Could be they overzealously blocked a load of things that could be used to cheat on exams (a REPL can be used as a calculator). Never attribute to malice etc.
Not saying it’s right but I think it’s unlikely there’s some nefarious current in teaching to stop kids learning to program.
From the petition[0]: "Some schools have called the site a "distraction" as kids are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects."
I don't get why this is an issue. I slacked off on many boring subjects to do the same. Building software and other digital stuff helped me think like an entrepreneur, and was a hell of a lot more educational than the rest of school.
While the goal of schooling is cultivate young minds and educate them, the reality is that schools are an institution that must implement a curriculum and they expect students to do as they are told.
Very peculiar sentence. The word "distraction" is quoted but the rest of the sentence, the strongest claim, is not quoted.
Where does the "are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects" come from? It is implicitly attributed to "some schools", but which schools? did they really say that, or is the author paraphrasing something they said? or is it the author's interpretation or guess of their motivation?
Or perhaps this is viral marketing, or in other words, BS.
Title is probably sensationalist. More likely that stretched IT departments at schools implement one-size-fits-all content blockers for websites and this particular site is caught up in a blocked category. I have strong doubts that schools are collaboratively targeting and blocking repl.it in particular.
My spouse is a teacher and can confirm that their IT dept uses a very broad brush in blocking things on the network. Many of the blocks are of sites that have become important teaching resources such as pinterest.
If a pupil somehow manages to access pornographic, violent, racist, whatnot content the school is going to be in trouble. The safest and simplest is to block liberally. No-one is going to be in trouble for blocking Pinterest.
I think that an IT department should have enough wherewithal to be able to distinguish between student accessible resources and teacher accessible resources.
Pinterest themselves go a long way towards breaking Google. Their crappy spam prevents you getting to the actual source of an image. I can’t believe Google tolerate it.
"Many" is a subjective term. It doesn't tell you anything quantifiable, merely what the describer thinks is a larger than usual number.
For example, someone who has never owned pets might think that someone who owns 2 cats and a dog has "many" pets, while someone who does own pets might only consider that to be a "normal" number of pets.
This is actually a great point. I have zero personal interest in pets or plants, so I'm always baffled by how people can live with animals running around at home or with plants cluttering up the home. I understand the appeal to others, I just don't relate. So for me a few pets or plants is indeed already 'many'.
Back when I went to high school, the tech curriculum was so rudimentary that the most knowledgeable programmers in the school were the self-taught teenage hackers.
From the school's perspective their relationship with programming was adversarial, trying to prevent students from breaking into things or defacing the lab equipment.
Of course that's still the case. Children are little shits and don't care if they cause everyone else a lot of work to undo whatever it was they thought was funny that day.
I know this because I was once that kid, and the universe gave me my comeuppance when I had to be a school system IT guy dealing with kids like me.
Maybe because repl.it can be used to bypass other school restrictions?
A quick search trying to find anything in the news about this just brought up a bunch of threads of people teaching others to use repl.it to bypass computer restrictions.
1. This is kind of a dumb defense in my opinion. If someone is smart enough to be finding and then logging into a coding website to follow the steps here, I very much doubt little will stop them of finding other work arounds.
2. The petition seems a bit lame and without any real purpose. Sometimes all news is good news. Not saying this is that definitely -- but astroturfing into an outrage machine is great for press for a market you're trying to grow in / raise brand awareness.
3. At the very least, more coding and access in schools is a no brainer. Restricting access in general to anything is dumb. Most kids have (or will have friends) with a smart phone to see and do whatever they want.
Personally, i agree with everything you say. I was mostly just trying to figure out why, that seemed like the likliest reason.
Schools tend to be not the greatest at computer security type stuff. Just wholesale blocking the site seems like something schools would do rather than actually do something useful.
My experience at least, i tended to break the restrictions on my school computers and mess around when i was bored of what they were teaching, usually because i knew it already. If they have a problem with kids doing this, maybe those kids aren't being challenged enough and are looking for their own challenge.
I did not know about those. Thanks for alerting me. I deleted the posts. But if it is the case that this is the main driver then they should have reached out to us instead of blanket blocking.
How long do you think it would take for various schools IT departments (usually incredibly understaffed) to reach out to every single website where they found content that doesn't fit the school board's policies and request a take down?
How many websites would, at the request of Random School X, would remove posts just to comply? Simply so a few hundred students can use the school network rather than a phone, home computer, etc.?
