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Intel Hardware Technology

Intel's 12th Gen CPU Can't Handle the Bar Exam (theverge.com) 101

Posted by msmash from the oops dept.
Law students getting ready to take the Bar exam digitally may run into a serious issue: one of the nation's most frequently-used test-taking software packages, Examplify, is incompatible with Intel's latest generation of processors. From a report: In a notice to users, ExamSoft, the company that owns Examplify, writes that 12th Gen Intel processors aren't compatible with its software. "New Windows devices containing the Intel 12th generation chipset are triggering Examplify's automatic virtual machine check," Examplify's notice reads. "These are NOT currently supported. Therefore, they cannot be used for the upcoming July 2022 bar exam." One user drew attention to the issue in a post on Twitter, and included a screencap of what appears to be a notice given to Bar applicants.
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Intel's 12th Gen CPU Can't Handle the Bar Exam More

Intel's 12th Gen CPU Can't Handle the Bar Exam

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  • Badly Written Anti Cheat Software. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by splutty ( 43475 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @12:04PM (#62702524)

    And once again, legitimate users get screwed over by terribly written anti cheat software.

    It's getting a tired refrain by this point, but in this case they don't even have the option of just sailing the seven seas for it.

    • Re: Badly Written Anti Cheat Software. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by superposed ( 308216 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @12:25PM (#62702596)

      Yes, the title really should have been reversed: "Bar Exam Software Can't Handle Intel's 12th Gen CPU".

      But I guess "Company You Never Heard of Screws Up" doesn't get as many clicks as "Tech Giant Screws Up".

      • Re: Badly Written Anti Cheat Software. (Score:5, Funny)

        by eth1 ( 94901 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @01:11PM (#62702748)

        Yes, the title really should have been reversed: "Bar Exam Software Can't Handle Intel's 12th Gen CPU".

        But I guess "Company You Never Heard of Screws Up" doesn't get as many clicks as "Tech Giant Screws Up".

        Hey, I know! Let's piss off a ton of future lawyers by putting their livelihood at risk!

        What could possibly go wrong??

        • Sounds to me like they're potentially pissing off a bunch of wannabe lawyers who can't take the bar exam.
          The actual lawyers won't give a fuck.
          • Probably will give a positive fuck, since less Bar Exam passes means less competition. On a technical level, what is the 12th gen doing differently from its predecessors?

            • I think it has to do with the "thread director". Basically it is a behind the scenes movement of threads from core to another in 12th gen chips.

              In older processors, if you run on bare metal, a thread would be only moved from core to another by the operating system. But if you run something in a virtual machine, the VM host software might also do strange manipulations to load balance between VM guests.

              Thus I guess the poorly written software is triggered by the thread director and thinks it is a VM host doin

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                It might be even simpler. The software has a list of known CPUs programmed in, and assumes any unknown ones are VMs. Being crapware, their engineering change process makes glaciers look speedy and they can't get a fix out before this exam.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by splutty ( 43475 )

              It monitors and analyzes the currently running processes and distributes them between "Performance" and "Efficiency" cores.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by fazig ( 2909523 )
            Those that do pass the Bar Exam despite of the unnecessary and unrelated obstacles put into their way by Examplify, may do so while harboring some resentment towards Examplify.

            • Re:what are they gonna do, shoot up the place? (Score:5, Interesting)

              by lsllll ( 830002 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @04:46PM (#62703296)
              My daughter was caught in the "take the Bar remotely for the first time ever because of COVID" and truly got shafted. The Bar takes 2 full days: the first day is multiple choice, and the second day is essays. It is a grueling exam to take. Every minute counts. So when she lost many minutes in the middle of the exam because of Examsoft issues [classaction.org] many exam takers experienced, it was enough to make a difference and she didn't pass the Bar. She had to take it again. And there's NOTHING you she could do (other than join the class action. I should tell her about it). They wouldn't give an inch and denied everything and blamed everything on her. She didn't get her money back, either. It was painful to pay those bastards again to take the exam.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jythie ( 914043 )
            'Actual' lawyers depend on a constant stream of entry level law school grads to do the massive amount of grunt work involved in cases.

        • If this somehow throttles the number of lawyers produced even for a single year, they've done the Lord's Work and should be praised.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      What I notice is that many exams do not leverage the expanded assessment opportunities of computers. Like the time when people wrote memos in spreadsheet, and that was all they knew, testing is just a matter of copying multiple guess questions to the computer. As it multiple guess tests are becoming intractable to administer and keep secure. If we want to test on computers, we must develop methods that are not from the 1900s.

