This is why I just suck it up and go to a testing center even though more often than not it’s unpleasant too. I’m not installing all their tools and having to clear an entire room so there’s nothing that can be seen is such a hassle.
Aw, manggg. But I just upgraded to Linux last week. Shoot...
Back to being treated like an idiot, force fed bloat, having no control over my own PC, and taking four steps to get everything done but often ending up down a rabbit hole of 19 step troubleshooting just to say, "Fuck it! Fine! I'll accept the new feature" then being toured on the new feature after it crashes first then won't let you login, but finally you do and THEN you've got your file open but forget what for by then, all the while it's notifying you of updates constantly but you won't run them because you noticed it contains the AMD driver which is the old one so Adrenaline will stop working but that also means Windows has somehow undone the group policy fucking around you had to do. And they say Linux is hard while Windows thinks I'm the fucking idiot and I CANT EVEN SHRINK THE FUCKING PARTITION BECAUSE THE GOD DAMNED PAGE FILE IS JIZZED ALL OVER THE FUCKING DRIVE!!! RAAARRRGH!!!!
snaps back
Huh, sorry. I get flashbacks still. The doctors say with the right therapy, I'll be better in a year.
This means they forgot platforms other than Windows exists. It's likely they're checking for currently supported systems and anything older is insecure, so blocked for your security.
Likely something like this pseudocode
function isPlatformVersionSupported(useragent) {
// Windows XP is NT 5.1
// Windows Vista is NT 6.0
// Windows 7 is NT 6.1
// Windows 8 is NT 6.2
// Windows 8.1 is NT 6.3
// Windows 10 and 11 is NT 10.0
if (useragent.name == "Windows" && useragent.version.match(/Windows NT (6\.3|10)/)) {
return true
}
// TODO: insert supported macos versions here
return false
}
Right, but that could still be given dynamically by a library as "one of the unsupported ones", getOSName(). They still might not have hard-coded "Linux is bad".
Which will be "If not Windows 11 or Mac os then report os string". I don't think they specifically took the time to research different OS's and list them.
The program has the information, but that doesn't mean the people that wrote the code felt it was worth their time to make the "upgrade" text inclusive to Linux, if they even considered the possibility of Linux.
If they were using user agents for identification, Android browsers on "Desktop mode" would be wrongly identified as "Linux". Even Discord has this issue on their download page. "Premium" Android devices with large screens use Desktop mode by default
I’ll just change my web browser’s user agent then; you’re a fucking website, you don’t need to know which OS I’m using.
It’s amazing how many “unsupported” web apps work perfectly fine once you change the UA. It’s often a completely arbitrary limitation so that they can hire less qualified support staff.
A small publisher's ebook platform recently started blocking firefox for me, did a bit of digging and found that if pages aren't requested with the right headers (which work in chrome and msedge) it will respond with a 302, suggesting you go to another page which takes a few minutes and then times out.
This is probably to stop scraping, and could be because I started testing some scraping scripts on it.
Anyway, this hasn't even stopped me scraping, I just copied the headers and use those in my script.
I ran into this before too, I believe I got around it with a User Agent changer… that or a windows 10 VM with 2 cores and 2GB of RAM that ran only Firefox… or you may be able to just press remind me later and suffer little/no consequences
I think it’s just because people that use Linux are generally more technologically inclined and are more likely to try and get around their crappy DRM
How tf do you not support an operating system. Like you gotta go out of your way to detect and block the operating system. Like if you put in 0 effort it would probably work but your company really spent money making their product less accessible for no reason.
I don't really disagree with you. It's dumb to go out of your way to block an OS that probably works just fine.
That said, the answer is probably "lawyers" and an attempt to limit liability. People rely on the course materials to work. If they don't want to out the effort into testing to ensure that their software works on Linux, even if it would probably be fine, they may want to limit the possibility of being sued by someone when it somehow screws up their semester.
So, they out up a soft barrier that says "this may not work right" but let you use it anyway. They have deniability if something goes wrong while the savvy Linux user probably just laughs and changes their user agent.
Essentially, no one is hurt and the lawyers are happy.
The motivation from their side is not wanting to support Linux. There's a difference between working and supported; support costs them money in terms of every phone call from every person for whom the material doesn't work correctly, as that means paid trained staff on hand all the time whether you're having linux issues right now or not. Imagine if one person a year had linux issues, requiring them to hire a full time linux tech with nothing to do but pick up the phone once a year. By putting a roadblock in front that people can get around, it can 'work' on that system while they have a leg to stand on to say no to any linux user who wants help they can't provide.
