upgrade to a supported operating system
What are the options? Let me guess, Micro$oft Windows or Windows
I had that problem. I changed my ua to Edge on Windows, and the message went away. Everything worked.
Huh, would that work for remote proctors?
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.
“Upgrade”? Every other option is a downgrade. Sue them for false advertisement.
Very loose interpretation of the word “upgrade” they’re employing here…
Same pearson selling linux books
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 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
Also, fuck the profs for choosing to use it, and make it a requirement for a course.
I had that problem too. Thing is, nothing was broken and everything was fine. It just whined at me.
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.
Lol what? Linux servers are still dominant in market share.
Pearson directly, not globally.
That makes more sense. Thank you for the context.
Guess what most IBM big irons are running nowadays?
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.
Dust? (but really its not Linux or windows anyway)
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.
RHEL, since they bought red hat.
That is both laughably wrong, and immediately verifiable as false. As far as server marketshare goes, Linux leads the pack with 62.7%.
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.
“Upgrading” to a supported operating system… “Upgrading”.
Yeah, that was also what got into my nerves.
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
What “Key features” from an educational course could possibly require windows? It’s spying on you.
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.
TPM2.0 DRM crap?
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
Change your user agent. There’s a bunch of extensions for that and they don’t compromise functionality.
