You can just use a service like SMSPVA, phone verification doesn't break anonymity. It's a reasonable anti-spam measure, you have to burn a tiny amount of cryptocurrency in order to register.
What do you mean? Monero is definitely anonymous. Obviously all cryptocurrencies aren't anonymous, but anyone with half a brain can understand that I'm referring to anonymous cryptocurrencies.
Many of these services use a limited pool of phone numbers that have already been used to register accounts on Twitter, and Twitter won't let you use them for fresh signups.
Glad to hear they thought of that - I haven't used this particular service before. However, I just looked at it and there are zero United States numbers available to rent for Twitter signups right now.
I could use one of the European numbers but given my experience with how sensitive Twitter is to sketchiness I'm guessing I'd get more random phone number verification requests.
Sometimes you can't even view tweets if you're not logged in (there are workarounds though). Viewing media and threads also has extremely limited functionality in embedded contexts.
This move is actually hilarious considering Twitter's policies.
Right, I remember you used to be able to sign up for Twitter solely with a phone number (and post tweets via SMS, a feature which I used every so often). You can see that if you look at an old archive of the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20061203201128/http://twitter.co... (heh, also gotta love that the site was so small they can just show some random recent tweets and users right on the homepage)
This was in the days before legit smartphones so running an actual "twitter client" was out of the question. Of course that all quickly changed with the advent of smartphones like the iPhone.
Twitter’s financials are public. They aren’t making any obvious money from having your phone. It’s more likely there to let them stop people from harvesting/selling accounts.
Understanding that "Free" is the only way to grow a platform, once there, I'd happily pay $X/month for Facebook, Twitter, etc that's customizable to the format and amount of tracking that I want.
That is completely unrealistic, of course, but that wasn't your question, so I can happily and honestly answer "Yes" :)
there used to be such a service, App.net[0], which was basically "paid twitter". It was pretty awesome. Not only was there the App.net client which was an analogue to Twitter, devs could make other services which you could log into with your App.net identity, for example there was an excellent Instagram-like app "Favd"[1] that could post to Twitter, FB and App.net.
Do you know what's the best thing about that? It's okay if only a part of the population pays for each service.
If enough people have Twitter Blue to make Twitter profitable, and are enjoying the comments and type of content the tons of non-paying users are making, it's win-win.
One person hast Twitter Blue, another one has Facebook Deluxe, and some others don't pay for online services at all. But these who don't pay are creating content people are willing to pay for.
That's how free to play games work, so it's not unrealistic.
Oh they don't - you can sign-up without one, and iirc, Twitter doesn't indicate anywhere that one is needed. But all new accounts just happen to exhibit suspicious activity and are blocked until submitting a phone number. This is all mere coincidence, and certainly not an effort by Twitter to conceal how much personal information they want for an account.
Reddit has the same bullshit problem. The website works perfectly fine on mobile, except it keeps trying to force you to use the app for absolutely no reason, and the app often works poorly.
If they want to be a walled garden, they can be a walled garden. But no embeds, no free traffic from all the news sites and blogs. No free traffic from google. You can't have the cake and eat it too. All of this scumbaggery with serving X to google and serving Z to the humans has to go. It's internet cancer. And I don't use that word ligthly. It's not just Twitter that does this, instagram, facebook, etc. all do this. It should have been regulated away a long time ago and harshly fined because THAT is what makes the current internet not open. Internet is about free(ish) access to information, and like it or not, Twitter is the current "breaking news" creator and aggeregator #1 (by orders of magnitude). If an adult voluntarily posts content to twitter, content that is intended to be public, an twitter tries to prevent public access to that information, a reaction to that should be disgust, not saying "what's in in for twitter". What's in it for ME. Me. Me. Me. I. My family. Maybe my friends. My company. Everyone else can go fuck themselves, right?
The situation with Ukraine and a lot of news and media breaking on twitter are a current, glaring representation of how twitter makes money on people's suffering... but it isn't the first and sadly won't be the last, because of people like you.
In order to begin being an actual useful resource on the internet they have to, among other things, get rid of the feature where you have to click "load more" 10 times to read the small fraction of replies to a Tweet that Twitter does not censor completely.
If a tweet has 100 replies, it generally only shows the most pro-neocon/PC response, and you have to click "Load More", then it will show 1 more response, you keep clicking "Load More", and eventually there's no more "Load More" button, and you've only seen 5 responses. Where are the other 95 responses that Twitter deemed to be wrongthink?
Why would anyone use a website like that when you're only getting curated propaganda? It's like sitting in front of the TV and only watching ads with no actual content.
