“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.
Their deliberate word choice of “upgrade” to supported operating system is mildly infuriating.
They probably assume you are running something like Windows 7
Uhh
Your operating system, Linux, is not supported…
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…
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.
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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
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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.
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 use this extension by a Firefox dev
I also use it, but it doesn’t work in this case. Thats why I said headers instead of just user agent.
Upgrade
Insults on top of incompetence, huh?
It’s Pearson.
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!
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
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.
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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.
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
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
“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
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
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 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.
Netflix does the same thing with “supported browsers.” It doesn’t matter if it’s actually supported, just whether it’s one of the two or three it allows because it can do analytics or whatever with them.
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.
Yea but that takes work, and we’d like, have to pay our teachers more.
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.
Then you’re lucky they had the freedom to donate their time like that.
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?