They're under a class-action lawsuit currently for using biometric data in a US state where it's illegal. Just kinda interesting. https://www.bipatestsettlement.com/Home/FAQ
I had this problem over 10 years ago. change your user-agent, problem solved.
they do it because they are regulations for educational software that must be met, like specific access requirements in order to be used in accredited courses.
it's not anything specifically against Linux, it's that they can't test and validate those access requirements for anything outside Windows due to organizational limitations.
source: I worked for colleges early in my career that used Pearson then worked for a vendor that managed infrastructure and project management for Pearson. they aren't unique, their competition is just as fucked as they are. most still use waterfall because upper mgmt is old and refuses to adapt.
I had a course where the teacher basically said you would have a hard time passing if you did not have a windows laptop because it was the only OS that worked well with their program.
Its comical that in the last 25 years Linux has gone from a nerd-only tool to something that a 10 year old can install on an air-fryer and still we deal with this bs
I had this problem with Pearson. I got around it by making sure my bowser (librewolf) reported windows as my user agent. This was last semester for an online intro level course, ymmv
Edit: I see your other posts about how its not blocking access... Tbh I don't remember checking, I just remember checking my browser settings haha. Guess I didn't have to bother.
Does it have online exams? Pearsons shitty anti cheat stuff they use for proctoring is windows and mac only.
Having seen how much people cheat including using someone else using screensharing to proxy the exam for you I cannot blame them for wanting to do this, but I do blame them for not wanting to support Linux properly.
If they're going to have online exams they need to just accept that cheating is going to happen. There's a million ways to do that in an environment you control. Make the exams open book but make it harder to account for the fact that the students have access to reference materials.
They weren't donating their time. Writing tests was part of their job. They just made the questions a lot harder and more based on practical knowledge. Rather than just recalling information found in the book you had to apply the information to answer the questions.
So, in principle, I agree, but it doesn't help with proxying, or for example, one I saw this week of someone using AI voice assistant to answer questions. Or people copying and pasting from online groups.
Their shitty software monitors all the connected devices, running processes, and webcam. That's still needed for open book.
Yup, exactly that. You are not allowed to proceed if you have additional devices including your mobile visible during the setup phase, you have to sweep the area with your webcam so they can see. When the exam is proctored if they see a phone or anything suspicious that you introduced into the frame you are generally fucked and have to go through a review.
Pearsons run a lot of different exams on behalf of a lot of different companies so the rules change depending on what that company wants and will pay for.
I know of one that you have to connect with your webcam and again with your phone camera so the phone can capture from behind you.This is one is live proctored by a real person throughout, it is pretty damn expensive so its not the norm. Many are just at the start and end, with AI triggers and random sampling to find cheaters.
I know of another than limits how many screens you can have connected to just one, this is principally to reduce the chance of a IP KVM being used for proxying. Its trivial for the software to detect how many displays are connected, same with number of HID devices.
I think you are underestimating how much cheating is attempted with these, and how much they have already been through the loop of being able to detect it.
Damn! If only we had some sort of technology that was OS independent and served as a way to view content and run code written for it without having to recompile for every platform.
I am of course talking about web browsers. Which I'm betting this screenshot is from.
This is like the Apple Business website, which only works in Safari, according to them. Used the User-Agent Switcher plugin, and the website/dashboard works just fine on Firefox in Linux.
Nearly all of my daughters sites she visited in college were nix servers. The exception being one administration machine she used for her payroll access as a RA.
Edit: ;) I guess you are all guessing poorly. Nix when I looked it up is just another fringe linix distro. Never heard of it because I don't need a purpose built crippled distro for anything. Since a guess is too hard to do I will tell you even now most websites I access according to my router stats are Linix distros. Every now and then there will be a bsd based one and ever rarer than that a windows site. I'm seeing these downvotes as a function of bias against the norm. I find it funny and responses like this always bring a smile to my face.
Widewine? Maybe they have some content that requires L1, which still doesn't work on Linux because of totally legitimate technical reasons that are absolutely not at all utter horseshit. Or they might be using some browser APIs that are not properly supported on Linux. There are a few of those.
Seriously, though, there may well be ways around this without switching your OS. If it's browser-based, the first thing I'd try is a user-agent switcher.
Though, actually, does that "remind me later" option work? It does look kindof grayed out, but it couldn't hurt to try a click.
I’d assume it is not supported as in if you ask them for tech support and they realize you’re not running Windows they’ll happily tell you to pound sand.
Yeah, and browsers are running the same engines across platforms, so there are very few differences between using Firefox on Linux and using Firefox on Windows. My best guess is what @[email protected] said, that it's just allowlisting new Windows user agents and was intended to target people running ancient versions of Windows.
