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Ask HN: My school is making me use ExamSoft, how do I preserve my privacy?

15 points by private_joker ↗ HN
Like many other students right now, I am being forced to use ExamSoft's garbage to proctor my online exams. I thought I would create a different user account and install it there to isolate it, yet macOS Big Sur installed it on all users.

Any and all help appreciated.

15 comments

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uberman
A refurbished mac-mini is $275 from New Egg or a new MacBook Air for $320 from Wallmart at the moment. If that would help at all.
private_joker
thanks for the tip, but they aren't powerful enough to support ExamSoft's spyware.
heyoni
That’s not true. There is nothing a 10 year old laptop cannot run unless you’re into gaming.
uberman
Not according to ExamSoft's minimum system requirements page :-)
private_joker
Not my first choice, but how ill-advised is just installing it and uninstalling it before and after the exams?
digikata
Perhaps create an external boot drive and run it from there?
endisneigh
Can't you just dual-boot a fresh OS?
private_joker
Will try this route - have never tried two copies of macOS...thanks!
2Gkashmiri
does anyone know of a simple way to prevent guest OS from detecting that its running under virtualbox? i had a similar software that refused to run in a vm and said "this software cannot run under virtualbox"...
merlyn
There's no simple way, the virtualization vendors have to write virtual hardware, and their signatures are all over everything in the virtualized PC stack. There are numerous ways to detect these, let alone the API hooks vendors leave in the guest OS for the guest to query the hypervisor.
[dead] crnamafija
As a non-American or someone who doesn't even know what's ExamSoft, what's the problem with this software?