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Pearson is indirectly asking you to pirate their courses.
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
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?
Nah, its pretty direct
They forgot to put the word ‘upgrade’ in air quotes.
Useragent string parsing, for <whatever excuse that you don’t do feature detection>?
Tf? Upgrade to a supported operating system???
Edit: added some clarity to indicate absurdity
I hope you’re missing a /s there, or that you are ridiculing their wording
Yeah idk if my edit helped my original sentiment of absurdity
It does, some haven’t stopped to think before downvoting. At least it’s all fake points anyways
“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.
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.
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
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 the worse
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.
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
Hold up, I can trigger a trauma response:
Answer entered:
25
Incorrect. The correct answer is:
25
Fucking goddamn bullshit
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.
No ty. :)
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
