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

15 points·private_joker··14 comments

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.

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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.

thanks for the tip, but they aren't powerful enough to support ExamSoft's spyware.

That’s not true. There is nothing a 10 year old laptop cannot run unless you’re into gaming.

Not according to ExamSoft's minimum system requirements page :-)

Not my first choice, but how ill-advised is just installing it and uninstalling it before and after the exams?

Virtual box https://www.virtualbox.org/

That doesn't work. Or at least in the past it didn't

Unfortunately, VMs still don't work.

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"...

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.

Perhaps create an external boot drive and run it from there?

will also try this! Thank you!

Can't you just dual-boot a fresh OS?

Will try this route - have never tried two copies of macOS...thanks!

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