Just had to deal with this last semester. Get a user agent switcher plugin and change your OS to windows, it should work for everything but proctored tests. You'll likely have to go in person for those
For the record, my friend (he uses arch btw) has used Pearson before and I dont believe it actually affected him, so to me the message means "it could work for you but we won't support Linux if something screws up on your end because we're lazy developers"
bro, my math and calc professor made us use this for our course despite the fact that our college really wants profs to stop using 3rd party sites like these and just use Brightspace.
It was like $100 CAD too. And it's a fucking WEBSITE. Why is windows required? Do you need to ring 0 access so I can solve a derivative or something????
It's also about making it the equivalent of pushing a button for the professor. Want a test that covers chapters X-y? Push three buttons and the students have a test over those chapters. No effort means they can jerk off in the direction of the grant that was just rejected because they used a bad word according to the government.
In my experience professors are heavily overworked and heavily underpaid. Offloading work onto other systems to get a better work-life balance seems like a natural response.
No disagreement on the overworked and underpaid bits, but I look at it like this: a parent with a full time job is extremely overburdened. Get the kid up in the morning, get the kid dressed, get the kid fed, deal with the inevitable breakdown from not getting the right cereal or the other kid taking the favorite seat, getting the kid's backpack and homework sorted, and finally get the kid to the bus stop or take said kid directly to school because there was a fight and now the kid isn't allowed on the bus... and they still have to drive to work by 0800 hours. Just because they're late to work and in a rush doesn't excuse the speeding. Teaching is a shitty, hard profession. You don't get appreciated despite almost literally doing nothing but try to improve the next generation. I still think that turning over the task of teaching (which the courses I had to take did; it was entirely book+online portal driven, very little teacher) to the textbook company is a bad track to take.
What is the relation between someone speeding in their car and a professor using a bad set of course materials?
Your analogy doesn't really establish any causal or relational links. Both subjects are victims of America's capital-dominated power structure?
Sure better decisions can be made, but how much can you blame the subject under duress? How much blood can you reasonably expect the parent or teacher to draw from the stone? At what cost of their health?
Professor=overworked and pushed to do the coursework more quickly so they can get everything; research, classwork, grant writing; done in the limited time they have. Not bringing in enough grant money or publishing enough well liked research often gets you fired, you know.
Parent=overworked and pushed to get to work faster so they're not late. Being late often get you fired, you know.
Both are being pushed into actions that are detrimental to society. Speeding creates a slew of cascading issues, starting with small things like increased frustrations in all drivers and building to large things like much more serious wrecks. It's a terrible thing. Giving up control of the curriculum and passing the buck to pearson (in the original OP's case) to teach students, make tests, grade coursework (that can no longer be anywhere near as inventive or applicable because it has to be in some format that a computer can grade), etc. is a terrible thing.
It is so infuriating how capitalists can use their stolen money to make people think they're saints. (All the while their "help" causes more damage than if we let experts fix problems rather than pirate kings.)
And it's even harder to criticize this bastard now because liberals think he's on their "side" and any criticism must be a "vaccine microchip" loon even when you talk about things he did openly.
I just tried to do a certification exam with these pricks a few hours ago. It was my first time and I was not expecting the degree of privacy-violating photos they would need of my workspace. I work in my bedroom and my desk wasn't clean enough. I think. I could barely understand what the guy was saying due to his thick accent. I think I got disconnected twice and just gave up. Fucking scam. All for a worthless piece of fucking paper to prove I can do the same job I've been doing for the past 13+ years.
The Pearson website for assignments and exercises is definitely in by bottom-ten user experiences on the internet. And it's even a paid tool! Fuck pearson
I couldn't even use a virtual machine for my cert I had to use a Friends computer to even do anything and even that it was incredibly hard because I had to disable things to make it work. Fuck Pearson fuck them to hell completely.
I tried to download Microsoft Office on Linux Mint and I couldn't even download the exe (to run through wine), I needed to go to Windows to download it ... now I just need to make it work (I am in the 1% of people who actually need official Excel)
It has been a bit since I tried it, but things like not having the buttons in the same place is annoying when teacher others. PowerQuery and Microsoft Scripts (what replaced VBA) are some things will probably be missing
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
If you want to set it up manually, you'll have to look into qemu and virtio.
If you want a more virtualbox-like experience, you can use boxes (also called "gnome boxes"), which gives you a very simple UI for setting up VMs (including windows) with networking/shared drives/hardware pass through/etc.
a "compatibility issue" would be if the website didn't load or display incorrectly, but as others pointed out, if you change your "user agent" (the code that tells websites what os and brower you use) to windows, it runs perfectly well
also, piss off, nobody's saying there are no difficulties
"Our spyware is not able to accommodate your platform."
