I work from home - with a 5 minute screensaver with complicated password required by corporate - USB MouseJiggler - https://www.amazon.com/Undetectable-Computer-Simulate-Moveme...
Best - Purchase - Ever - !
I've never had a need for such a device, but I worked for a company that wrote Skype for Business plug-ins, many of which revolved around "presence". You were considered active on your computer[0] when your mouse moved. We had a tool that we used for billing our time which included a graph of your Skype for Business presence state for the day you were entering time for[1].
I noticed, one week, that I was active 24-hours a day for three days in a row. I discovered that I left my mouse plugged in, it had fallen onto the carpet, and the minor vibrations that would occur in the house mixed with difficulty tracking would cause the mouse to move on its own "little enough" for me to not notice but frequently enough that it kept the computer from sleeping and kept my Skype for Business state bright green.
[0] Similar to Teams, today, you could be logged in from multiple devices; unlike Teams, a toast message might not reach your phone (or appear and be dismissed immediately) if you were active on a computer.
[1] This was entirely to assist in accurately filling out time sheets; it was never used to make sure "butts were in chairs".
The mousepad itself has an eink or similar display to change it over time and have the mouse detect some motion. The "active" part is turned off (to just be a regular display) when there is pressure on the wrist rest.
The mousepad is a USB hub (to get power for itself) that you can also plug the mouse and keyboard into so that its one less cord back to the computer.
I am not interested in installing bloatware drivers. Embedded IDEs OTOH...
Isn't this cheating?
The problem is that preventing it is difficult to impossible.
You can't calculate recoil server-side because the latency would make it nigh unplayable. But once it's done client-side, it's cheatable.
Logitech is the problem here for even allowing this in the first place. No CRC checks for mouse firmware or anything? It screams poor implementation. I will not be surprised if anti-cheat software starts banning people or companies like Logitech.
Kind of sad to see the number of threads and communities online encouraging this. The point of games is to have fun, when you cheat all that goes out the door.
It's client-side. Spoofing the CRC checks would be almost trivial.
They don't have to.
All they need is a signature of a valid firmware, and then inject code that returns that signature.
The "kids" won't be the ones writing the cheats. That'll be someone who knows how to write code that injects code into another running process, and then they sell the cheat software.
Blizzard tried for YEARS to detect a bot program for World of Warcraft called Glider. Every time they found a way to detect it, the bot engineers found a way to evade the detection. It was constant cat and mouse until Blizz sued the developer and had them shut down.
More back on topic, most of the cheaters are just script kiddies. There are only a couple that actually develop cheats, and they tend to be quite clever.
If on Windows, I use their "Power Toys" (free, btw), which has a keep awake function. My company user policies do not allow me to manage my energy policy, which is what kept shutting off my screen (and therefore necessitating the complicated password). Power Toys solves this problem.
this usually keeps the laptop from going to lock screen
bonus: press B to blackout the screenshow to avoid monitor burn-in
[0] https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/c19a56...
Which is not to say that it is not done, but personally I have enough options that I would like to see them try to fire me over something like that. If I'm staring off into the distance to think about something or reading source code without pgdn'ing for five minutes, yes it's not uncommon that my screen turns off while reading something (until I get around to setting the timeout higher at least) but that doesn't mean I'm not working.
It was almost a meme on TikTok during the pandemic, (American) people figured out the weirdest ways to keep their Teams bubble green.