White Lies Help Stressed Computer Users

An anonymous reader writes "Simple tricks allow one to appear to be hard at work in the office while actually forwarding calls, e-mails and instant messages to your mobile phone. One can backdate e-mails through rolling back a computer's built-in clock or use background phone noises to concoct convincing excuses not to go to work."

Comments

people have been lazy long before tech

[ibanez16]

People have always been finding ways to cheat work. Whether its longer breaks, sleeping in the bathroom, yeah i know people who have done it, or god knows what else. My favorite though is the george costanza's method, building a bed under your desk to take naps in.

God i've thought about it myself a few times......

setting back clock does nothing

[germanStefan]

While setting back you clock may fool some people, it wont fool anyone who knows about the "header" of an e-mail. A quick peek there and you find all the timestamps of each email server that passed the email along. If there is a "huge" gap inbetween when it was send form "localhost" and the first mailserver...something is up.

Also this doesn't work if one uses webmail where one would have to reset the server's time.

NOT that I don't resolve to such trickery once in a while. Most of our boses won't read the header of a message, and only the true geek has his e-mail viewer set to e-mail source instead of the nice outlook (evolution for me) display. If your cubicle is in a public place, virtual desktops comes in handy. gaim open on desktop 1, quickly move to desktop2 with source code open when you hear footsteps... or for the windows fans, alt tab to a full screen program where you have "actual work" open...

I would be interested in what other slashdotters do, I'm sure we have some pretty original ideas.

I waste my employer's money the old fashioned way

[museumpeace]

I used to rename all the executables for my playthings to the application names for editing, compiling, archiving and so on. [Its good to have privs.] If they sniffed my processes, I look like I'm bustin my hump for 'em

Re:Marx predicted this

[Oligonicella]

Did Marx predict the plethora of corruption and dictatorial suppression that is the very hallmark of communism? Or perhaps the almost complete and utter collapse of the various contries economys?

Re:The Culture of Lying

[CHESTER COPPERPOT]

There was a book out recently called the cheating culture. I highly recommend it as it points out the cheating is a systemic problem in all levels, from school to business, and that it's pretty damaging to long term values. It also points out interestingly enough that in a lot of other countries such widespread cheating would lead to a revolt however in America the poor can cheat just as much as the rich. So everyone gets into a self perpetuating mindset of 'everyone else is cheating so why does it matter' thus continuing the vicious cycle.

Re:Liability.

[NormalVisual]

This happens to people where I work regularly - most people there are pretty security conscious, and when someone brain-farts and walks off leaving their machine unlocked for more than just a few minutes, they're as likely as not to come back to an open IM window with some kind of inappropriate message to a same-sex co-worker having been entered some time before by some anonymous party. Pretty much everyone does it, so the recipient of the message will usually make some kind of remark about the IM they received to the security-challenged party, with an admonishment to lock their machine in the future. It's kind of a self-correcting system, or will be until someone gets pissed off and calls the Compliance people.

Re:Marx predicted this

[drsquare]

What is happening is workers, reduced in today's "service economy" (subservience economy would be a better term) to little more that soulless drones, are rejecting the labor and property regimes imposed upon them by the ruling classes.

What does that have to do with 'today'? You make it seem like in the history of mankind, workers have been anything more than soulless drones. Let's have a look back at history:

Ancient Egypt: workers are mindless drones building Pyramids.
Ancient Rome: workers are mindless drones building aqueducts and roads.
Dark Ages: workers are mindless drones rowing boats and invading countries.
Middle Ages: workers are mindless drones tilling fields for their feudal lords.
Industrial Revolution: workers are mindless drones working in mills and down mines.
Modern Day: workers are mindless drones working in offices and shops and factories.

Nothing's changed, this isn't a 'prediction' by Marx, people have shunned work as much as possible since the dawn of time. In fact, these days the lowest rung of workers have the most stimulating work in history. Even punching numbers into a computer or writing programs is more stimulating than digging coal from seams. Stacking shelves is preferable to working in an 19th Century workhouse.

I'm sure pyramid builders did as much as possible to do as little pyramid building as possible. Nothing has changed.

Gaston Lagaffe

[Pig Hogger]

Gimme the work. Finally, it's going to be less tiring doing it than trying to avoid doing it...

Those who read french undoubtely know Gaston Lagaffe (Gaston The-Blunder), a comic character who works in the children's magazine it is published. Being lazy, he eithers find ways to avoid working by sleeping on the job, inventing goofy machines to do the work (often with catastrophic results) or simply help pass the time he is at work (either by playing or cooking).

The comic strip ran for almost forty-five years and grew-up; at some point, you could see that several of the characters (the cop always trying to ticket him for illegal parking, his immediate bosses, the businessmen trying, for all that time, to sign some contracts) had quite serious neuroses, with Gaston always seeming to be the more sane character...

Stealth Switch

[rabel]

The simple slacker's solution: StealthSwitch. It's a foot switch that automatically hides the window you're viewing in Windows.

Read the owner's about page to see what he's about. It's a pretty cool idea that jives with the theme of this topic. Of course, this assumes you're at the office and not boating at the lake, but it's a tool for "stressed computer users" *snicker*

No, I'm not affliated in any way, just a happy customer.

Re:Bill Gates: Visionary

[Jackmn]

With a typical Linux installation, a compromised process only has as much access as the user name it was run under. That is, a virus that remotely compromises a process will not have root access. Just about every Linux distrubution comes near to forcing this type of setup - it is possible to get around it, but it is far more work than simply going with it.

This is in stark contrast to the typical Windows configuration, where any remotely compromised process grants the attacker full access to the machine. It is possible to set up limited user rights, but this breaks a great deal of software. Also, such a setup is not encouraged by the Windows installer.

Backdating the SMTP server's headers?

[J'raxis]

Yeah, backdate your computer's clock. Then try to explain why the first Received header on your email, which is appended by the SMTP server through which you sent your message, is always x hours or days or whatever ahead.

Also, what of the possibility that an email server will just replace your date header? If this isn't a server configuration option, it should be. I haven't seen a server that does this, but I've seen NNTP servers do it, and some that also add an additional NNTP-Posting-Date header.