The horror stories I've read about what you give the software access to do (assuming there's truth to them; I've never run it myself).
Edit: I'm realizing now your screenshot is probably for a web course.
It's hilarious how bad it is
I won't ramble but I'm a cybersecurity professional with a lot of certs and... I've played with it (Pearson VUE)
Hey Pearson, I have completely defeated your anticheat measures. Ironically, have used my expertise to pass cybersecurity exams. Fight me.
Hey OP, use a free windows VM. Guess how many monitors your VM has? Guess how many your host can have? Yeah.
This was 2019, so they may have gotten past that but I tells ya... For folks testing cybersec pros, they sure don't have airtight opsec.
I found more, but cannot responsibly disclose 😊
They’re in the business of selling the illusion of security to university administrators.
Most money moves because a retarded manager/executive has a retarded idea, I'm sure of it.
Also kickbacks, don't forget the kickbacks
This is why I just suck it up and go to a testing center even though more often than not it’s unpleasant too. I’m not installing all their tools and having to clear an entire room so there’s nothing that can be seen is such a hassle.
You should get bonus points in cybersecurity for bypassing that crap
"upgrade"
Upgrayedd. With two "d"'s. For a double-dose of telemetry.
A CEO's love is very different from that of a FOSS.
Carls Jr; Fuck you! I’m eating.
Aw, manggg. But I just upgraded to Linux last week. Shoot...
Back to being treated like an idiot, force fed bloat, having no control over my own PC, and taking four steps to get everything done but often ending up down a rabbit hole of 19 step troubleshooting just to say, "Fuck it! Fine! I'll accept the new feature" then being toured on the new feature after it crashes first then won't let you login, but finally you do and THEN you've got your file open but forget what for by then, all the while it's notifying you of updates constantly but you won't run them because you noticed it contains the AMD driver which is the old one so Adrenaline will stop working but that also means Windows has somehow undone the group policy fucking around you had to do. And they say Linux is hard while Windows thinks I'm the fucking idiot and I CANT EVEN SHRINK THE FUCKING PARTITION BECAUSE THE GOD DAMNED PAGE FILE IS JIZZED ALL OVER THE FUCKING DRIVE!!! RAAARRRGH!!!!
snaps back
Huh, sorry. I get flashbacks still. The doctors say with the right therapy, I'll be better in a year.
I felt this revulsion in my bones. :shudder:
Haven't you heard? Pearson's requires at least Linux 2.
Let me just check something on my terminal.
I'm suspicious.
That came out in 1996.
This means they forgot platforms other than Windows exists. It's likely they're checking for currently supported systems and anything older is insecure, so blocked for your security.
Likely something like this pseudocode
I always hate this when it's used to target Firefox.
"upgrade to chrome"
Like... What the fuck?
Just use a user agent switcher.
The actual audacity
Their deliberate word choice of “upgrade” to supported operating system is mildly infuriating.
They probably assume you are running something like Windows 7
Uhh
Right, but that could still be given dynamically by a library as "one of the unsupported ones", getOSName(). They still might not have hard-coded "Linux is bad".
I'd like to interject for a moment...
Wow, I laughed far too much after reading this comment. Thank you kind stranger.
They know which operating system you use based on the user agent, so they know it's Linux.
Which will be "If not Windows 11 or Mac os then report os string". I don't think they specifically took the time to research different OS's and list them.
Captain, what should we do? She's not on the list.
The program has the information, but that doesn't mean the people that wrote the code felt it was worth their time to make the "upgrade" text inclusive to Linux, if they even considered the possibility of Linux.
If they were using user agents for identification, Android browsers on "Desktop mode" would be wrongly identified as "Linux". Even Discord has this issue on their download page. "Premium" Android devices with large screens use Desktop mode by default
we have wildly different definitions for "mildly"!
I’ll just change my web browser’s user agent then; you’re a fucking website, you don’t need to know which OS I’m using.
It’s amazing how many “unsupported” web apps work perfectly fine once you change the UA. It’s often a completely arbitrary limitation so that they can hire less qualified support staff.
and so they can use browser
vulnerabilitiesfeatures to collect more data on youA small publisher's ebook platform recently started blocking firefox for me, did a bit of digging and found that if pages aren't requested with the right headers (which work in chrome and msedge) it will respond with a 302, suggesting you go to another page which takes a few minutes and then times out.
This is probably to stop scraping, and could be because I started testing some scraping scripts on it.
Anyway, this hasn't even stopped me scraping, I just copied the headers and use those in my script.
