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“Upgrade”
“Operating”
“System”
"Win"dows
“Pornography-related virus”
Just like they asked you to upgrade to ie in the 90s a d early 00s.
I have this exact problem when I have to manage Apple devices for work. Nothing that user agent switcher can’t fix.
Pearson is a testing company. They use all sorts of sketchy shit under the guise of anti-cheating. Much of that requires specific plug-ins and stuff that only work in Windows.
Even if you could get it working, but they’ll likely just say you were cheating, and take the $300+ you paid to take that required test.
Pearson using all sorts of extremely invasive and questionable kernel-level access plugins to make sure people don’t open notes to cheat on their test on their computer. People just open their notes on another device. Or, you know, paper.
Or, you know, paper.
- That’s what desk/workspace scanning in the most extreme cases is meant to detect. This is why I really don’t like online schooling, because in the absolute worst case, your school will literally scan your place.
You know what would be a really good way to show if your students learned your course material? Let them show it with a practical test of some kind…
My daughter had to write a university paper once. They required two cameras to be running. One atop the screen like you use for meetings, and one showing the whole desk and the tested person.
Redhat would randomly interrupt your test and ask you to stand up, pick up the camera and show the room
Privacy invasion. I doubt that would hold water in the EU.
Also, do we really want to normalize mandatory cameras broadcasting from people’s homes? Where’s the outrage?That was in the EU
It’s really useless too. If I wanted to cheat on a test so fucking bad, I’d learn to read braille and just stick reference material under my desk.
I’d clone my monitor to a second monitor in another room and then use an AirPod or something similar to communicate with someone searching for the answers using the second screen and a second device.
Thats not necessary for online teaching. I just got my degree and there were some online courses too, never had to deal with any of this anti cheating crap.
We just have open book exams, problem solved
Easy enough to put notes or a phone on the backside of your monitor. Pearson doesn’t check there during their room scans
Source: Took dozens of exams through them
Mine had an external webcam that had to be purchased, and you had to have the laptop webcam on. It was ridiculous.
When my wife did her online courses, she actually had to set up a webcam showing her face and hands while she did the tests.
But not the cheat sheet post-it notes she could have put all around her computer screen
They actually made her set it up so it shows her hands, face and screen at the same time.
It was a bitch to even find an angle to set it up, and then she got yelled at every time she leaned back too far.This is some dystopian shit. I never cheated at a test and wouldn’t even want to take a test under those dehumanizing conditions.
Just have her wear some AirPods, and read to her the notes. GG
They use massively privacy-invading measures to ensure that you don’t do that. I don’t know about Pearson specifically, but there are horror stories from the “proctoring” industry about what people have to put up with.
For example: “facial detection, eye tracking, and algorithms that measure “anomalies” in metrics like head movement, mouse clicks, and scrolling rates to flag students exhibiting behavior that differs from the class norm” As is widely known, facial detection doesn’t work as well for dark-skinned people, and eye and head movement of so-called “normal people” is not fair to people who are not cheating, but not “normal”.
And you can’t leave your desk because you might have something out of camera sight to help you cheat. Straightforward right? Not really: “A University of Florida student felt forced to vomit at her desk when the proctor threatened to fail her if she left the screen (Harwell, 2020). She vomited at her desk in front of the stranger.”
Maybe you can get away with hiding notes on another device or paper, but they try hard to make that impossible. They want to you to get up and show them everything in the room before you start your test. They want to see your hands at all times, and even track your eye movements. If your eyes are always darting to a certain area off screen where you might have notes, they might interrupt your test and demand to be shown what you’re looking at. If you look up or off to the side when you’re thinking, they’re going to demand that you show them what you’re looking at too. If you think you can scroll through notes on your phone… maybe. But, they often demand that your hands be visible on-camera at all times.
It’s an arms race, and sometimes people do manage to cheat, but when that happens the proctoring companies just implement more and more outrageous surveillance.
The only solution for that is to proctor exams in person on their equipment. Miss me with all that nonsense. Makes me glad I’m done with schoolin’ for now…
Oh Pearson definitely does thst as well. But not everyone lives near or has reliable transit to a testing facility. Online testing is essentially a requirement for those people.
They actually already do that. Many schools will have dedicated exam rooms setup (some are even certified by Pearson) where you empty your pockets before entering, cameras are trained on you while you take the test, recorded for future review if needed, the computer is configured to be locked down to only the test site and there’s a test proctor actively monitoring as well.
Honestly just give me a printed packet in a classroom with a teacher watching the test takers any day
Linux will never become relevant on the desktop until its has better spyware support.
All it takes is one class action suit. Wait for it
This is probably just user-agent sniffing, right? I’d say swap it out to one that claims you’re on windows and see if that fixes it. Good luck :)
I do, my usual go to is windows 10 chrome latest
Some websites do this.
Change the user agent to windows and it works.
Fuxk you piece of shit!
Amazon does this too. After you bought a movie you can’t watch it in full hd on Linux. User agent doesn’t help.