This seems like a ridiculous request. From the school IT point of view, block it and move on is much more realistic.
I just saw your comment (but I will still keep my other comment for people to see).
Basically, AFTER you get caught, you delete the evidence and leave a 404? How about edit/censor to write: "we do not condone these actions - bypassing school security, and thus we remove this harmful content"?
They're basic tutorials on how to build proxies. Some of them are pretty neat technically actually and pains me to delete them. But we also don't condone use-cases like this. If I had more time I will build the infra for taking down posts and leaving a message like you suggest.
I mean we're a general purpose computing platform, if we allow you to build and host a website, of course it's possible to build a proxy. It's essentially impossible to stop that. However, I doubt that's the main driver for the blocking.
We are on the phones since the start of the week with no avail. It sounds like there are some shadowy IT providers that are hard to reach that are doing all the blocking and locking down of machines. Someone else on this thread mentioned one such provider.
Fair enough. Honestly,.i do hope you guys can find a solution that allows students to keep using your tools. I would have loved something like that back when i was in school.
I can see why schools may not like it though, apart from just the proxy stuff, i imagine kids use repl.it a lot to do things their teachers would find unproductive.
Just thinking back to the kind of crap i would do on school computers even back in the early 2000's, i can't even imagine what kinds of things kids have come up with these days to fuck around on a computer instead of doing their work.
Like i said though, i think repl.it can be a great tool and resource for students, it seems like it may have to involve more direct effort from you guys in working with schools to make this happen though.
I just tried to visit these pages (from Europe) and they are 404. "Not found error: This is not the page you're looking for. If you think this is a mistake please contact us_".
Is someone trying to hide something?
To the Replit folks: I don't know you, I have never in my life heard of Replit before (until this HN post), but I feel I won't like you. Did you actually take down these pages with evidence of bypassing school security controls just so "you got no valid reason - apart from the ones we just hid"?
Edit: "just" is 16mins after the parent posted the 3 URIs (as per HN clock).
I just deleted them because we don't condone using our tool for this use-case. Basically they're tutorials on how to use replit to build proxies. Basic stuff you can google.
Back when I was in school, google.com got blocked once. They reversed that decision pretty quickly, but never did explain why they blocked it in the first place.
Back when I was in school I was reading Practical Common Lisp online during study hall until they blocked it (I can't remember the category-might have been education.) Over the next few days they kept tweaking the filter settings and all kinds of sites (NYT, etc) where blocked. It was amusing but they did categorically block proxies so it was difficult to circumvent. Got me interested enough to read our acceptable use policy which banned the downloading of anything at all (presumably including HTML.)
That wasn't the worst use of tech though. We also used a service called Turnitin which purported to find the plagiarism percentage of submitted papers. Of course it couldn't understand the difference between stealing and quoting and would flag very small sentence fragments including idioms. The fix was that we had to submit papers that where "no more than 3% plagiarized"
Students would copy something, change a few words, check the turnitin score and change a few more. It was a good way of plagiarising and getting away with it.
I didn’t plagiarise but submitted my assignments as locked PDFs which they couldn’t pass through turnitin. This met the school requirements for digital submission but I had to argue this point. The following year the rule was changed and .doc was specified.
In fairness we used a similar service in high school to bypass all other filtering. I wrote a script to setup a remote desktop server on the VM they gave you and then run a web remote desktop client. Unfiltered internet unlocked!
I would not be surprised. A lot of my fellow schools insist on blocking the command prompt and powershell. I've tried explaining that there is nothing they can do with those tools which can't be done without them.
There is a real fear amongst some schools that cmd/psh and programming tools can be used for hacking.
This feels more like a marketing campaign for Replit than an actual widespread problem.
The Tweet is from Paul Graham, an investor in Repl.it
The HN submission is from the founder of Repl.it
The only evidence I could find that this was happening at all is some Tweets, which I initially read to be tongue-in-cheek rather than serious problems.
Is this the case of a single IT admin blocking a website somewhere being blown up into a viral marketing campaign? This narrative that incompetent school admins are preventing brilliant students from learning how to code feels like it was written to trigger the HN crowd. How many people are now researching Repl.it because they read some Tweets that claimed it was being blocked by schools?