    • I've got to wonder what exactly the point of the anti-cheat software even is? They think law students will be using aim-bots to pass the exam or something?

      I mean, any sort of information lookup is trivial to do on another device - they probably all have smartphones and/or tablets and/or an old computer sitting around (or easily borrowed).

      And WTF is up with not supporting desktop PCs, only laptops?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jythie ( 914043 )
        If they are checking for VMs, the cheat software might be making it so someone else can take the exam for them, probably hired from a service.

    • When I took the California bar in 1989, I had to show up the day before and pay an extra $55 dollars to have my typewriter inspected to make sure it had no memory . . . so I'm not really gushing sympathy here.

      To let a computer near this test, the *starting point* is, "can we absolutely verify that it can't cheat?"

      That is going to mean that that there is going to be a delay between the introduction of any generation of chips and the ability to use them on a test--even assuming that the software correctly an

  • I actually like this... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ZorinLynx ( 31751 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @12:05PM (#62702530) Homepage

    If hardware manufacturers make it impossible to determine if a system is running as a VM, software makers like these won't be able to place restrictions on software based on it being on a VM or not. This is a good thing as virtualization shouldn't be discouraged.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sique ( 173459 )
      Maybe we should not only include an Evil Bit, but also a Cheat Register.

    • Re:I actually like this... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slazzy ( 864185 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @12:41PM (#62702642) Homepage Journal
      This is actually really important for anti-virus / anti-malware research and protection. Software shouldn't know if it's in a VM or not. Typically software only knows it's in a VM by using hacks such as detecting the video card and such and isn't reliable anyway.

      • Why wouldn't a virus want to infect a virtual machine?

        • Re:I actually like this... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Ed Tice ( 3732157 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @01:07PM (#62702734)
          A virus would want to infect a virtual machine. The ability to detect being in a virtual machine (or not) is an information leakage that is useful for an adversary.

          • Re: (Score:3)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Viruses also like to be virtual machines. If the OS can't tell it's running in a malware VM, it can't do anything to detect the malware or defend against it.

            A lot of malware pre-Secure Boot did just that. Virtualized disk access so that the virus scanners couldn't detect it, while it could access every part of the OS including the kernel because it was the hypervisor.

        • Re:I actually like this... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Zak3056 ( 69287 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @01:24PM (#62702792) Journal

          Why wouldn't a virus want to infect a virtual machine?

          Since so many things run in VMs these days, I'd guess it's less prevalent, but once upon a time the purpose of VM detection in malware was to prevent running in sandboxes or on honeypots so as to avoid detection/analysis.

        • One reason is that researchers use VMs to analyse malware. Much like Volkswagen if you suspect you're being tested, best not to use the normal profile and get caught, better to act differently and throw off the people doing the testing.

        • Re:I actually like this... (Score:5, Informative)

          by sjames ( 1099 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @02:33PM (#62702948) Homepage Journal

          Some try to avoid running in a debugging environment which is also a virtual machine environment. They don't want security researchers to be able to watch it in action and develop countermeasures.

          Notably, an early virtualization technique in Linux utilized the ptrace system calls intended for debugging to run a Linux kernel as a user mode program in Linux.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gTsiros ( 205624 )

        user-space programs should not even _know_ what GPU there is. All it should know is the graphics capabilities provided to it by the OS

        i hate modern OSes

        • You can use a graphics card like that if you want to. There's nothing stopping you. And you will be unable to get the maximum performance out of it, but that's OK right? That's the future you want anyway.

    • If hardware manufacturers make it impossible to determine if a system is running as a VM, software makers like these won't be able to place restrictions on software based on it being on a VM or not.

      Hardware manufacturers can't prevent someone from detecting whether a machine is virtual. Virtual machines are decoupled from actual hardware, which is the whole point. If you examine the "hardware" in any virtual machine you can plainly see that's it's virtual hardware, not physical. This is particularly obvious with things like graphics adapters and disks. You will see drivers for VMware, or Hyper-V, or whatever flavor of hypervisor is used.