However if you tell their api that you are an smart tv running Linux it works…
Same goes if you’re running Firefox.
I once had Hotmail take forever to get past the loading screen, then actually navigating my mail was hellishly slow. Switched my user agent to Edge and “magically” it loaded instantly and everything was snappy…
Had a few other sites do similar slowdowns but that and Youtube were the most unashamedly blatant.
The amazon might be due to drm, not OS racism, not that that’s a valid excuse
Drm was not the issue they just refused to run high quality on Linux.
Linux Browsers Support drm too.
However if you tell their api that you are an smart tv running Linux it works…
I wanna figure out how the heck to do this. 1080p doesn’t particularly bother me, but it’s pretty ridiculous getting discriminated against like that.
In my case the highest resolution was 360p Because Linux is bad.
Then I installed kodi, amazon vod plug in and it worked.
Seriously, fuck Pearson. Garbage company.
Hey now, garbage companies actually do something productive for society. :p
It’s kinda wild that an IT Certification company can’t handle Linux, but I’m sadly not surprised.
Pearson is indirectly asking you to pirate their courses.
Pearson, HMH, and all the major for-profit educational resource providers (and much of the not-for-profits, too) are literally actually evil.
Gemini asking: how/why?
They did a long time ago. Overpriced books that only changed layouts yearly just so that they can charge you for it again. Like having to keep up with the editions so that you can follow the lessons.
Yarrrrrr
Nah, its pretty direct
Pearson is the worst
Not surprising
It’s a real bummer how the “education” system is infested with crappy, exploitative grifters. See also textbooks, standardized tests, administrators, etc…
Not to mention for-profit schools, at least in the US.
Maybe they should upgrade to support other OSes?
This is like “upgrading” from a Ferrari to a Ford.
Hey Ford beat Ferrari in Le Mans
And Ford beat the entire world into a 48h workweek
Harrison ford shummed on my dog
pirate the book, they clearly don’t deserve your money
The problem is most courses require a code that costs about ten dollars less than the book. Pearson did this to destroy the used book market.
The ONLY money I spent during my entire time at uni has been on these stupid Cengage and Connect courses. I blame the teachers, more than anyone, for using these awful services. I also blame the Uni for not advertising that it would be required for the coursework. The teachers are either too lazy or too overworked to make their own materials or teach from an analogue book which doesn’t spoon-feed the lessons and grade things for them. It’s a shit system and nothing made me madder than a required class using these services.
For a few of them, I just lobbied the department to pay for it saying I wasn’t able to afford it, and they paid for my license or whatever.
Hold up, I can trigger a trauma response:
Answer entered:
25
Incorrect. The correct answer is:
25
Fucking goddamn bullshit
I also blame the Uni for not advertising that it would be required for the coursework.
Just like Steam now says "REQUIRES KERNEL LEVEL ANTICHEAT" like a big ugly Surgeon General’s warning, I think college courses should say stuff like this too.
Along with “REQUIRES INVASIVE KERNEL LEVEL REMOTE ACCESS MALWARE BROWSER TO TAKE EXAMS”
100% agree on both counts
Pearaon also has homework on their site these days. I’ve only used pearson for physics homework, because I didn’t have the need to read the book. I needed to buy the book for the homework though
The homework code is what I meant. Sorry for not being clearer in my comment.
Seems to be that learning sites in general are assholes. I once attended a language course, and while their “solution” was web based, it was focused on IE. I had serious issues attending the course under Firefox.
I logged a lot of errors on their site, but their tech support could only manage accounts, the web site had been built by an external company ages ago, and they had no fingers into that.
A key difference is that for learning sites, those who hold the purse strings are usually not those who actually use the website. They only need to convince the school administry or corporate procurement, but care little about the actual users.
Ha ha, that’s cute, you think there is are admins and procurement teams involved. The book publishers sell this shit directly to the professors, and usually the university can’t get involved because of the way the profs contracts are setup. Pearson builds their platform for making the profs job easier, not for any benefit to the students.
At my uni they go to the extreme where not only one gets around 20-30 mails DAILY but now to go check your email, which is gmail-based, it hops first into a Cloudflare human verification page that you can never pass in Falkon because it keeps looping after you check the human verification
No ty. :)
Ughgggh. Am I gonna need to get a device I can put propriety garbage on for school?
I should be fine right? A software dev program couldn’t possible force you to use windows right?
I used a Windows VM when I was in college. Even if you are pursuing a computer science degree, yes, some professors assume/expect that everyone will be using Windows. Using a VM also has the added benefit of you being easily able to get rid of all the programs they made you install as well once the semester is over.
Computer science was all Linux at my college. Xubuntu, specifically.
CS for me was on SunOS / Solaris.
Tell us about punchcards again, grandpa! 😉
Just kidding. Solaris came out after I got my undergraduate degree…
Same.
Then I went to work for the company whose code Solaris was derived from. Back in time almost!
