Hacking My Way To Github's Student Developer Pack

18 Sep 2025•3 min read

It's time for me to be a student again (on paper anyway), and being a student (or should I say SUTDent) grants me access to Github's Student Developer Pack for free! There's just one small problem...

The Problem

Github has made their verification more stringent. A few years back I only needed to verify my student email, but now I need to:

  1. Share location
  2. Show proof of enrolment (offer letter, student card, etc.) - you can't upload from your device, Github requires that you snap the photo during the process

What is the problem with this you ask, sounds simple no? Well, when I tried on my phone:

  1. Student card rejected because it was recognised as a debit card (well it is)
  2. Photos of my offer letter turned out blurry, even though I was as still as a soldier in a parade. It looked fine on screen, but after the countdown - 3, 2, 1, boom the picture becomes blurry. Like what's up man...

The Solution

OBS Virtual Capture

I resorted to using my laptop to fix this issue. On OBS, I used the Virtual Camera feature to use my screen as a dummy webcam to upload my digital offer letter. As I'm writing, I realise there's an upload button on the desktop website. I'm a real fool... but I'd still like to share about my experience :v

Dummy camera in action

To get this to work on Linux:

  1. Install v4l2loopback
  2. Enable v4l2loopback: sudo modprobe vl42loopback
  3. In OBS, select the window to capure, then enable Virtual Capture. By default, the whole screen is captured. The size can be changed in Files > Settings > Video > Base (canvas) resolution. I changed mine from 1920x1200 to 1000x1200 to capture half the screen where the offer letter is visible.

geoclue Geolocation

My distro doesn't come with geolocation services by default, so I installed geoclue. After I installed it, I updated /etc/geoclue/geoclue.conf to update the WiFi-based location services to use BeaconDB as the provider, since Mozilla Location Services is retired:

[wifi]
enabled=true
url=https://beacondb.net/v1/geolocate


After this was done, I ran /usr/libexec/geoclue-2.0/demos/agent & to start the service and Firefox finally managed to get my location.

Conclusion

This was a lot of work for the Student Developer pack. Don't be like me; notice the Upload button and use it, instead of whatever I did.

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