Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Monday, July 8th. I'm Zoe Thomas for the Wall Street Journal.

Companies productivity tracking tools are getting more sophisticated in detecting when remote workers are using devices like mouse and keyboard jigglers.

We'll tell you how bosses are using their own tools and software to spot fake busy work.

And then China wants to dominate commercial fusion, which could deliver almost limitless energy.

Our reporter Jennifer Hiller will join us to talk about how China is outspending the US

in the race to achieve a clean energy dream. Energy Dream.

But first, the rise of remote work and in turn employee monitoring software sparked a boom in

hacks designed to help staffers fake computer activity, so workers

could step away to do something else.

Now some companies are cracking down on these techniques, deploying tools they can better spot the phony busy work.

Here to tell us more is San V. Bangalore who reported on this for the Wall Street Journal.

So San V. For people who aren't familiar with these tools to fake work activity like mouse or keyboard

jigglers, can you give us an idea of how they work?

Yeah, so there are a wide range of devices and life hacks that people use to blow off work or give the impression that they're actively on their computers.

And so we lead the story with mouse jigglers, which are essentially small rotating platforms that you can place your computer

mouse on and they can be plugged into your computer or an outlet and so the rotation of

the jiggler moves the mouse cursor, which can simulate a person physically using the mouse.

What about devices to keep computers awake?

There are just so many hacks that people use.

Like, for example, people have like an automatic

PowerPoint running just so that their computer doesn't shut down there's also like

some old school hacks like placing a textbook on a keyboard just to keep the computer on.

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