It is a real problem. We're trying to get to the bottom of it but the system seems vague and opaque and we have no idea who's doing the actual blocking. I do think some publicity might help us reach folks who are in charge of these school firewalls, which seems to be run by IT providers. In addition to kids posting, here is a screenshot of schools posting on Facebook groups also confused by it: https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp
> It is a real problem. We're trying to get to the bottom of it but the system seems vague and opaque and we have no idea who's doing the actual blocking. I do think some publicity might help us reach folks who are in charge of these school firewalls, which seems to be run by IT providers. In addition to kids posting, here is a screenshot of schools posting on Facebook groups also confused by it: https://imgur.com/a/YzFEEmp
> Many schools have decided to start filtering out sites such as Replit which allows students to code in the browser. Some schools have called the site a "distraction" as kids are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects.
In this quote, which schools called your product a distraction? Why ask HN to sign a petition with no further information?
Look into vendors of "security software" for schools. I had to lawyer up at the beginning of the school year to get securely.com (edited) (government has no business deploying this kind of spyware against children) removed from my children's chrome accounts. I ended up having to pull my kids out of the school system as two of the three started to have mental health issues.
I have five kids, and have had this kind of thing crop up multiple times. The most recent was when I was showing my youngest how to make web pages on his school issued Chromebook. They school had locked down everything, including the browser's developer tools. So, I called the administration, and they told me that they didn't want kids having access to programming tools because the kids could use them to cheat, access "secure" data and otherwise cause mischief.
I asked, so, what if my son wants to learn to code? The IT guy said, "use your own computer". This isn't incompetence. It's outright foolishness. He also went out of his way to remind me that unauthorized access was a criminal offense and the school would go after any student who "tried".
Out of genuine curiosity, would you quit a job if the equipment they gave you was locked down to meet enterprise requirements?
It's a school issued computer. I think it is more than reasonable for the school to lock down their own property as they see fit for security, and likely for liability, reasons.
I'm not saying kids shouldn't be able to learn programming, obviously they should be able to, but we have to stay in touch with reality.
IT standards should not block the mission of the organization or block a user from doing their job. If I were hired as a developer, and the "enterprise requirements" prevented me from doing my job to the best of my ability, I would find another job. The problem here is that administrators (IT or business) have lost sight of what it means to be an educational institution, and are denying students a very powerful chance to learn.
A more apt analogy would be an enterprise blocking, for example, the Tor protocol on the laptop which was given to you to do graphic design. The laptops are given to students for school-related activities, and evidently learning the developer console of Chrome is not a school-related activity.
We're on the same page when it comes to the fact that students should have ample access to learn programming and other CS fields. The fact is that it is not currently in the curriculum, and no one is entitled to use the organizations laptop for things the organization says it doesn't want. This isn't even touching the aspect of liability the school's face for the actions taken on/with their property.
The fight should be to change the curriculum, not to get mad at the IT guy who is enforcing the administrations rules about using the organizations property for unrelated activities.
The only way your example would be equivalent is if the school was offering a class on programming, but then blocked access to the development tools required to complete the class.
You seem to be doing a bit of hand-waving at the end there trying to equate the school’s purpose with the entire idea of education and learning. That’s something that takes place on all of life, not just in school.
It's just not educating in the specific areas you want. I imagine your kids aren't learning quantum physics or fine dining etiquette either. That doesn't mean that the school is no longer educating.
"It's just not educating in the specific areas you want."
You are right. I do not want my children to learn whatever is being taught when the school's IT department is threatening children with the police for trying to learn to make a web page and fiddle with CSS and Javascript.
That is a separate issue, and one I wholeheartedly agree with. If that is what the IT department or administration said, I would also be upset. Saying that it is locked down for XYZ is one thing, adding in a line which threatens kids with police action for wanting to learn something is obviously out of bounds and inappropriate.
However, that is different than claiming that schools purpose is no longer education. It's conflating an entire system with the disappointing actions of a few people working within a school.
That's funny though, a good chunk of companies forces you on macbooks nowadays, which for devs working on ubuntu the entire life, does stop them from working to the best of their abilities.
I would quit if the corporate computer prevented me from doing my assigned job.
Programming is literally an option to sign up for, after which it is an assigned task on which you get graded.
You can’t tell me there is no way to let someone use an entirely web based programming environment. I understand locking down the machine, but then provide a VM.
You seem to be an individual that acts on principle.
Did you pull out all of your kids from school? Was this public school? Did you weigh the costs of private education against the cost of "use your own computer"?
I get the feeling you don't pick your battles rationally.
We changed schools. The kids get one chance to grow up. Being in an environment that literally threatens law enforcement when a child wants to learn about how their computer works is an unsafe place.
