(This is going to make me embark on a weekend project to use an Arduino, some servos and a 3D printed finger to move my trackball.)
The trick that I heard is to just place the mouse on a clock. The second hand jiggles the mouse every minute. Can be stashed away in a drawer or something. Never tried this though.
If you were really smart you would lobby your IT department to change the ridiculously short timeout, and protest by not working when it locks on you during normal pauses.
I bet they also have many other great ideas and processes that are strangling efficiency and preventing innovation.
Of course it's a balance, but think of the wasted productivity from a 2 minute timeout with stupid password requirements like that. That incurs a cost.
Look, I get why some of these policies are in place -- a bunch of it stems from locking down our systems and protecting critical data due to various Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. Plus, sometimes smart people do dumb things, and it leads to bad things (e.g, see the LinkedIn incident) [1].
But man, oh man, is it annoying! Especially if I'm in my own home, with no one around, and I otherwise get my work done.
I am, generally, very sceptical of corporate surveillance stuff, and think that it should be largely banned. But this particular case isn't surveillance, it's security.
We have some ridiculous timeout on our work machines that triggers the screensaver after 2 minutes of idle time (we can’t change this).
After it’s triggered, you need to enter your password to unlock (company mandated, 10 chars minimum, no repeating chars, at least 1 upper and 1 lower case char, at least 1 special symbol, change every 90 days, can't be too similar to last 10(!) passwords).
Okay, this is annoying. So, for the longest time, I used an open source mouse jiggler app (basically simulated cursor movement).
This worked fine until a recent software update. I wondered why my screen saver was being triggered again. Oh, the mouse jiggler isn’t running! Let’s open it up.
A big dialog box appears on the screen: “THIS APPLICATION VIOLATES COMPANY POLICY AND ITS USAGE HAS BEEN REPORTED.”
Oh… cool.
I went on Amazon and ordered some $5 hardware mouse jiggler dongle. That worked for about a month or so.
Then suddenly, I started getting CrowdStrike notifications: “Functions of a USB device were restricted according to company policy.”
Fun times!
It’s only a matter of time until Zoom starts sending reports of whether I had the window in focus or not during meetings with management.