This feels more like a marketing campaign for Replit than an actual widespread problem.<p>The Tweet is from Paul Graham, an investor in Repl.it<p>The HN submission is from the founder of Repl.it<p>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.<p>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?
Maybe because repl.it can be used to bypass other school restrictions?<p>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.<p><a href="https://repl.it/talk/learn/How-To-Visit-Blocked-Sites-~-Using-Replit-TutorialJam/79171" rel="nofollow">https://repl.it/talk/learn/How-To-Visit-Blocked-Sites-~-Usin...</a><p><a href="https://repl.it/talk/learn/Bypassing-School-Restrictions/24573" rel="nofollow">https://repl.it/talk/learn/Bypassing-School-Restrictions/245...</a><p><a href="https://repl.it/talk/share/Proxy-Get-Past-School-Filters-Or-other-things/56967?order=new" rel="nofollow">https://repl.it/talk/share/Proxy-Get-Past-School-Filters-Or-...</a>
> Many schools have decided to start filtering out sites such as Replit which allows students to code in the browser.<p>Which schools are blocking these coding sites? Why is it so hard to find on this petition?
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.)<p>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"
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.<p>From the school's perspective their relationship with programming was adversarial, trying to prevent students from breaking into things or defacing the lab equipment.<p>I wonder if this is still the case.
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.
Title should probably remove the editorialization "to prevent kids from coding." It's not clear that that's the intent behind the blocking.
It looks like some clever kids have figured out how to use repl.it to bypass school blockers.<p>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.<p>It looks like the technique is pretty widely known, so schools are getting wise.<p>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.
IMO seems like another attempt at using a platform not for ads for ads.<p>Replit has used the following platforms for ads that shouldn't be used for ads:<p>- change.org
- ProductHunt
- HackerNews<p>Why not use a mainstream form of ads?
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.<p>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.<p>Unless schools are blocking every single tool that assist with coding like khan academy, I don't really see the issue.
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.<p>There is a real fear amongst some schools that cmd/psh and programming tools can be used for hacking.
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!