That’s it.
I admire the folks who have such quality KPIs.
And, yes, I’ve been forced to deal with others’ decisions to let folks go as well (primarily missing growth targets), but very rarely.
its a fine argument made well, but no.. the job description and the work as directed are the agreement between the employee and the company. IANAL it seems that the fundamentals here are abusive or unwinnable terms of employment, fundemental labor rights that may not be overridden, and yes, slacker or cheating employees who may be gaming their supervision and what to do about that.
History is full of outrageous "agreements" by the powerful applied to the powerless, so there have to be labor laws that set an even playing field. Distributed work across legal jurisdictions is an opportunity to push those labor agreements and avoid consequences. On the other hand, there have always been cheaters among workers and that wont go away, either.
Modern technology has opened a pandora's box of constant surveillance that was not practical or even possible previously. There have to be new agreements on labor practices. It is a political problem. Compounding the urgency of this situation in an advanced economy is the looming implementation of AI to replace workers, and to enable a few workers to do the work of many, many more of the past. This time around, middle-managers are included in those that are replaceable, or perhaps even mid-level leadership i.e. "your boss is an AI"
Even if the employee is excellent, the deceit is enough to justify the firing. There is a requirement in the financial industry of being of good character and even minor things could result in loss of employment. There was a story a few years ago of a UK banker being banned from the city for fleecing train fares, even after he offered to repay the train company.
There was an even crazier detail to this story. While he thought he's fleecing tfl, he ended up paying more than he would have if tapping out properly.
But the intention was there. And if you're a banker, (intend to) steal but still end up paying more, maybe you're not a good banker, lol.
Right; it's not necessarily that they weren't working, but that they lied about it. The fake customer accounts scandal is also in Wells's recent memory, so this can make sense.
> There is a requirement in the financial industry of being of good character and even minor things could result in loss of employment.
Ha! That's a funny joke you hid in the middle of your comment.
> the company has literally no way to tell if someone is actually useful
You say this like it's easy, but it's actually very hard for most white-collar jobs.
Is that guy who's closing lots of tickets just picking the easy ones - or fobbing off customers with unhelpful responses?
Is that guy who took two weeks to make a two-line change incredibly unproductive? Or did they explore hundreds of avenues to finally stamp out a bug that had stumped dozens of other engineers for months?
Is that guy who's overseeing an external project and hasn't raised any issues a veteran with the foresight and initiative to solve problems early, and the expertise not to need hand-holding? Or are they simply not looking for issues?
Is that guy reviewing grant proposals taking the time to carefully read through every last one and fully comprehend all the technical details? Or are they skimming a few then funding the famous researchers at the well known universities, same as last year?
For a great many jobs, the main form of monitoring is how productive the worker's line manager feels they are. An extremely flawed measure.
Any manager worth their pay should be able to address all of these scenarios without much difficulty. I definitely don't classify any of your scenarios as "very hard".
Between talking to your reports, auditing some small portion of their work, and reviewing historical data, you'd be able to answer all of your hypothetical situations with fairly high confidence. Certainly higher than just vibe-based feelings or how many keys were pressed per minute.
If the managers don't get taken in by charismatic bullshitters, sure.
If the managers don't have super busy schedules, leaving them little time for "auditing work" and "reviewing historical data"
If the managers aren't managing workers who know much more than them, meaning they're poorly equipped to understand how hard a given task is.
If the managers have perfect vision into untracked work like prioritising tickets, helping people in other teams, interviewing, coaching new starters, performing code review, working on cross-team standardisation efforts and so on.
If the managers don't feel looking over people's shoulders or demanding webcams be turned on in meetings would seem distrustful and intrusive.
If the managers have time to keep track of everyone's health, wellbeing and equipment so when a spot check finds periods of low productivity it can't be explained away by a broken keyboard or wifi problems or having the flu that week.
If the managers think firing one person is guaranteed to let them hire someone better, with no hiring delays or freezes.
