• Vahenir@lemmy.world
    142·
    1 year ago

    Hey, at least it told you. When i was fiddling to get disney plus working on my own setup it just refused to play until i changed the reported OS to windows. Nothing else was changed. I really have no idea why they would go out of their way to block specific operating systems.

    • Johanno@feddit.de
      67·
      1 year ago

      Same with Amazon Videos.

      AFTER I PAID it told me my os does not support hd quality Playback.

      With kodi and a plugin I got it working to run at 1080p

      Saved it with OBS out of spite.

      Changing the user agent unfortunately didn’t work.

      • tomaThomas@lemmy.world
        13·
        1 year ago

        You did? I also tried that, but the best resolution I got was 540p… As far as my research went that was because they require a higher widevine level not available on linux for HD

        • Johanno@feddit.de
          13·
          1 year ago

          Install kodi and then the vod-Amazon plugin.

          Then you have at least 1080 if higher res is possible idk.

      • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        That’s more to do with the version of WideVine DRM your browser has - the DRM in Firefox is neutered so the chrome will always give the best experience. Why? Because the WideVine DRM is owned by Google.

        • Johanno@feddit.de
          2·
          1 year ago

          Because you didn’t read the technical specs of that service before you purchased it. The information was there and you ignored it. Why do people buy things based on assumptions?

          Here is the info you should have read before you bought. They have a page dedicated to this exact topic:

          https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=GUVGB3QMQRYRERYW

          Of course I like every other human that uses any Service in the internet read the whole Terms and conditions when I signed up and everytime they changed.

          I am pretty sure it is illegal in my country to not disclaim such information before you purchase. And it should not be legal anywhere!

        • blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk
          1·
          1 year ago

          Oh yes, trusty GUVGB3QMQRYRERYW, one of my favourite amazon pages. There’s something just so playful about the page name that every time I think of GUVGB3QMQRYRERYW, I just have to smile. Unlike GUVGB3QNQRYRERYW, that page sucks ass!

    • azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      They just whitelist few of the “supported”, operating systems. The message says what your OS is because it blindly read that from the UA.

    • aksdb@feddit.de
      5·
      1 year ago

      This must be a while back, because it works fine here.

      A few months ago they had a bug that prevented playback on Linux. But that was resolved after a week or so.

    • sebinspace@lemmy.world
      5·
      1 year ago

      Have to go their testing centers for certifications. Place feels so damn sterile I wanna die, and the buzz of the fluorescent tubes is just…

      Place feels like the Backrooms but with less yellow

  • Melpomene@kbin.social
    106·
    1 year ago

    Having used Pearson products, this doesn’t surprise me at all. Thier testing software hasn’t been updated since the dawn of man.

      • Final Remix@lemmy.world
        19·
        1 year ago

        Sadly, we get fuckin’ stuckbwith certain publishers either through sweetheart deals with admin (so we professors don’t get a choice) or through lack of available courseware/software/support elsewhere.

        At my institution, we’re lucky, because we get to pick basically whatever we want. We’re pushing hard for free open-access stuff. Fuck contemporary publishers.

  • ReveredOxygen@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    94·
    1 year ago

    Pearson is stupid, but for homework you can get around it by changing your user agent. For proctoring you have to actually boot into windows though

    • 520@kbin.social
      43·
      1 year ago

      Won’t work if you’re using their test software. That shit is more invasive than anticheat

        • 520@kbin.social
          141·
          1 year ago

          They can detect that too - at least, they can detect the common software. You might be able to do it with a custom QEMU setup but good luck guaranteeing that for your exam.

          • vettnerk@lemmy.ml
            28·
            1 year ago

            I used to be a reseller of this highly specialized navigation software. The licensing was handled via hardware fingerprinting of the harddrive. I’m not 100% sure on how it worked, but it grabbed some raw data off of the boot device, and from that generated a fingerprint. This fingerprint was then sent to the guys who made the software, and they would then send us a license key and a hefty bill. The license key only worked with syatems running off of that particular harddrive. If a customer had a harddrive failure, we had to send them the actual harddrive for them to verify, so they would issue a free key to whichever replacement drive was used.

            I did a lot of experimenting with that software. It was linux based and very tweakable, but the licensing part of it was a bit of a mystery. I managed to crack it through some surprisingly simple out-of-the-box thinking, but one limitation I could never figure out how to circumvent was its refusal to generate a fingerprint from virtual drives.

            For starters, it only worked with drives registering as /dev/hdX or /dev/sdX. Anything outside of that and it wouldn’t generate a fingerprint.

            This was especially frustrating when a well-paying customer offered a nice bonus if we could install it on a macbook for him. After a few days of tweaking I managed to install and run it, only to discover that fingerprinting the drive couldn’t be done due to the device node being/dev/nvmeSomething. And after avfew more days of hacking I managed to fake that too, and they outright refused to issue a license due to them not wanting to support our unofficial hacks.

            Where was I going with this? Oh, right, vmware… i never managed to get it to run in vmware. We had this other well paying customer who wanted the ability to alt-tab between the software and Windows. Unfortunately, any fingerprinting done from within vmware, regardless how I set up the storage, resulted in a fingerprint file with no data.

            Fun fact: the software ui was written in raw xlib. I got to know the owner and lead dev fairly well, and he hinted that the codebase was a complete mess to the point where something as simple as an input dialog for a config option I recommended was A LOT of work.

            • 520@kbin.social
              9·
              1 year ago

              The easy way involves looking at the devices and drivers you have installed. Things like a VirtualBox display or a SPICE guest driver are dead giveaways. next, they might look at your processor and see if it has as many cores as it should, but that’s more involved.

              • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                1·
                1 year ago

                Holy shit why is it even getting anywhere near that nosy? I didn’t know it was anything like that. And I even worked for them for a little while.

                • 520@kbin.social
                  11·
                  1 year ago

                  Holy shit why is it even getting anywhere near that nosy?

                  Because it also serves as an anti-cheat…in the most literal sense. It is trying to make sure students can’t cheat by having other things open like answer pages or Google.

        • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
          24·
          1 year ago

          Unfortunately they probably have detection methods for that, so have fun trying to work around that.

        • 520@kbin.social
          5·
          1 year ago

          Yep. This is by design - it’s trying to detect container software that stops it from seeing what else is running.

            • 520@kbin.social
              4·
              1 year ago

              Technically true, but programs loaded via WINE can be made to act somewhat containerised, and can provide incomplete information as to what else is running. Maybe containerisation is the wrong word though, maybe ‘sandbox’ instead?

              Good luck detecting Linux native programs from WINE-loaded Windows executables.

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
        61·
        1 year ago

        ah yes - WEI, the DRM for the web - because we all know how effective DRM was to avoiding piracy.

        these policymakers and lobbyists are a bunch of clowns

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
          311·
          1 year ago

          It’s not about drm… it’s about forcing people to use browsers that report their browsing activities

          That data is immensely valuable

  • Hellfire103@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    54·
    1 year ago

    I really hate these guys. The exam board is petty, the content is hard, and they do bullshit like this.

  • OrangeXarot@sh.itjust.works
    474·
    1 year ago

    I’m going to guess it’s because they wanted to account for older windows operating systems and they made that everything that isn’t like windows 7+ mac and stuff it pops this message and the linux string is probably taken by the useragent.

    sorry for bad English

    • Cynetri (he/any)@midwest.socialEnglish
      20·
      1 year ago

      English is all good, and honestly that’s a good point. I tend to forget that the browser is what forwards the OS to the website, not the OS itself