I use this extension by a Firefox dev
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chrome-mask/
I also use it, but it doesn't work in this case. Thats why I said headers instead of just user agent.
Insults on top of incompetence, huh?
It's Pearson.
I ran into this before too, I believe I got around it with a User Agent changer… that or a windows 10 VM with 2 cores and 2GB of RAM that ran only Firefox… or you may be able to just press remind me later and suffer little/no consequences
I think it’s just because people that use Linux are generally more technologically inclined and are more likely to try and get around their crappy DRM
Yeah, I can still access it just fine, but the word "Upgrade" didn't make me very happy...
Very true, I too would consider Microsoft’s spyware a massive downgrade
The most infuriating part is that they call it an "upgrade"
Yeah I go from an OS that I know how to use up and down to an ad riddled bloated piece of garbage. Thanks!
"Upgrading" to a supported operating system.... "Upgrading".
Yeah, that was also what got into my nerves.
How tf do you not support an operating system. Like you gotta go out of your way to detect and block the operating system. Like if you put in 0 effort it would probably work but your company really spent money making their product less accessible for no reason.
User agent
I don't really disagree with you. It's dumb to go out of your way to block an OS that probably works just fine.
That said, the answer is probably "lawyers" and an attempt to limit liability. People rely on the course materials to work. If they don't want to out the effort into testing to ensure that their software works on Linux, even if it would probably be fine, they may want to limit the possibility of being sued by someone when it somehow screws up their semester.
So, they out up a soft barrier that says "this may not work right" but let you use it anyway. They have deniability if something goes wrong while the savvy Linux user probably just laughs and changes their user agent.
Essentially, no one is hurt and the lawyers are happy.
The motivation from their side is not wanting to support Linux. There's a difference between working and supported; support costs them money in terms of every phone call from every person for whom the material doesn't work correctly, as that means paid trained staff on hand all the time whether you're having linux issues right now or not. Imagine if one person a year had linux issues, requiring them to hire a full time linux tech with nothing to do but pick up the phone once a year. By putting a roadblock in front that people can get around, it can 'work' on that system while they have a leg to stand on to say no to any linux user who wants help they can't provide.
They're under a class-action lawsuit currently for using biometric data in a US state where it's illegal. Just kinda interesting. https://www.bipatestsettlement.com/Home/FAQ
I had this problem over 10 years ago. change your user-agent, problem solved.
they do it because they are regulations for educational software that must be met, like specific access requirements in order to be used in accredited courses.
it's not anything specifically against Linux, it's that they can't test and validate those access requirements for anything outside Windows due to organizational limitations.
source: I worked for colleges early in my career that used Pearson then worked for a vendor that managed infrastructure and project management for Pearson. they aren't unique, their competition is just as fucked as they are. most still use waterfall because upper mgmt is old and refuses to adapt.
My bank does this too. I also just change the user agent to switch and it works with no issues.
At this point it just seems silly that they even want to go out of their way to Prohibit Linux users
I had a course where the teacher basically said you would have a hard time passing if you did not have a windows laptop because it was the only OS that worked well with their program.
The program was Excel workbooks
Most tech street smart non-techie.
College is a joke
"Upgrade"? Every other option is a downgrade. Sue them for false advertisement.
Very loose interpretation of the word "upgrade" they're employing here..
I assume it is a generic message, let's say youd run windows 7. Then this message would sound more reasonable.
But I agree, this is crazy if it is running in a browser
Its comical that in the last 25 years Linux has gone from a nerd-only tool to something that a 10 year old can install on an air-fryer and still we deal with this bs
I had this problem with Pearson. I got around it by making sure my bowser (librewolf) reported windows as my user agent. This was last semester for an online intro level course, ymmv
Edit: I see your other posts about how its not blocking access... Tbh I don't remember checking, I just remember checking my browser settings haha. Guess I didn't have to bother.
I had that problem. I changed my ua to Edge on Windows, and the message went away. Everything worked.
Holy shit, why even implement the message then? There is no good answer.
Huh, would that work for remote proctors?
No because that requires installing a rootkit on your machine as part of their anti-cheat system.
What "Key features" from an educational course could possibly require windows? It's spying on you.
They just don't want to support it to save dev time/money
Oh yes, the very expensive Dev time cost of zero, because it is a fucking website.
Does it have online exams? Pearsons shitty anti cheat stuff they use for proctoring is windows and mac only.
Having seen how much people cheat including using someone else using screensharing to proxy the exam for you I cannot blame them for wanting to do this, but I do blame them for not wanting to support Linux properly.
If they're going to have online exams they need to just accept that cheating is going to happen. There's a million ways to do that in an environment you control. Make the exams open book but make it harder to account for the fact that the students have access to reference materials.
