Glitch's policy on proxy browsers

Announcements
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Recently, a number of our users have reported that Glitch is being blocked by their institutions due to the repeated creation of proxy applications designed to get around security or policy limitations. While we always want to encourage as much open exploration as possible, the most basic thing we need to protect for our users is access to Glitch itself, so we will begin more strictly enforcing our existing rules around apps which cause people to be denied access to Glitch.

In plain language, this means that proxy apps designed to get around content filters aren’t allowed, and we’re going to be suspending those kinds of apps so that everyone can keep access to Glitch.

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Is this being posted anywhere else, or being linked to. I doubt people who write proxies check the forum.

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That’s a great question! So, “proxy” is one of the top searches in the forum so we know they come here, we’ve also updated our help doc on project suspensions linking to this policy. I’ll also be making note of it in the next monthly newsletter.

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I’m having a hardtime understanding what is even being banned like bots that commit view bots or something you gotta give us an example cause a lot of people use proxies for other reasons. Personally I only use them because I get forced to once in a while to access something.

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If you’re making a proxy browser app to access sites not allowed by your network’s content filters, then that is not welcome on Glitch. Since you said yourself that you use them, it sounds like you know what we are talking about!

If anyone has any questions about how this may impact your account, email support@glitch.com!

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only realized this now, is there any major reason for this move? i dont really see many benefits of doing this

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The benefit is schools stop blocking Glitch from teachers and students using it for assignments.

Glitch being blocked would end up blocking the ability to use proxy browsers on Glitch anyway.

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btw this actually makes sense, because it’s perfectly in line with TOS. By creating a proxy browser enough times to get *.glitch.me blocked, you’re essentially

  • Code that overloads our system and prevents the enjoyment of Glitch by others.

I guess that could be reworded to an “or” statement. I actually had a similar scenario in school, where I had to request science-aggregator.glitch.me for an explicit unblock since *.glitch.me was blocked t the time.

also funnily one of the older forum regulars predicted something like this by asking about them a while ago…

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woulda thought of it as under this thing

You agree to comply with all rules, laws, and regulations relating in any way to your use of the Services including, without limitation, rules about intellectual property rights, the Internet, technology, data, email, and privacy.

but it’s not entirely that. the scary thing with this announcement is that if you make a project following all the rules of your organization, it can still be suspended for the proxy rule if someone else can break the rules of their organization using it

Examples (of cases where Glitch suspends your project) include:

  • Creating a project that contains:

(a link back to this thread :laughing:)

I really hope Glitch uses their discretion with this. for one thing, I build a lot of projects with dependencies from npm, and there are countries where all of npm is blocked. if someone could access a project I made in order to access npm, that would be, I don’t know, bad for my project’s good standing on Glitch, but eh, there’s also some moral angle to resisting censorship.

there’s a limit to how much you can reason about whether you’re following the Glitch terms of service. after all,

We may also terminate or suspend your access to, or ability to use, any and all Services immediately, without prior notice or liability, with or without cause.

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that’s a bit concerning esp when a school has blocked google.com temporarily once while they figured out covid stuff for some reason…

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So how is it now?

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Haha funny story about this. My filter blocked glitch.com as security.proxy so I went to the site and wrote a good paragraph on why it’s not a proxy and how to contact Glitch Support to report proxy sites on Glitch

26 minutes later the site was categorized as computers and I could code once more

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Thank you Glitch for this new change! It’s going to be really helpful convincing our IT staff to unblock Glitch!

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great to hear!
honestly though, glitch staff might want to look into contacting the vendors of major filtering companies and ask them to forward known proxy site compliants over to them for better cooperation :slight_smile:

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