I had that problem too. Thing is, nothing was broken and everything was fine. It just whined at me.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Mildly Infuriating
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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
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.
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?
RHEL, since they bought red hat.
z/OS
Unix
Dust? (but really its not Linux or windows anyway)
AIX (Unix), Windows, Powervm?
That is both laughably wrong, and immediately verifiable as false. As far as server marketshare goes, Linux leads the pack with 62.7%.
Change your user agent. There's a bunch of extensions for that and they don't compromise functionality.
They should be extremely infuriated that you are using some old and busted software that doesn't support a common OS.
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.
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.
and so they can use browser ~~vulnerabilities~~ features to collect more data on you
Nope 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"
used unlicensed windows vm back in college. user agent change is faster
"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.
TPM2.0 DRM crap?
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.
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.
Yea but that takes work, and we'd like, have to pay our teachers more.
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