Not really a lot of the teachers at the tech school I went to did it that way and I know for a fact they weren't getting paid well at all.
They weren't donating their time. Writing tests was part of their job. They just made the questions a lot harder and more based on practical knowledge. Rather than just recalling information found in the book you had to apply the information to answer the questions.
So, in principle, I agree, but it doesn't help with proxying, or for example, one I saw this week of someone using AI voice assistant to answer questions. Or people copying and pasting from online groups.
Their shitty software monitors all the connected devices, running processes, and webcam. That's still needed for open book.
all that stuff is rendered useless by having a second computer.
Nope as you have to show the room before the exam starts andusing the second computer shows up in the webcam. It's what the webcam if for.
So what they're going to make you disassemble your personal space if you happen to have a PC on the same desk you use for your school laptop?
Yup, exactly that. You are not allowed to proceed if you have additional devices including your mobile visible during the setup phase, you have to sweep the area with your webcam so they can see. When the exam is proctored if they see a phone or anything suspicious that you introduced into the frame you are generally fucked and have to go through a review.
Pearsons run a lot of different exams on behalf of a lot of different companies so the rules change depending on what that company wants and will pay for.
I know of one that you have to connect with your webcam and again with your phone camera so the phone can capture from behind you.This is one is live proctored by a real person throughout, it is pretty damn expensive so its not the norm. Many are just at the start and end, with AI triggers and random sampling to find cheaters.
I know of another than limits how many screens you can have connected to just one, this is principally to reduce the chance of a IP KVM being used for proxying. Its trivial for the software to detect how many displays are connected, same with number of HID devices.
I think you are underestimating how much cheating is attempted with these, and how much they have already been through the loop of being able to detect it.
TPM2.0 DRM crap?
Pearson has an effective monopoly on teacher certification tests. I don’t understand why private companies get to make up so many of the rules.
Money makes might makes right
Th*tcher
Our website runs on a linux server, can you not use it though
Damn! If only we had some sort of technology that was OS independent and served as a way to view content and run code written for it without having to recompile for every platform.
I am of course talking about web browsers. Which I'm betting this screenshot is from.
"Upgrade"
LOL
This is like the Apple Business website, which only works in Safari, according to them. Used the User-Agent Switcher plugin, and the website/dashboard works just fine on Firefox in Linux.
You heard that OP? That's how you do it, it'll still work on Linux.
welp, I use Vivaldi without any user-agent switching and it works fine
The funny thing is that their server is probably running on Linux.
they aren't all. vast majority is Windows Server and IBM.
edit: because people seem confused. I'm talking about Pearson directly, not global OS stats.
chill tf out Linux weebs. I'm one of you.
Windows has a laughable market share when it comes to webservers.
I'm talking specifics, not globally.
Nearly all of my daughters sites she visited in college were nix servers. The exception being one administration machine she used for her payroll access as a RA.
By "nix" do you actually mean Nix, or do you mean "*nix" as any Unix derivative?
Guess.
Edit: ;) I guess you are all guessing poorly. Nix when I looked it up is just another fringe linix distro. Never heard of it because I don't need a purpose built crippled distro for anything. Since a guess is too hard to do I will tell you even now most websites I access according to my router stats are Linix distros. Every now and then there will be a bsd based one and ever rarer than that a windows site. I'm seeing these downvotes as a function of bias against the norm. I find it funny and responses like this always bring a smile to my face.
Guess what most IBM big irons are running nowadays?
Dust? (but really its not Linux or windows anyway)
Unix
Well, AIX (one of IBMs UNIX variants) is old, and, AFAIK more or less legacy stuff. The other is RHEL, which is s Linux.
The world runs on legacy
RHEL, since they bought red hat.
z/OS
For closed and proprietary stuff, and things that still run on FORTRAN and COBOL, yes. But about anything running a web frontend, it's Linux (RHEL).
AIX (Unix), Windows, Powervm?
Windows? On a mainframe? Microsoft may be ambicious, but that is a few number to big for them.
Lol what? Linux servers are still dominant in market share.
Pearson directly, not globally.
That makes more sense. Thank you for the context.
what could they possibly be doing that requires an os?
Widewine? Maybe they have some content that requires L1, which still doesn't work on Linux because of totally legitimate technical reasons that are absolutely not at all utter horseshit. Or they might be using some browser APIs that are not properly supported on Linux. There are a few of those.
They want to find excuses not to provide any customer service
"Upgrade?" "UPGRADE?!" Oh no they didn't.
Seriously, though, there may well be ways around this without switching your OS. If it's browser-based, the first thing I'd try is a user-agent switcher.