      • Re:I actually like this... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 ) <bert AT slashdot DOT firenzee DOT com> on Thursday July 14, 2022 @12:56PM (#62702704) Homepage

        Devices which are specific to the hypervisor are used because it performs better, but it's not essential. Hypervisors are perfectly capable of presenting simulations of actual hardware, and they do this for compatibility purposes (eg to install an os that doesn't have specific drivers for the hypervisor).
        You can also pass through real devices from the host, so you could have a virtual machine with access to a real GPU.

        • You can also pass through real devices from the host, so you could have a virtual machine with access to a real GPU.

          Yes, there is support for passing through actual hardware devices, but there are limitations, especially on Hyper-V. The bottom line is that you're never going to see a VM with zero virtual devices. At that point it would no longer be a VM.

        • Not disagreeing with you, but it becomes an arms race: those trying to obscure virtualization have physical possession of the hardware. Those trying to detect virtualization have timing attacks, fingerprinting, possibly TPM/secure boot/remote attestation, and first mover advantage.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sjames ( 1099 )

        They're doing a good enough job of it that the cheat detection has to rely on unreliable heuristics rather than a deterministic test in order to decide if it's running in a VM. And TFA shows that it sometimes gets it wrong.

        It got it wrong because they don't actually test for a VM, they test a handful of quirks and hit the tilt switch if the quirks don't match a known hardware CPU.

        For their next trick, I suppose they'll dispense with all those questions and just examine the lines on your feet and the bumps o

        • They're doing a good enough job of it that the cheat detection has to rely on unreliable heuristics rather than a deterministic test in order to decide if it's running in a VM.

          This likely has to do with where they're testing from, and with what level of access, rather than anything intrinsic about detecting virtualization.

          On another note, why would they give a shit whether your computer is virtual or not? In what way does being on a VM enable cheating on a test?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      VM shouldn't be identifiable. What's the use of a virtual machine if it doesn't emulate the machine correctly?

      • It's probably not the machine.

        You can bet the graphics driver is called "Oracle(TM) Virtual Graphics Driver(R)" or something lame like that.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rahmrh ( 939610 )

        if you have privs the vm's are usually obvious. VMware seems to emulate a bx440 chipset (a vintage 2000 chipset with a max cpu/core count of 2 and max cpu speed of 800mhz and max ram of 2gb).

        So when you see a vintage 2000 chipset machine running a 1+Ghz cpu with more than 2 cores and an amount of ram that was never supported on the given chipset your automatically know it is a VM.

        I have not looked at other vendors, but I would expect similar oddities that are easy to catch, since re-engineering the chipset

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jd ( 1658 )

          Then it's not much use for development or testing purposes, as a machine configuration that physically can't exist is not representative of any system that can exist. And VMs are quite popular in development and testing. Which... kinda implies that people are doing a particularly awful job of both of these right now.

          Which I can believe, although it's not my preferred option.

    • What are the principles? And examples of how the check is carried out?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        What are the principles? And examples of how the check is carried out?

        Many ways.

        1) Check for presence of nonsensical hardware - e.g., an Intel 440BX chipset with an AMD CPU. Or a 440BX chipset with anything newer than a Pentium III.

        2) Test the "guest additions" interface. All VM software has support for guest additions to do quality of life things like mouse integration, display resizing and other things (like memory management - the VMWare "balloon" driver that allows a VM to give up memory when the hyperv

  • time to have at an test center with test center hardware?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rta ( 559125 )

      Exactly. How the heck do they allow such high stakes tests to be taken at home / on users own machines?! It seems like cheating would be relatively easy Examify or not. Unless they maybe they require like 3 or 4 streams of video and audio from multiple angles streamed in realtime and analyzed closely for communication.
      (but even so... could you really detect it? a hidden camera pointed at the screen would be very hard to detect afaik. As would e.g. a vibration based device on the body to at th

      • It's not offered at home. The issue is that the bar exam is typically only offered in a couple of locations and only twice a year statewide. When I took the New York bar exam, it was literally thousands of people taking it at once in a giant conference center. No test center has the hardware to do such mass proctoring.

        • I don't think they let you take the mcat at home / on users own machines
          if any thing the school / college system can do is force people to pay an hardware rent fee and use rented systems as student loans are umlimted.

          But anyways for what ExamSoft costs they can do better unless it's the states / conference centers that takes can big part of the test fee.

          Trying to do the lock down game on users own machines is just going to run into
          os issues
          hardware issues
          the need to install what may be seen as an root kit o

  • Don't cross the str...er cores! (Score:3)

    by Megane ( 129182 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @12:16PM (#62702564)
    So I'm guessing this what I heard about months ago, where it has regular and low-power cores, and the software freaks out when it runs on a different type of core? I think the only surprising part is how long the problem has been known, but stuff is still tripping over it.

