> What bugs me is when this is applied to remote workers in a way that seems optimized for in-office environments.
> For example IT enforces that your screen becomes locked after 15 minutes of inactivity
If your OS is MS-Win, try playing an audio file when you don't want the auto-lock to go off. Provided IT's "checkbox security" parameters [1] did not include turning this off, MS-Win does not timeout lock the system if an audio file is playing, which makes playback of an audio file a way to prevent the timeout auto-lock from happening. Note that this won't help with any 'presence' indicators that go "idle" or "away" with no activity for some time.
If this works, then you can create an audio file of 'silence' with sox to use to play back when you don't want the auto-lock to trigger:
sox -n silence.wav trim 0 10:0.0
Creates a ten minute long wav of 'silence'. If you want it smaller, compress the wav with lame into an mp3 or fdkaac into an aac file. Then launch playback of the silence file, and set windows media player to "loop" when it reaches the end of the file.
[1] Much corporate/govt. IT "security" is "checkbox security". It is the equivalent of IT having a "compliance form" with a long list of "configured settings" with check-boxes next to each, and so long as they can go down the form and "check all the boxes" they deem their setup "secure". Whether it is actually secure is not important, just that it "checks all the boxes" on the "compliance form".
That's really clever. This is a company issued Macbook (macOS is a requirement not a choice btw) but I'm guessing there will be something similar that you could do.
This puts you into a grey area though no? You could make a case this is willingly trying to circumvent security protocols which could be grounds for being fired.
> For example IT enforces that your screen becomes locked after 15 minutes of inactivity
If your OS is MS-Win, try playing an audio file when you don't want the auto-lock to go off. Provided IT's "checkbox security" parameters [1] did not include turning this off, MS-Win does not timeout lock the system if an audio file is playing, which makes playback of an audio file a way to prevent the timeout auto-lock from happening. Note that this won't help with any 'presence' indicators that go "idle" or "away" with no activity for some time.
If this works, then you can create an audio file of 'silence' with sox to use to play back when you don't want the auto-lock to trigger:
Creates a ten minute long wav of 'silence'. If you want it smaller, compress the wav with lame into an mp3 or fdkaac into an aac file. Then launch playback of the silence file, and set windows media player to "loop" when it reaches the end of the file.[1] Much corporate/govt. IT "security" is "checkbox security". It is the equivalent of IT having a "compliance form" with a long list of "configured settings" with check-boxes next to each, and so long as they can go down the form and "check all the boxes" they deem their setup "secure". Whether it is actually secure is not important, just that it "checks all the boxes" on the "compliance form".