this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2024
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I know people who use the mouse jiggler. They get all their work done and are good employees.
I'm a manager at a large company and have employees who work mostly from home. I don't bother checking if their picture has a green or yellow mark next to their name. If they respond to my emails quickly and get their overall work done, I'm happy.
Their productivity is naturally increased because they aren't force to re-authenticate on their laptops because they were inactive for 5 minute while reading a report or going to the bathroom. Or worse, if they have multiple laptops because of security or compliance reasons, and one will inevitably be inactive forcing yet another sign in.
This is the real reason I have one of those damn mouse jigglers. The timeouts on our laptop are CRAZY short, like 5 minutes tops. Just stepping away for some coffee or to take a shit then I have to re-authenticate. Heaven forbid I make myself a toasted bagel or something!
It's even worse as I work 95% inside multiple virtual machines in the cloud that also timeout (and in some cases shut down) so there are multiple layers of password +2fa just to get back to whatever I was doing.
So yeah, $10 USB device from Amazon allows me to not spend a hour a day just having to re-auth.
There’s an old but IMO still very relevant white paper by Microsoft titled “So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users”. It argues that security measures often cost more in employee time (and hence wages) than the potential benefit. It’s an interesting read and I think about it whenever our chief of security cooked up with another asinine security measure.