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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
I lost lots of sleep over the past year agonizing over student & teacher emails saying their admins blocked Replit. It’s crucial for the future of our nation that kids have access to powerful tools to learn & build 🇺🇸 Tomorrow we’re announcing a fix for this. Once and for all!
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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
Before I share the news let's answer this question that keeps coming up: "Why would anyone block Replit? What makes it special -- after all, it's just an 'IDE?'"
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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
Replit gives you a full computer in the cloud, instantly, from any device, anywhere in the world. On top of that: tools to make and run practically anything. This is never been done before at scale. This kind of power was exclusive to pros, and is now in the hands of millions.
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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
99.9% of the time this power is directed towards productive use like building & learning. On rare occasions, young people might find it interesting to toy with this power. Most "abuse" is frivolous, like opening Instagram on a school computer.
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JuanR4140
@JuanR4140
Replying to @amasad
It's the students that misuse them that gets Replit blocked. I saw a girl using Replit to log onto Instagram during school hours. Thankfully, it's the end of the school year and the teacher was lenient, but I'm sure if it was mid-year, admins wouldn't hesitate to get it banned.
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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
On still rarer occasions kids might build software that's less than wholesome. Replit Inc is actually the biggest victim in these cases. Kids have written worms, mined bitcoin, and done other naughty things that put a strain on our infra.
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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
A 13 y/o programmer on how he built a large crypto-mining operation on @replit. He built a distributed mining and monitoring software purely on repls. It's against our ToS and we can detect these things and shut it down but we let kids have their fun sometimes 😅
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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
Mischievous hacker kids are nothing new -- almost every tech entrepreneur has a hacking story, which is why we are forgiving first-time offenders. But school admins take a hard line on anything that makes their jobs harder, so banning Replit is the hammer they reach for.
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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
Now we understand the desire to keep kids in schools safe, and we want to do the right thing. We want to make sure people can use Replit to continue to learn & build while limiting the potential risk of having a super powerful cloud computing network at their disposal.
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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
Replying to
@amasad
Technically: our cloud computers are blocked from much of the internet. There are things we still allow like PyPi and NPM for packages. But you should still be able to basically build anything, and students can still work on their side projects, including building web servers.
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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
For Replit Devs using Firewalled at school: if there are services that you think are essential, let us know and we will unblock them.
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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
We feel like this strikes the right balance of keeping kids safe while ensuring access to essential tools to learn a crucial skill for the 21st century. And we've heard great feedback from school administrators.
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Amjad Masad ⠕
@amasad
Those who will nonetheless block this site I'm afraid are not acting in good faith. And in fact, they're actively sabotaging the future careers of kids they're supposed to serve. If that's the case at your school, reach out to me and we'll help you fight it: amjad@repl.it
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