Though, actually, does that "remind me later" option work? It does look kindof grayed out, but it couldn't hurt to try a click.
Yeah they're not blocking access or anything, I was just infuriated by the message
Wait what? Then wtf is the point of that message? "Your operating system is not supported", except that it totally fucking is.
I’d assume it is not supported as in if you ask them for tech support and they realize you’re not running Windows they’ll happily tell you to pound sand.
Yeah, and browsers are running the same engines across platforms, so there are very few differences between using Firefox on Linux and using Firefox on Windows. My best guess is what @[email protected] said, that it's just allowlisting new Windows user agents and was intended to target people running ancient versions of Windows.
I’m guessing it’s the default message for any non-whitelisted os and it was written assuming you’ll be on an old version of windows and not linux
They probably check to make sure you're running a current version of Windows. The code assumes if you're not on Windows 11, then you need to upgrade.
ask them for the .onion to get to their site 👍
Use Librewolf or a plugin that masks your user agent for privacy purposes; hides your OS so you can't be fingerprinted so easily.
That kind of fuckery drove me off a company-sponsored training course.
Just had to deal with this last semester. Get a user agent switcher plugin and change your OS to windows, it should work for everything but proctored tests. You'll likely have to go in person for those
For the record, my friend (he uses arch btw) has used Pearson before and I dont believe it actually affected him, so to me the message means "it could work for you but we won't support Linux if something screws up on your end because we're lazy developers"
NO! YOU FUCKING UPGRADE!
Bonus points if it's a Linux course
Change User-Agent
Pearson: Please come in!
bro, my math and calc professor made us use this for our course despite the fact that our college really wants profs to stop using 3rd party sites like these and just use Brightspace.
It was like $100 CAD too. And it's a fucking WEBSITE. Why is windows required? Do you need to ring 0 access so I can solve a derivative or something????
Its about data collection under the guise of "security"
It's also about making it the equivalent of pushing a button for the professor. Want a test that covers chapters X-y? Push three buttons and the students have a test over those chapters. No effort means they can jerk off in the direction of the grant that was just rejected because they used a bad word according to the government.
In my experience professors are heavily overworked and heavily underpaid. Offloading work onto other systems to get a better work-life balance seems like a natural response.
No disagreement on the overworked and underpaid bits, but I look at it like this: a parent with a full time job is extremely overburdened. Get the kid up in the morning, get the kid dressed, get the kid fed, deal with the inevitable breakdown from not getting the right cereal or the other kid taking the favorite seat, getting the kid's backpack and homework sorted, and finally get the kid to the bus stop or take said kid directly to school because there was a fight and now the kid isn't allowed on the bus... and they still have to drive to work by 0800 hours. Just because they're late to work and in a rush doesn't excuse the speeding. Teaching is a shitty, hard profession. You don't get appreciated despite almost literally doing nothing but try to improve the next generation. I still think that turning over the task of teaching (which the courses I had to take did; it was entirely book+online portal driven, very little teacher) to the textbook company is a bad track to take.
What is the relation between someone speeding in their car and a professor using a bad set of course materials?
Your analogy doesn't really establish any causal or relational links. Both subjects are victims of America's capital-dominated power structure?
Sure better decisions can be made, but how much can you blame the subject under duress? How much blood can you reasonably expect the parent or teacher to draw from the stone? At what cost of their health?
Professor=overworked and pushed to do the coursework more quickly so they can get everything; research, classwork, grant writing; done in the limited time they have. Not bringing in enough grant money or publishing enough well liked research often gets you fired, you know.
Parent=overworked and pushed to get to work faster so they're not late. Being late often get you fired, you know.
Both are being pushed into actions that are detrimental to society. Speeding creates a slew of cascading issues, starting with small things like increased frustrations in all drivers and building to large things like much more serious wrecks. It's a terrible thing. Giving up control of the curriculum and passing the buck to pearson (in the original OP's case) to teach students, make tests, grade coursework (that can no longer be anywhere near as inventive or applicable because it has to be in some format that a computer can grade), etc. is a terrible thing.
What are the options? Let me guess, Micro$oft Windows or Windows
Apple and Microsoft
How bad can it be?
It was made by Bil Gates, I keep hearing he's a genuine 'philanthropist'.
Boo! 🤮
It is so infuriating how capitalists can use their stolen money to make people think they're saints. (All the while their "help" causes more damage than if we let experts fix problems rather than pirate kings.)
And it's even harder to criticize this bastard now because liberals think he's on their "side" and any criticism must be a "vaccine microchip" loon even when you talk about things he did openly.
liberals are not known for their intelligence
Your operating system, Arch, is unsupported. Click here to upgrade to Ubuntu.
