Mouse jigglers have been A Thing for years now. I used one on my work laptop a decade ago to get around the damn screen lock that I couldn't turn off.

A decent Facebook engineer can probably make one in an afternoon with an Arduino. Bonus points if they disable the Arduino bootloader so it doesn't show up in the logs.

Or they could buy one of these and just plug it in: https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/31...

It's an ATTiny85 so it can be customised pretty easily if necessary.

Ah, OK. I get it now. No, to the best of my knowledge Slashdot articles still come from users.

If I had a mod point, you'd get it.

I wasn't at Amazon, but I can confirm. 20 years ago I worked in a call centre and they used a similar metric, which was basically "calls per hour." There was another perverse incentive too - if you didn't actually solve a customer's problem, they'd probably need to call back again soon, further inflating your stats. I remember listening to the guy who had the best stats, all he ever said was "fix your firewall."

As other posters have stated, the way to fix this has two parts. First, better metrics. Second, better management who understand the work and can prevent their staff from gaming the metrics.

You're commenting on one right now.

Good for you. I got out when the carbon footprint became too big.

Hahahahaha!

Yeah, that's why the average member of the public has such great coding skills. And they are great at saving their work, and making backups, and adding attachments to emails, and and and....

I would vote for this. I don't even demand that the directors teach at the school. Working as a cleaner in a busy public school would be acceptable too.

I cannot think of anything more dystopian.

If I had mod points, you'd get them. Random sites don't need to know your birthday. Neither does GMail, nor facebook, nor any of the others. Using false info is the only way to protect yourself from the next inevitable data breach.

This arms race is as old as ads on the internet. I remember stories in the 90s about click farms staffed with real humans n developing countries.

Betteridge's Law states that if the headline is a question, the answer is probably "No."

The modern web would suck, but it would probably be fine for email if you limited it to text-only. Hell, even emails with images and attachments are usually limited to a couple of meg. Slow, but doable.

Yep, still in print. So is "Cars and Trucks and Things That Go" and "What Do People Do All Day." The latter has probably aged more than others, it has abig section about how great it is to dig up coal and burn it. "Buried sunlight."