If the managers don't feel they're buddies with the people on their team, who they eat lunch with every day, and they have far greater affection for the corporation they work for.
And if the managers don't benefit from having a larger empire, incentivising them to respond schedule slips by hiring more people
Then yes, the manager could indeed address many of these scenarios.
This is quite hyperbolic.
They shouldn’t be managers if they are unable to manage for these reasons. Either they are not suited to management, not properly trained, or the organization is not set up to support management. They should not have a manager title if they aren’t prepared to sometimes have uncomfortable conversions with people.
Sure, I agree it’s hard. How often they press keys still isn’t a useful proxy for a good answer.
Why are these the only options?
Visit /r/overemployed on Reddit and you’ll find a large community of people teaching each other to do stuff like this so they can collect 2-3 full-time salaries.
I wouldn't want to work with anyone who thought an activity faker was a good idea. I also wouldn't want a work environment where someone would think they needed that.
But this is really the least of behavioral problems at Wells Fargo:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo#Lawsuits,_fines,_a...
The Feds could have a dedicated Wells Fargo Paddy-Wagon, running an express route for corporate HQ.
It's not really clear from the article if the employees who were fired were faking activity/work or if they were just trying to keep their computers from locking.
Musical reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8LHlJSBkg0&t=1m32s
At least the damage is localized, not a "invite to a meeting cause lol im bored"
Man, that list went on a LOT longer than I expected it to. I’m on a mobile device, so no scroll bar - I kept thinking that I must be nearing the end of the List of Horrible Things and being wrong. Also learned the term “redlining”.
I know the answer is “they’re big and integrated into the financial system”, but still, how are they still in business?!?
Using a mouse jiggler, as I'm on meetings most of the day, and inactivity timeout is 5m, so that while looking at the screen it'll lock up and takes almost a minute to come back up (external connection to docked, closed macbook). Mac just sucks at recovering with an external display and the laptop closed.
Not "pretending" anything... just one pain over another.
edit: For clarity, it's a relatively locked down system, and even then, I'm generally connected to a remote Windows based VM for working "inside" a secured and more locked down environment. I can't use a software solution for this.
Maybe this might help? https://www.caffeine-app.net
I haven't used Caffeine but used the very similar app Amphetamine and found it worked great.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704?mt=12
macOS has `caffeinate` built in as well.
https://ss64.com/mac/caffeinate.html
This will not show you as active. Teams and Slack and check the presence of HID events. If you have Xcode/swift installed you can script this instead:
This simulates one press/depress of the command key (0x37). The rest of the key codes can be found in Events.h in the location of your MacOS SDK library (deep in Xcode usually).
Add it to a cron job or whatever.
But that isn't the goal. Keeping the computer from going to lock screen is.
This will also do that. It has the same effect as tapping a key repeatedly
On Windows you can open windows media player and play a silent track on repeat.
Or if you can code, it's a simple flag an application can set to tell the OS it can't fire a screen saver (that flag the player uses).
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winbase/...
Or, the ultimate zero-software solution ... just rest your mouse on top of a running analog wristwatch; bonus points if said watch is mechanical ::grin::
This is a great solution for my wristmouse but what about my deskmouse?
A deskwatch?
Really? I've had mine connected to 2 external monitors for years and it's always closed. I never have a problem getting it to wake back up. You can change the inactivity timeout settings under preferences. Should be under Displays or Power settings I think.
The settings in question are locked down, and I don't have the ability to change them... I've had similar experiences with prior macs. In any case the hardware jiggler works. I shut it off when I am away/done... mostly just a "keep alive" method without having to install software.
It could be the display device through the thunderbolt dock I'm using...
I have a corner of my screen as the dedicated "do not turn on the screensaver" corner, and the rest as dedicated "screensaver NOW" corners. OS X supports this natively.