I understand why they would do this, in light of the attention this is getting. Whether the attention itself is the purpose of the posts or not isn't really relevant to what gleaned from this.
Learning to evade restrictions is a powerful motivation for curious kids. How many kids are initially interested in figuring out how to play a browser-based game on their Chromebook, but in the process discover that learning programming is something that they enjoy and is accessible to them?
Some of my first "tech" experiences were learning to get around copy protection schemes for 90s-era software. That has directly lead me to the career I have today. These posts seem like the 2020 equivalent of learning just enough assembly to do a hex dump of an executable, find the serial number conditional, and invert the logic.
I went to a religious grade school and a public high school. I started coding and playing with Linux when I was around nine.
The answer, in my experience as a kid, is yes -- schools actively block all kinds of programming activity on school resources.
The reasons are pretty simple:
- Schools don't pay the best admins and much of their advanced capabilities come from vendors.
- The vendors often don't produce "secure" software like you and I (read: in the industry) would expect. A lot of this software has obvious holes. I have fond memories of exploiting the Novell boot process to mount Linux or implementing my own pass through proxy on my home server so I could browse the "real" web while at school. Another example, one of my best friends/colleagues/fellow students/future boss installed a Halo server on our 3D rendering server and you can bet I could join a game at any time from anywhere on the network.
- Schools don't implement zero trust (zero trust didn't even really exist back then, but I know this to be true to this day) and much of this is derivative of that simple fact.
- Software vendors are often limited by the OS. A lot of Novell's exploits were because of opaque API's provided by Windows that they didn't fully understand or that changed. This encourages further locking down of the environment.
So the problem is a lot more nuanced than Amjad and Paul make it seem, I suspect they know that are using this as a conversation starter. If that is indeed the case, I would prefer they just start this conversation rather than this ridiculous round about method that takes advantage of outrage and sensationalism.
Schools need help more than they need vague criticism.
It looks like some clever kids have figured out how to use repl.it to bypass school blockers.
I guess the program instantiates a browser, makes an HTTP request and displays the result. The program runs from repl.it servers, which, of course, are not limited by the school's blocker. But the results are displayed back to the school.
It looks like the technique is pretty widely known, so schools are getting wise.
This is tricky from the school's perspective. Obviously repl.it is a valuable educational tool. Yet it can be abused pretty easily to do things schools can't allow.
Are people against blocking replit or schools blocking things in general? If the former, but not the latter, what's so special about replit? Schools block a ton of websites.
An argument could be made that schools blocking websites in general is counterproductive, however given that replit can be used to circumvent school blocks, it seems justified from the school's point of view.
Unless schools are blocking every single tool that assist with coding like khan academy, I don't really see the issue.
Kids can't code is the effect of the block. I don't think this is in any way editorializing. The issue with blocking general programming functionality is that it takes away educational opportunity from students. Regardless of intent, the side effect of that intent is anti-education and has no business going on in a school.
Lightspeed Filter has this categorized as "security.proxy" which is right. Unfortunately there's nothing stopping people from setting up a sophisticated web proxy on repl or a similar free PaaS so that would make sense. The simple solution people jump to is just completely block repl.it
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadNot saying it’s right but I think it’s unlikely there’s some nefarious current in teaching to stop kids learning to program.
[0]: https://www.change.org/p/schools-of-the-world-unblock-replit...
In a country of 350M people, "some" schools are going to block hopscotch or using improper fractions for whatever dumb reason. Why should I care?
Where does the "are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects" come from? It is implicitly attributed to "some schools", but which schools? did they really say that, or is the author paraphrasing something they said? or is it the author's interpretation or guess of their motivation?
Or perhaps this is viral marketing, or in other words, BS.
Which schools are blocking these coding sites? Why is it so hard to find on this petition?
For example, someone who has never owned pets might think that someone who owns 2 cats and a dog has "many" pets, while someone who does own pets might only consider that to be a "normal" number of pets.
From the school's perspective their relationship with programming was adversarial, trying to prevent students from breaking into things or defacing the lab equipment.
I wonder if this is still the case.
I know this because I was once that kid, and the universe gave me my comeuppance when I had to be a school system IT guy dealing with kids like me.
A quick search trying to find anything in the news about this just brought up a bunch of threads of people teaching others to use repl.it to bypass computer restrictions.
https://repl.it/talk/learn/How-To-Visit-Blocked-Sites-~-Usin...
https://repl.it/talk/learn/Bypassing-School-Restrictions/245...
https://repl.it/talk/share/Proxy-Get-Past-School-Filters-Or-...