  • Virtualization Based Security? (Score:5, Informative)

    by tk77 ( 1774336 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @12:23PM (#62702584)

    I recently got a new ThinkPad X1 Yoga (Gen 7, w/ 12th gen cpu). I was having issues with VMware Workstation and VirtualBox both thinking I was running in a hypervisor. msinfo32 and systeminfo showed that Virtualization Based Security was enabled, and that a hypervisor was detected.

    I tried all the usual methods of disabling them. Hyper-V wasn't installed and VBS was disabled through the group policy. Nothing worked and the system kept insisting it was running in a hypervisor.

    I then discovered that "Firmware Protection" under "Core Isolation" in Defender Device Security was using a relatively new feature called "Defender System Guard" which seems to also enable Virtualization Based Security, even though it may be disabled via other means. Once I turned this off, VBS was disabled and the system no longer detected a hypervisor. Workstation and VirtualBox then both ran normally.

    My pervious system was a C940 w/ 11th gen CPU, but more of a consumer model, and it did not have the same security features. Not sure if this was due to the 12th gen chip, or the system being a more business focused ThinkPad. Either way, I wonder if the Bar exam software is using the same check and if that feature is enabled, simply disabling it would get it to work. Not that I endorse such a check for anti-cheat.

    • Interesting to note, but if you're trying to run Linux I've found WSL 2 to be a very good replacement for development tasks. Can even run X with VcXsrv and sports USB passthrough if you're willing to recompile the kernel with the correct USB flags. I.e. you may not need VMWare Workstation or VirtualBox, depending on your use case.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tk77 ( 1774336 )

        Thanks for the note! I actually a heavy user of WSL1, because I've had some random lag issues in games on my desktop whenever I've had Hyper-V / VM Platform enabled, so I've stuck with it. It actually does everything I need, as I don't do much over the net with X.

        However, I do manage a vSphere cluster and having the Workstation integration is pretty nice. I run multiple OS's as (Linux and Windows) and having the "native" distribute comes in handy when testing. I do also like to mess around with retro sy

  • Don't worry, I have an old 486 based desktop (Score:3)

    by Virtucon ( 127420 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @12:33PM (#62702624)

    For sale, is one well-used 486 desktop with a 3dfx voodoo card and a 50MB hard drive. It also has a 3.5" floppy. Perfect for bar exams! It comes with Windows 3.1 as an added bonus!

    $250K OBO

  • Ignoring the browser, any reasonable "anti-cheat" or "proctoring" software should have to run on all modern POSIX compliant Operating Systems, without the need for platform locking or platform regulation based detection. Reading the Examplify Requirements, it's shocking that anyone could pick that software thinking it meets the needs of both the users and the administrators trying to run the testing!

    This seems to be another classic case of bad software dictating the landscape, over the software being forc

    • "proctoring" software may need be in an test center with locked down VM images and software that WILL run in that VM.

    • Is Linux even POSIX compliant?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by HiThere ( 15173 )

        It wasn't. Unless they've changed the specs it still isn't. Still, it's "close enough" for almost any reasonable purpose. Not, however, close enough for the difference to be undetectable. (Well, *I* couldn't detect it, because I've forgotten what the difference was.

        Just a second... https://unix.stackexchange.com... [stackexchange.com]

        So I guess the answer is, "Linux isn't necessarily POSIX compliant, but it can be.".

        • I recall there being a difference with pipes, something about blocking in a case where posix defines it shouldnt....
          • Na. POSIX is very lenient.
            Linux does not strive to be POSIX compliant, but it can be is the correct answer.

            POSIX compliance isn't really worth that much. The actual spec is a fucking disaster. What you really want to aim for is what Linux aims for- POSIX-like.
            I.e., you're using the primitives that a POSIX programmer with some experience is used to, but you're not constrained to some of the idiotic ambiguities in POSIX.
      • It's close to being POSIX without being certified (unless that recently changed), and again except in limited circumstance where some distro's do have POSIX certification. If a software is written with POSIX compliance in mind, it will run on all major Linux Distro's that I'm aware of, certainly Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, PopOS, Arch, Gentoo, etc....