When I interview for remote jobs, I increasingly ask about this kind of surveillance. I ask them if this is the kind of remote job where I'm required to be at my desk 8 hours a day straight or if it's more flexible
This. Some days I work one hour. Other days I work from sunrise to sunset. I'm always available during office hours, but I'm not going to be surveilled in my own home. If I'm doing my job, let me keep it, and if not, tell me how to improve, but I am not a rat for some middle manager to prod to justify his salary.
If my well-done work is not good enough for an employer, than we are an impasse that will not be resolved, and there are plenty of other places to work.
Better be shit hot or you'll be in the difficult category
It seems like most of these devices (example: https://hackaday.com/?p=683252) have a fixed and unusual USB vendor+product ID that will surely come up in the system log.
People could always just use a device that physically moves the mouse around or pushes a button on the keyboard instead. Companies could of course react by requiring employees to solve a captcha every once in a while to work around that, but here's a controversial thought:
What if the "proof of work" that companies use to "detect employee presence" was just... Actually accomplished work? That should solve the problem at the correct layer.
Unless, of course, objectives and goals are poorly defined, and requiring that would result in huge embarrassment to the management layers above the mouse wigglers.
What’s going to happen is they’re gonna ask a Microsoft-provided AI whether employees’ data from Microsoft Recall looks like work, on a scale, and fire the lowest percent or two of that scale every quarter. If running it over data from all the days is too expensive, they’ll pick a day or two to sample and you’ll be retained or fired based on that.
At least I’ve been assuming that’s the main reason MS is making Recall. To issue spyware-reports on corporate workers.
Yikes!
You just to outspend at least 1% on your generative mouse-movement AI.
Now this is an exciting emerging market
THIS is exactly right.
I wish I could find it again, but I was impressed by a study of remote work around 2010 that showed that remote work improved the results of teams with good managers and (further) degraded the results of teams with bad managers.
A key difference between the good vs bad managers was that the good managers focused on specific tasks being accomplished whereas the bad managers focused on the usual indicators of work such as as time of butts being in seats, which has only an incidental and often inverse relation to quantity or quantity of work produced.
This 'tech' is simply attempting to enable bad management with remote workforces. A good sign that remote is winning the war and here to stay. A bad sign that bad mgt will make it suck more (at least until AI eliminates those jobs for good).
Not familiar with WF but I've seen large corps in the past where HR mandates N number of reportees to get promoted. It goes up the chain, so your boss is pushing you to hire and you are pushing to hire, etc.
The problem is then, people get hired but there is no work for them, especially during lean times.
There is a wide chasm between well-run large companies and poorly-run ones. You can look at sector-level revenue/employee to get an idea of efficiency/waste.
Empire building is a well-known phenomenon in organizations, but that still begs the question: Does it matter whether employees largely hired and retained for payroll metrics actually wiggle their mice or not?
One obvious alternative is to use a real optical mouse, but move the surface next to the sensor. This would be easy with any of several motorized mechanisms, e.g. a turntable -- but that would be bulky, most people do not actually have a turntable, and many cheap implementations would make noise.
That makes me wonder what would happen with an optical mouse atop a tablet, displaying a slowly-panning video of a texture. However, there are a few obstacles. First, Google tells me that optical mice have frame rates of 1.5 to 5 kHz. That's very fast. It probably makes the optical flow problem easier, since there's less change between frames. But it's also much faster than the, say, 60 Hz refresh of a tablet's screen. I don't know what a bunch of "stairsteps" in the position signal would look like to the mouse. Second, there's the issue of wavelength. Google brings me optical mouse sensors with sensitivities in the 832 - 865 nm range, i.e., in the infrared. Visible red is around 740 nm. Looking at this chart [1] and extrapolating just a tiny bit, it seems that LCDs have almost no emissivity around 850 nm. So this probably would not work. Whether an LCD with an infrared backlight would work is left as a question for another time.
What might be easier still, would be to somehow hack the USB device itself to spoof the vendor and product ID. I don't know how to do that myself, but it might be easy for anyone who's familiar with USB device development.