2. The petition seems a bit lame and without any real purpose. Sometimes all news is good news. Not saying this is that definitely -- but astroturfing into an outrage machine is great for press for a market you're trying to grow in / raise brand awareness.
3. At the very least, more coding and access in schools is a no brainer. Restricting access in general to anything is dumb. Most kids have (or will have friends) with a smart phone to see and do whatever they want.
Schools tend to be not the greatest at computer security type stuff. Just wholesale blocking the site seems like something schools would do rather than actually do something useful.
My experience at least, i tended to break the restrictions on my school computers and mess around when i was bored of what they were teaching, usually because i knew it already. If they have a problem with kids doing this, maybe those kids aren't being challenged enough and are looking for their own challenge.
How many websites would, at the request of Random School X, would remove posts just to comply? Simply so a few hundred students can use the school network rather than a phone, home computer, etc.?
This seems like a ridiculous request. From the school IT point of view, block it and move on is much more realistic.
Basically, AFTER you get caught, you delete the evidence and leave a 404? How about edit/censor to write: "we do not condone these actions - bypassing school security, and thus we remove this harmful content"?
There was a whole google page full of threads on this. I picked the top three results...
You can't just delete some forum posts and expect the knowledge to go away.
They'll just post it somewhere else.
I can see why schools may not like it though, apart from just the proxy stuff, i imagine kids use repl.it a lot to do things their teachers would find unproductive.
Just thinking back to the kind of crap i would do on school computers even back in the early 2000's, i can't even imagine what kinds of things kids have come up with these days to fuck around on a computer instead of doing their work.
Like i said though, i think repl.it can be a great tool and resource for students, it seems like it may have to involve more direct effort from you guys in working with schools to make this happen though.
Is someone trying to hide something?
To the Replit folks: I don't know you, I have never in my life heard of Replit before (until this HN post), but I feel I won't like you. Did you actually take down these pages with evidence of bypassing school security controls just so "you got no valid reason - apart from the ones we just hid"?
Edit: "just" is 16mins after the parent posted the 3 URIs (as per HN clock).
* https://web.archive.org/web/20210120075709/https://repl.it/t...
* https://web.archive.org/web/20210119055116/https://repl.it/t...
Those are some clever kids...
Some kid finds boobs in a google image search, outrage ensues.
Administrators task IT to block it.
IT responds that it cannot, as sometimes boobs are available even in Google safe search. There are no 100% solutions.
Administrators order IT to do something about it anyway, so IT decides to disable Google image search entirely.
IT discovers that Google image search doesn't use its own domain, so they have no choice but to block all of Google.
Much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues.
Administrators quickly reverse the decision to block Google.
In a 4 hour meeting, IT is eventually able to explain to Administrators why what they want is not possible. Maybe.
That wasn't the worst use of tech though. We also used a service called Turnitin which purported to find the plagiarism percentage of submitted papers. Of course it couldn't understand the difference between stealing and quoting and would flag very small sentence fragments including idioms. The fix was that we had to submit papers that where "no more than 3% plagiarized"
I didn’t plagiarise but submitted my assignments as locked PDFs which they couldn’t pass through turnitin. This met the school requirements for digital submission but I had to argue this point. The following year the rule was changed and .doc was specified.
There is a real fear amongst some schools that cmd/psh and programming tools can be used for hacking.
The Tweet is from Paul Graham, an investor in Repl.it
The HN submission is from the founder of Repl.it
The only evidence I could find that this was happening at all is some Tweets, which I initially read to be tongue-in-cheek rather than serious problems.
Is this the case of a single IT admin blocking a website somewhere being blown up into a viral marketing campaign? This narrative that incompetent school admins are preventing brilliant students from learning how to code feels like it was written to trigger the HN crowd. How many people are now researching Repl.it because they read some Tweets that claimed it was being blocked by schools?
> Many schools have decided to start filtering out sites such as Replit which allows students to code in the browser. Some schools have called the site a "distraction" as kids are choosing to learn computer science and programming as opposed to working on other subjects.
In this quote, which schools called your product a distraction? Why ask HN to sign a petition with no further information?
I asked, so, what if my son wants to learn to code? The IT guy said, "use your own computer". This isn't incompetence. It's outright foolishness. He also went out of his way to remind me that unauthorized access was a criminal offense and the school would go after any student who "tried".
I pulled my son out of the school.
It's a school issued computer. I think it is more than reasonable for the school to lock down their own property as they see fit for security, and likely for liability, reasons.
