At 10 o'clock late at night, just as I had put my child to sleep, my phone screen lit up - the leader assigned work in a WeChat group and requested it to be handed in tomorrow morning. This is not a fictional scene, but a real dilemma faced by millions of professionals in the digital age. Recently, a typical case announced by the Third Intermediate People's Court of Beijing has attracted widespread attention: a worker named Dong used WeChat to handle work late at night and during holidays, and the court ultimately ruled that the company should pay overtime pay. This verdict has pierced through the gray area where "invisible overtime" has long been outside of legal protection. Dong's experience is by no means an isolated case. From 2022 to 2024, among the 4942 cases involving the right to rest and vacation concluded by the Beijing Third Intermediate People's Court in the second instance, "hidden overtime" has become a new type of infringement area. When tools such as WeChat and DingTalk extend the workplace infinitely to bedrooms and dining tables, the traditional boundary of "freedom after work" is completely shattered. The court accurately pointed out in the relevant notification the essential characteristics of "online overtime": fragmentation, boundarylessness, and difficulty in proving - workers are forced to "always be online", but it is difficult to prove that these scattered hours constitute overtime in the legal sense. The "tricks" used by companies to evade responsibility make it even more difficult for workers to protect their rights. Some companies, while setting strict "overtime approval systems" in their rules and regulations, tacitly approve or even require employees to respond at any time in practice. In fact, the various evasion methods used by enterprises are shocking: replacing overtime pay with "duty subsidies", splitting wages to disguise payment, and abusing the special working hour system... These "carefully" designed institutional traps transform workers' legitimate claims for the right to rest into "non compliant" personal behavior. The breakthrough significance of this judgment lies in establishing a feasible judicial recognition standard for "invisible overtime": clearly occupying rest time+providing substantial labor. During the trial, the judge penetrates the form and comprehensively considers factors such as the nature, frequency, and duration of the work - even without traditional attendance records, electronic traces such as WeChat communication screenshots and email exchanges may still become key evidence. This has opened up a glimmer of hope for the "digital laborers" trapped in the "difficulty of providing evidence". On a deeper level, the proliferation of 'invisible overtime' exposes the disorder of technological ethics. When "immediate response" is packaged as professional ethics, and "24/7 standby" becomes a hidden rule for promotion, the logic of capital is systematically eroding the private domain of workers. To eradicate "invisible overtime", it is necessary to build a three in one protective net: refine online labor recognition standards through legislation, judicial interpretations, etc., and promote the consensus of "providing substantial labor and enjoying compensation"; The labor supervision department should carry out special governance to address the abuse of the "overtime approval system". In the legislative stage, the "disconnection right" can be introduced to clearly give workers a legal shield to refuse non emergency work contacts. In addition, the application of digital technology should be strengthened to achieve information sharing between tools such as WeChat and DingTalk, enterprise management platforms, and information processing software. AI and other technological means should be used to intelligently identify and analyze massive fragmented communication, accurately separate personal conversations and work instructions, automatically accumulate online actual labor hours and record them in real-time in the attendance and salary accounting system, and form an electronic work hour ledger. The labor supervision department should establish a unified "online labor monitoring platform", access anonymous work data streams authorized by workers, use big data models to dynamically screen high-risk points of hidden overtime in enterprises, and achieve a transformation from passive complaint acceptance to active intelligent warning. The sentence in the judgment of Dong's case that "online overtime needs to be supported by specific job content" is like a surgical knife dissecting the alienation of labor in the digital age. When the Beijing Third Intermediate People's Court makes relevant typical cases public, what we see is not only the judicial relief of individual rights, but also a solemn reaffirmation of labor dignity. In the era of rapid technological advancement, the off-duty hours of workers should not become a free "long working hour" for enterprises - making every minute of physical labor online visible and paid is the temperature that technological civilization should have. This is not only a legal guarantee for individual rights, but also a reshaping of the "people-oriented" technological ethics. When AI can accurately capture every work instruction that pops up late at night and convert it into a reward voucher that workers deserve, we truly grasp the tool to tame the wildness of technology and defend the boundaries of life, allowing labor in the digital age to return to its essence of creating value, rather than endless invisible consumption. The warmth of technological civilization should ultimately be reflected in the respect and fulfillment of every online effort. (New Society)