Looks useful. So this software detects how long you spend on what app?
This may be compositor dependent but just a guess. Thats a problem of Wayland (currently)
The port will be huge and just making the extension run not enough.
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Pretty much. My company has it set to track the following:
- Periodic screenshots
- Mouse and keyboard activity
- Apps used
- URLs visited
All of this is combined to determine how active you were (as a percentage), you can then try and determine how much time was spent on productive vs non-productive work. However, we use it as a glorified timesheet.
If the tracking software is open source what is stopping employees from changing source code to their advantage ?
It’s not open source. I just added it to codeberg for easy sharing to ask this question
I dont think they actually take screenshots, do they? That would be awfully inefficient. You can get the window titles in better ways.
the URL stuff should use a browser extension to tell them that name.
If that app really takes screenshots and extracts URLs from them, it is pretty overcomplex. But that improves platform-independence a lot
It takes screenshots that get posted to a user dashboard for management to check if needed.
I don't have anything useful to say but that sounds fixing dystopian.
The GNOME extension appears to get the currently focused window information (ie name, title, PID and executable name) and make this information available over DBUS for the client binary.
The client binary calls gnome-screenshot -f and I assume gives a path that the client binary then sends to Hubstaff servers.
A janky suggestion would be to create a Kwin Script that pulls the active window information, sends it (somehow) to a DBUS service that can provide it to the client binary and create a wrapper script around spectacle to pretend to be gnome-screenshot (eg spectacle -b -f $@)
I don't know if this would work fully though as the client binary strings seem to hint it checks the running version of GNOME Shell, and without an account I can't see if this is a hard requirement or a "Hey, this is broken, we'll try our best!" type thing.
For screenshots Spectacle supports Wayland. Perhaps you could create a script to trigger it when certain conditions are met to get a similar effect.
I tried contacting support to get it fixed from their side (haven't followed up recently). The issue they noted from my logs was the following:
2024-02-29 02:00:12.809995 [AUDIT] [main] ActivityTracker.cpp:923 (START_IGNORED) Unable to start tracking project(2730068) due to Screenshots data consent/permission.
In the app, you need to enable permission for tracking (see screenshot). For some reason, this permission isn't granted "correctly" on Wayland which means it won't let me track time. At least that's how I understand it.