I'm not saying kids shouldn't be able to learn programming, obviously they should be able to, but we have to stay in touch with reality.
A more apt analogy would be an enterprise blocking, for example, the Tor protocol on the laptop which was given to you to do graphic design. The laptops are given to students for school-related activities, and evidently learning the developer console of Chrome is not a school-related activity.
We're on the same page when it comes to the fact that students should have ample access to learn programming and other CS fields. The fact is that it is not currently in the curriculum, and no one is entitled to use the organizations laptop for things the organization says it doesn't want. This isn't even touching the aspect of liability the school's face for the actions taken on/with their property.
The fight should be to change the curriculum, not to get mad at the IT guy who is enforcing the administrations rules about using the organizations property for unrelated activities.
You seem to be doing a bit of hand-waving at the end there trying to equate the school’s purpose with the entire idea of education and learning. That’s something that takes place on all of life, not just in school.
It's just not educating in the specific areas you want. I imagine your kids aren't learning quantum physics or fine dining etiquette either. That doesn't mean that the school is no longer educating.
You are right. I do not want my children to learn whatever is being taught when the school's IT department is threatening children with the police for trying to learn to make a web page and fiddle with CSS and Javascript.
However, that is different than claiming that schools purpose is no longer education. It's conflating an entire system with the disappointing actions of a few people working within a school.
Programming is literally an option to sign up for, after which it is an assigned task on which you get graded.
You can’t tell me there is no way to let someone use an entirely web based programming environment. I understand locking down the machine, but then provide a VM.
We aren't. So I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
You seem to be an individual that acts on principle.
Did you pull out all of your kids from school? Was this public school? Did you weigh the costs of private education against the cost of "use your own computer"?
I get the feeling you don't pick your battles rationally.
This is most people on HN
Not cool. Please don't cross into personal attack, and especially not on highly emotional themes like parenting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20210120075709/https://repl.it/t...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210119055116/https://repl.it/t...
The look of hurriedly sweeping things under the rug, and asking HN to sign petitions without any information...
Learning to evade restrictions is a powerful motivation for curious kids. How many kids are initially interested in figuring out how to play a browser-based game on their Chromebook, but in the process discover that learning programming is something that they enjoy and is accessible to them?
Some of my first "tech" experiences were learning to get around copy protection schemes for 90s-era software. That has directly lead me to the career I have today. These posts seem like the 2020 equivalent of learning just enough assembly to do a hex dump of an executable, find the serial number conditional, and invert the logic.
The answer, in my experience as a kid, is yes -- schools actively block all kinds of programming activity on school resources.
The reasons are pretty simple:
- Schools don't pay the best admins and much of their advanced capabilities come from vendors.
- The vendors often don't produce "secure" software like you and I (read: in the industry) would expect. A lot of this software has obvious holes. I have fond memories of exploiting the Novell boot process to mount Linux or implementing my own pass through proxy on my home server so I could browse the "real" web while at school. Another example, one of my best friends/colleagues/fellow students/future boss installed a Halo server on our 3D rendering server and you can bet I could join a game at any time from anywhere on the network.
- Schools don't implement zero trust (zero trust didn't even really exist back then, but I know this to be true to this day) and much of this is derivative of that simple fact.
- Software vendors are often limited by the OS. A lot of Novell's exploits were because of opaque API's provided by Windows that they didn't fully understand or that changed. This encourages further locking down of the environment.
So the problem is a lot more nuanced than Amjad and Paul make it seem, I suspect they know that are using this as a conversation starter. If that is indeed the case, I would prefer they just start this conversation rather than this ridiculous round about method that takes advantage of outrage and sensationalism.
Schools need help more than they need vague criticism.
I guess the program instantiates a browser, makes an HTTP request and displays the result. The program runs from repl.it servers, which, of course, are not limited by the school's blocker. But the results are displayed back to the school.
It looks like the technique is pretty widely known, so schools are getting wise.
This is tricky from the school's perspective. Obviously repl.it is a valuable educational tool. Yet it can be abused pretty easily to do things schools can't allow.
An argument could be made that schools blocking websites in general is counterproductive, however given that replit can be used to circumvent school blocks, it seems justified from the school's point of view.
Unless schools are blocking every single tool that assist with coding like khan academy, I don't really see the issue.
Well.
Replit has used the following platforms for ads that shouldn't be used for ads:
- change.org - ProductHunt - HackerNews
Why not use a mainstream form of ads?