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.
“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
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You should get bonus points in cybersecurity for bypassing that crap
Upgrade
Insults on top of incompetence, huh?
It’s Pearson.
Its a parasite
“Upgrading” to a supported operating system… “Upgrading”.
Yeah, that was also what got into my nerves.
“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:
I always hate this when it’s used to target Firefox.
“upgrade to chrome”
Like… What the fuck?
Just use a user agent switcher.
Haven’t you heard? Pearson’s requires at least Linux 2.
That came out in 1996.
Let me just check something on my terminal.
$ uname -sr Linux 6.14.4-arch1-1I’m suspicious.
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 }The actual audacity
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.
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 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.
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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.
Prolly don’t like that sandboxed browser, so Inconsiderate
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?
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.
Our website runs on a linux server, can you not use it though
“Upgrade”
LOL
