Some Schools Are Blocking Replit to Prevent Kids from Coding
twitter.com
twitter.com
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
There is a real fear amongst some schools that cmd/psh and programming tools can be used for hacking.
Well.
Not 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.