That "load more" is extremely annoying. I believe it's an a/b test because I only see it with one of my accounts. It seems to get triggered when the http referer is from another social site. I found you can get rid of it by re-opening the link in another tab by control-clicking on the tweet timestamp.
This is not a real problem as tweets and their replies are all publicly available. Likely brought on yourself by using ad-blocker or something triggering it (which Twitter has every right to try to encourage you to log in or use the site more regularly)
Have you tried making any accounts online these days without a phone number? Good luck — there are extremely few services left that allow it due to “abuse” and other nonsense.
My favorite case of this is that you used to be able to create a google account through android without a phone number. Assuming this is still possible, if you do this your account will be immediately suspended for “suspicious activity” and require a phone to unlock.
I use one service that requires a phone number: Signal. I'm doing alright on the internet. If your service requires a phone number to sign up, I will not use it, period. If more people thought like me this would be a problem, but the majority seems hell bent on spreading their cheeks for peanuts these days.
"Hate" / "Dislike" / Critical Post / Negative comment, is just as valid as "Love" / "Like" / Positive Comment. Either may be productive (constructive feedback or earned support) or unproductive (pointless criticism as much as baseless love).
In fact, as owner of any service/product/store, constructive negative feedback is valuable. My wife is a store manager and subscribes to "Feedback is a gift" philosophy - is a customer is going to leave, she'd appreciate knowing, in constructive way, why they are leaving.
There's a general tone of commentary here that it's good that Twitter is accepting Tor connections. I think that's a good thing. There's also a lot of side-commentary about how Twitter shouldn't be overly-praised for this because they follow plenty of other dark patterns, most notably requiring a login and collecting phone numbers and other personal information. The main reason I hate Twitter is because of their dark patterns (and shitty UI). If they stopped collecting phone numbers, I'd hate them less.
Originally Twitter was over SMS. That's why Tweets were limited to 140 characters; it's all you could fit. So they did have a reason to ask for phone numbers from the beginning.
Ok but now, what feels like a 100 years later, they don't anymore. It's just another data point to identify users and sell that information eventually.
They're typically required. Even if you manage to create an account without a phone number, you'll soon start get notifications from Twitter saying that your account is at risk and you have to add your phone for verification (at least that's what happened to a friend of mine who set up an account some time last year)
It's possible to create a twitter account without a phone number. You'll initially get suspended and get an email stating why. Just reply to that email (open a ticket) and they will approve the account without a phone number.
I can't imagine many of the people accessing twitter over Tor are going to be okay with running random executable code to be able to read text. But maybe in this context they're assuming people will be using Tor that don't care about privacy and only care about access.
Twitter is almost useless now unless you login with an account (that requires a phone number). I'm not sure who the subset of Tor users are who are comfortable logging into a service such as Twitter?
> We need to be in an international military crisis in order that basic values of privacy prevail at home? ... That does not speak well of our quiescent "western values"
It also doesn't speak ill of those values, it says nothing about the values. You're conflating two separate matters: the values, and the effort required to hold/protect them.
Liberty requires a persistent effort to maintain against politicians, malevolent actors generally, that lust after increased power (for themselves and frequently the state as well).
It makes sense that that would be a process of erosion and (hopefully) rejuvination across years, decades, generations, centuries - as the counter forces battle. If you're really fortunate you live in a system that makes it a lot more difficult for the power-seeking politicians to trample on your rights.
Just because something of value requires effort to keep or maintain, that doesn't debase its value or otherwise speak to how great or how little the value is. Very valuable things often require an enormous investment to acquire and keep over time. At all times entropy is trying to destroy well ordered systems (eg democratic, constitutional, rights-protecting governments), it takes a huge amount of resources just to forestall that and you can never stop investing into it for long.
It also takes an enormous investment of resources to maintain authoritarian, anti-rights systems. They can never stop using force to oppress the population, they have to constantly crush the spirit of the population. They have to divert human potential on a persistent basis toward destruction, oppression, violent actions against the citizenship, actions inspiring fear/terror/dread. They can never stop spewing propaganda meant to keep the population in check, docile, in fear, etc.
That systems require active effort and mental attention to maintain, tells you very little about whether they're good or bad, the same goes for values a person holds (which also require effort to maintain), or the values a culture of people broadly holds.
> Liberty requires a persistent effort to maintain against politicians, malevolent actors generally
Politicians do not in general work to abolish democracy. The vast majority, in democratic countries, accepts and supports it. To just label them "malevolent actors" without even feeling the need to explain it is nihilistic cynicism: if all you ever do is scream at the top of your lung that someone is a corrupt scumbag, they will either adapt and become someone like that or quit.