Your operating system, Arch, is unsupported. Click here to upgrade to TempleOS.
Your operating system, Arch, is unsupported. Click here to upgrade to Arch.
I just tried to do a certification exam with these pricks a few hours ago. It was my first time and I was not expecting the degree of privacy-violating photos they would need of my workspace. I work in my bedroom and my desk wasn't clean enough. I think. I could barely understand what the guy was saying due to his thick accent. I think I got disconnected twice and just gave up. Fucking scam. All for a worthless piece of fucking paper to prove I can do the same job I've been doing for the past 13+ years.
Was that a ccna certification? I've heard they are quite strict on home exam conditions
Nah. Just basic Azure stuff.
Same pearson selling linux books
There s a place where you can name and shame in a permanent searchable record: https://wiki.rossmanngroup.com/wiki/Main_Page
Be the change you want.
I had that problem too. Thing is, nothing was broken and everything was fine. It just whined at me.
The Pearson website for assignments and exercises is definitely in by bottom-ten user experiences on the internet. And it's even a paid tool! Fuck pearson
Also, fuck the profs for choosing to use it, and make it a requirement for a course.
Would you share your preferred alternative(s), if any? Thanks! 🖐️
Just a maths workbook I guess. This was just forced on me as a student so I'm not really aware if the alternatives.
Just spoof your user agent string. You'll eventually find one they like.
Haiku OS stumbles into the room, gags at the PearsonVue stench, beats a hasty retreat
I couldn't even use a virtual machine for my cert I had to use a Friends computer to even do anything and even that it was incredibly hard because I had to disable things to make it work. Fuck Pearson fuck them to hell completely.
Change your user agent. There's a bunch of extensions for that and they don't compromise functionality.
I tried to download Microsoft Office on Linux Mint and I couldn't even download the exe (to run through wine), I needed to go to Windows to download it ... now I just need to make it work (I am in the 1% of people who actually need official Excel)
This might be the right case to use a VM. Though, I just keep a spare SSD with Windows.
Would be great if the web app had the same features as the desktop app
Ugh, webapps are obnoxious as hell to me. Give me a thick client any day. Biggest irritation for most for me is the loss of keyboard control
I prefer the desktop app, but things like powerquery won’t work to its fullest online
I wonder if MAS can work through Mint, even if just to download the installer?
Might try it later.
I tried a couple versions of Excel, but I was unable to get it to work sadly.
LibreOffice is decent. Have you tried it yet? Anything major it can’t do for you?
It has been a bit since I tried it, but things like not having the buttons in the same place is annoying when teacher others. PowerQuery and Microsoft Scripts (what replaced VBA) are some things will probably be missing
They mean downgrade
Spin up a VM with windows 95 and try again.
if it's in a browser fake ur user agent
... Set up firefox for windows via wine, if its a webapp?
used unlicensed windows vm back in college. user agent change is faster
Ezpz just use wine or set up a VM and exfil the data you need
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called "Linux", and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called "Linux" distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.
Too many users on here don’t know about the old magics
What do you mean by that?
I was talking about all those downvotes you got by people who got whooshed
Time to download Virtualbox
Is Virtualbox still considered the go-to VM program? I haven't been keeping up.
Very much no
Use libvirtd/Qemu on Linux and Hyper-V on Windows
I recommend using a kernel virtual machine.
KVM comes with the Linux kernel.
If you want to set it up manually, you'll have to look into qemu and virtio.
If you want a more virtualbox-like experience, you can use boxes (also called "gnome boxes"), which gives you a very simple UI for setting up VMs (including windows) with networking/shared drives/hardware pass through/etc.
KVM is just the hypervisor, not the whole package.
Neither have I really. It’s the last one I used, which was like 5 years ago.
These days I’m mostly using docker containers but all my docker containers as well as my hosts are flavors of Linux so YMMV.
Why?
So that you can run the windows exclusive software in a virtual machine.
I would Honestly just set your user agent to Windows. It is good for privacy and is the default for Librewolf.
They should be extremely infuriated that you are using some old and busted software that doesn't support a common OS.
Lutris -> chrome -> try again?
Edit: I love downvotes when I'm trying to be helpful. :-D
But Lemmy told me you can do everything on Linux and there’s never compatibility issues! 😱
a "compatibility issue" would be if the website didn't load or display incorrectly, but as others pointed out, if you change your "user agent" (the code that tells websites what os and brower you use) to windows, it runs perfectly well
also, piss off, nobody's saying there are no difficulties
No one told you that and you're mom is lying to you
*your