Comically, now, my C and Solaris experience is a marketable skill for reliable employment, albeit less fun.
That’s is really cool. There were a lot of Windows fanboys at my college unfortunately.
They can force you to use Windows.
What you can do is ask if using a virtual machine is fine. or don’t ask at all and have a virtual machine image of windows ready.
As someone who’s worked for several years in higher ed IT and used Linux during my studies, this’ll only get you most of the way there. Unfortunately some proctoring software (Respondus Lockdown Browser comes to mind) can be incredibly invasive, and to my knowledge will refuses to run in a VM.
Instructors also have a tendency of not disclosing during registration whether or not they use these proctoring softwares.
I’m lucky enough that by the time I was all-in on Linux, I wasn’t taking courses that used that exam model, but it’s why I make sure that the helpdesk at my current institution offers loaner devices to students who either have computers incapable of running the proctoring software, or who simply don’t want that kind of software on their own machine. It’s a pain in the ass to work with, but apparently it’s enshrined in our faculty’s union contract.
Kernel-level anti-cheat, it’s not just for gamers.
There are some fairly in depth setups to hide the fact that its a VM normally used for testing malware, I winder if those would fool it.
I’ve heard of some methods to bypass it, but unfortunately to test them I’d need to run a real proctored exam, or have our academic technology group set up a “pentesting” one that I can abuse for this software we pay for a license to. Assuming that didn’t land us on Respondus’ bad side and jeapordize our license, it would at best be a waste of time and resources since we couldn’t guarantee students that it wouldn’t get patched or flag them for cheating in the future. The obvious answer is for us as an institution to use better software (or adopt better assessment methods) but software this invasive by nature is generally not going to be open to running on platforms like Linux. And use of proctoring software is unfortunately enshrined in our faculty’s contracts.
And yeah, on the individual level, students themselves can’t really toy with getting it to run in a VM without risking failing an exam. Shit sucks.
Thankfully our uni forces us to use Linux at least in a form of WSL.
worked for several years in higher ed
softwares
/Sigh
I’m writing a Lemmy comment, not my thesis. Sorry my casual and lazy word choice upset you for not being grammatically correct.
All my professors taught and programmed in linux, but when it comes to exams, you need windows for the lockdown browser to do your exams. If you only had a linux machine, you won’t be passing your classes!
At least for assignments, the professors requested pdfs and not docx or smth.
Unless the school that has the software dev program forces all their teachers to use this stuff…
Yeah I’m not going to buy ebooks that expire so quickly.
Books… doing what? Expire?
Yeah wtf. That’s kinda books whole thing. They just sorts exist until they naturally end up in a charity shop.
Yep. They sell them as an online access model. The professors use them because they can have questions built in during your reading that will give you a grade. It will also have premade tests. It makes it simple for them, and they don’t give a shit about your privacy anyway. If you don’t buy the online book, you don’t get the grades and fail.
Its kinda fucked, especially since McGH, the other big textbook company, offers theirs online with tuition as built in course materials. Like, on the one hand I understand them only offering access during the course but if they’re also charging you for access that’s horseshit. Idk, I just open my books in reader mode and then print them 😅
I hate this move to only having ebooks. I have to have actual books to read through. I can’t stare at a screen and concentrate to comprehend the topic.
I’ve got my stuff customized to be as close to real paper as I can manage regarding contrast and readability but sometimes I just can’t and have to look at my printed copies instead.
Screens aren’t meant for reading, they’re meant for watching.
Note to self: Find color E-Ink monitor for textbooks
DRM - the bane of good user experience.
GOG nailed it - no DRM, low prices, convenience.
If most book publishers released their texts with new features (e.g. linking references, or adding additional notes to proofs/solutions) they’d get their sales. Instead they just slap DRM on and…
Low prices end GOG ? Yea nah, not really. Sorry but their UI is kinda shitty, hasn’t improved in years, they don’t have a client of Linux, they take 30% just like Steam, and from my experience easily 25% of recent games there get updates far later than Steam, if they ever receive them… The Escapists is a good example of that.
I use the Heroic launcher with GOG and it works fantastic. Official apps are less needed if the open source ones are great.
I agree. I run Heroic as well, but it’s not as straightforward for most people. GOG should at least redirect Linux people to Heroic or something. Having to find it by myself isn’t great
Have an official tutorial for the normies
Heroic is so aptly titled. Combined with one of those helper apps to install “Proton GE”, it makes you just about unstoppable.
I’m finding that Linux has given me better compatibility with my game library as a whole!
For real legacy stuff, Bottles also works a treat. Never thought I’d get Sims 1 working again with so little hassle.
It’s a wonderful time.
easily 25% of recent games there get updates far later than Steam, if they ever receive them
Blame the publishers, not GOG
I have contacted some of them and what they said was often: GOG’s tools suck, their support team suck…
I don’t know how a company could fuck this up so I take it as is, and don’t fully trust it, but they haven’t improved their store in years
