“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.
“You are an unfit mother, your children have been placed in the custody of Carls Jr.”
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.
$ uname -sr Linux 6.14.4-arch1-1I’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
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 }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
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…
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.
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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.
and so they can use browser
vulnerabilitiesfeatures to collect more data on youNope we don’t want to hire anyone who knows anything about Linux, no one uses Linux
“Linux is unsupported”, that’ll work
Everyone: uses a UA switcher
“See? No one uses Linux, 100% of users are on Windows or MacOS”
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.
Its a parasite
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.
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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.
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
“Upgrade”? Every other option is a downgrade. Sue them for false advertisement.
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
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