        Instead of mentioning Windows 7,8,10,11, Mac OS X (blah), Android, iOS (is that what it's called?), just implement against the standard interface, and then

    • "Don't pick tools which can't run on Windows, Mac or Linux!"

      I'm curious, what OS are you using?

  • fake headline (Score:5, Insightful)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Thursday July 14, 2022 @12:41PM (#62702644)

    Actually, no, it's the crappy software that can't handle a new cpu.

  • Say in your best Jack Nickelson voice.

  • ... let's kill all the lawyer exams!

  • Terrible Software (Score:2, Redundant)

    by nealric ( 3647765 )

    I took the bar exam over 10 years ago, but Examsoft was a nightmare back then too.

    My year, there were a non insignificant percentage who failed or could not complete the bar exam over that POS. Keep in mind that the exam is only offered twice a year, and failing effectively prevents you from working for an entire 6 months, so this is a pretty high stakes piece of software. Back then, there was the option to hand-write, but the exam is so time limited that being able to type is a huge competitive advantage.

  • Layoffs (Score:3)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Thursday July 14, 2022 @01:36PM (#62702832) Homepage Journal

    They've had eight months to test Alder Lake. Did they fire the guy who could add a new CPU check to the code?

    It should have been an x.x.1 update, not a press release.

    So why?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve ( 949321 )

      They've had eight months to test Alder Lake. Did they fire the guy who could add a new CPU check to the code?

      It should have been an x.x.1 update, not a press release.

      So why?

      Here's why. I have lots of friends who are lawyers. I'm an IT guy.

      Lawyers don't understand computers at all. I mean not at all. For God's sake, the US legal professional used Word Perfect until not that long ago because nobody was smart enough to figure out how to use anything else. No joke there. Word Perfect has been singlehandedly kept in business by American lawyers since the beginning. And you probably either never heard of it or remember it from so far long ago that you thought that

      • You must work for a court, your words are so true. I'm flabbergasted that in 2022 we have clerks, courtroom deputies, and judges still banging out documents with WP. I have intimate knowledge of this because the fed court i work for is full of PCs running WP.

      • I just checked the Wordperfect site.

        It seems they are owned by Corel now. So at best the American legal system is keeping one division or department of Corel profitable, since Corel got lots of other software as well.

        I will not mind more competitive word processor software being available. MS Word being in most places just gives MS more power to steamroll the other players in the word processing market.

      • Gosh. I remember those days well. I spent much of my time integrating a FoxPro database application with WordPerfect so we could crank out engagement letters and various types of motions and pleadings in semi-automated fashion, in mass tort litigation, without the expense of having to hire dozens of paralegals. The fact that no one on our side ever read these was largely mitigated by the fact that no one on the other side read them either, and, presumably, neither did clerks or judges. Which never sat w

  • If it was good enough for grandpa, it should be good enough for me!

    This just in: "Back in my day, we didn't have to sit for a bar exam, or even go to law school to practice law." -- ghost of one of Abe Lincoln's contemporaries

  • Looks like the bar has been raised...

    It is literally the name behind the term.

  • This isn't Intel or Microsoft's fault, they just didn't update their own "security check" nonsense to play nicely with modern hardware. These processors aren't that new. This shouldn't be a thing.
  • Lawyers getting screwed by a technicality? Sounds like it's right in their ballpark.

  • The bar exam can't handle intel CPU's. I would expect software to conform to hardware, since software is much easier to change than hardware.

    This also makes me want to complain about software devs and software companies.

    The attitude of many software devs reflect a poor attitude of changing hardware before software, "Oh, you ran out of resources? just buy new hardware".

  • What the hell is wrong with headphones?

    If I had to take the bar exam, I would not stand for any of this shit. I would demand to take it in person, with a proctor, on paper. If the bar is too lazy to meet those requirements, I'd move to a state with intelligent lawyers.

    ExamSoft should go die in a fire.

  • This sounds like they need to update their software. It's not Intel's fault that this company wants to whine about their software being incompatible with modern technology.

  • Let us welcome the attorneys to this technical battlefield. Maybe they can help finally push this non-sense away.

    For years, nvidia actively blocked their drivers in a virtual machine, and only recently decided to stop doing that (Error 43). Yep, there was (still is?) an active community to run Linux as a hypervisor, but occasionally have Windows for gaming, in a relatively secure environment.

    AMD has a "bug", the GPU cannot be reset. (Why is the "bug" still there?)

    Gaming on the Steam Deck? Many games refuse

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