Of course, this is a silly arms race that it wouldn't actually be worth participating in, but it's amusing to consider what you could do.
I heard a story of an employee health plan that issued pedometers and issued cash rewards for higher step counts. In short order, one employee had put his on a clock pendulum, another had secured the thing to the collar of his hyperactive dog, and a third had hacked the thing to display all nines.
[1] https://www.displaymate.com/Spectra_4.html
For what it’s worth, the max polling rate for low-speed USB devices (of which mice almost invariably are) is, IIRC, 100 Hz.
I would worry less about stair stepping and more about making the speed and acceleration distributions and auto-correlation look natural: a real human-powered mouse won’t be constantly moving (you have to stop the think about the next step, use the keyboard, etc) and when it is moving will tend to follow a rapid move-pause-move pattern.
Another telltale would be a mouse that moves naturally but never clicks.
Vendor and device ID are the lowest hanging fruit, but I think there are a lot of other giveaways that a mouse jiggler is being used.
> Wells Fargo holds employees to the highest standards.
I wonder if they also compensate them to the highest standards.
https://archive.ph/WVdjx
How do you get these links, do you have a step by step by any chance? I feel like I've tried to get them on my own and they never seen to work or be a short link like this. Thanks in advance!
https://archive.is/ https://ghostarchive.org/
Are the sites you are looking for.
Amongst other options, the !ais bang search on DDG will either turn up an existing archive of an article or web page, or start the dialogue for creating one yourself.
Archive.Today takes up to 5--10 minutes to fully complete an archive, as it's waiting for all of numerous related page requests to complete, as opposed to a local browser session which makes a best-guess effort at rendering a page with only partial completion of downloads. Capacity and queue length also seem to be factors here.
The !wayback bang will search or create Internet Archive pages, though this is less successful at byapassing paywalls, as with Bloomberg.
Ghostarchive doesn't seem to have a bang at this point.
`caffeinate -d` keeps my corporate mandated screensaver and forced sleep timeout from happening, which usually suck to recover from.
It feels like a draconian security/monitoring department would have a problem with the caffeine app just as much as a USB jiggler dongle.
I hate the macOS wakeup too, it's way too slow.
True. It sounds better on the innocence/plausible deniability side to just use a tool in the regular corporate environment to get the presentation flag set. For example, viewing a .PPT in presentation mode, then using "Hide presenter view", seems promising.
I would consider our security tooling draconian yet they haven't said anything about this. And I've been using it for about 2 years
The previous flight of employees from this part of WF due to unethical activity might suggest those remaining made a choice (perhaps a difficult one, unless they were oblivious). In a situation where someone stayed because they really needed the job, yet the clients have left in droves, keeping-up the appearance of being needed/busy might sound tempting.
I'm definitely not for it, or agreeing with the choice, but I can understand how it might happen. It isn't necessarily that they were being entirely awful (predatory toward their employer).
The issue here isn't the employee behavior. It's that Wells Fargo imposed an idiotic culture where employees felt this was necessary.
Goodhart's Law at work.
I don't agree with measuring keyboard activity in the first place, but if some place is going to measure it and employees know that measurement is happening, then it's guaranteed that some of them will game it.
I can't even begin to fathom a world where such things exist. Maybe I need to get out more.
Corporate IT gets told to keep workstations secure, they set a timeout way too low, people get frustrated.
Exactly. The problem employees here weren't the ones moving their mice, it was the IT department who were annoying the employees by constantly locking them out of their machines.
I guess Wells Fargo should have fired all their employees, not only those gaming it, if they have absolutely no trust in them. Only a company using slaves should reach such a low level of company culture.
And yet no Wells Fargo executives went to jail for opening real bank accounts for people who didn't ask for them, and other crimes.
The employees fucked up by screwing over the shareholders instead of the working class. Common mistake.
Where do you report odd and possibly deceptive activity by an employee of your financial institution?