Thanks for a thoughtful reply adventured. As I said, it gives me an
uneasy/weird feeling, which is to say I haven't quite unpacked it
myself yet. Your response is helping me.
> It also doesn't speak ill of those values
Well actually it does, at least in that it highlights them as
inconsistent. Clearly my issue is that values prone to change
according to circumstance are weaker, as generally one holds
consistent values higher than fickle ones. However, your further
points are interesting and deserve thought.
> You're conflating two separate matters, the values, and the effort
required to hold/protect them.
Perhaps in a short, pithy comment I'm not taking time to distinguish
the values (which I love and live by, and believe most of my
countrymen uphold) and the laziness by which some fail to consistently
and robustly stand up for them.
> Liberty requires a persistent effort to maintain against politicians,
malevolent actors generally
Absolutely, and would you agree that we've slipped dreadfully in that
duty in recent years?
> Just because something of value requires effort to keep or maintain,
that doesn't debase its value or otherwise speak or how great or how
little the value is.
I am glad you think that, and we agree. I am not sure if you thought I
said otherwise?
> Very valuable things often require an enormous investment to acquire
and keep over time.
Like previous wars in which my family have fought at great cost.
> At all times entropy is trying to destroy well ordered systems
No. Sorry. That's too simplistic a take. I'm not talking about the
constant gardening required to maintain structures of value, I am
alluding to the malevolent domestic forces who would sell our hard won
freedom, democracy and liberal values down the swanny for their own
aggrandisement and profit when it suits them, and sing a different
song when virtue signalling calls.
Let me try to be clearer what I am attacking here. It is sloppy and
selective values. It is a laziness that lies somewhere between "sworn
enemies unite against a common foe", and a prejudiced framing effect.
We're all very happy to cheer on Tor, VPNs or other instruments that
circumvent tyranny, so long as it's not _our_ tyranny. All of us have
benefited hugely from the freedoms immanent therein. We built these
tools (US Navy), and the internet itself (DARPA), in pursuit of
spreading the same values that we no longer have the stomach to
robustly defend here.
Yet when a tyrant goes crazy in Overthereistan we're all sweetness
and light and our digital "doors are always open for freedom". Those
double standards are not a good look.
I need more time to think about it, but maybe what irks me here is
simple hypocrisy.
> We need to be in an international military crisis in order that basic values of privacy prevail at home?
Pretty much, yes. The US benefitted hugely from defining itself in opposition to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It's a major countervailing force to growing to resemble your opponent.
Arguably, the US hasn't really figured out how to effectively define itself in opposition to China, given how liberally China has been copying parts of the US economic playbook (ie. "Capitalism with Chinese characteristics"), which itself is a trick the Soviets never managed.
If most Tor traffic to your service is abuse where it may be worthwhile to block it completely, then a catastrophic event that gets more honest people using Tor may make it worthwhile to unblock it.
My site blocks tor nodes not because I hate privacy, but because the overwhelming majority of spammy / abusive content was posted over the tor network, and blocking tor improved the signal:noise ratio better than the best anti-spam tools :/
Use nitter.net to view twitter. Just http://nitter.net/username. It barely uses javascript (except if you want to watch video), no ads, no popups, no login, no "trending" section. Just the content of the person you're trying to read content from. All twitter links are replaced with nitter links, so navigation isn't an issue. Even if I had a Twitter account I'd use Nitter to browse. It's a lighter experience with no extra crap.
thanks, i really like this. i've been using the ublock zapper to get around twitters obnoxious sign up wall.
i feel like websites like this, and archive.ph are a sign of the future web. very little or now javascript, very light and fast - it inspires me to want to build something again.
it's not a good solution tbh, it's like blocking html elements but on reload they come back. the zapper is integrated into ublock, if you click on the icon its there.
i think a better solution is blocking cookies as another comment mentioned, but for me that seems to cause an infinite reload loop.
Oooh this is great, thank you. I've been wanting to set up something like this for quite a while and haven't really spent the time to figure out how I'd do it. Glad to have an option just land on my screen like this! Cheers :)
Also just realized there are one or two other services they could redirect (e.g. Medium -> scribe.rip). Will see if it's feasible for them to easily add...
Which have terrible discovery compared to social media. Make a website about a hobby and you're unlikely to get many views. Post it on social media and you'll get way more
A surprising amount of timely information from public institutions (everything from road conditions to "it's not a real nuclear attack[0]") is often much more accessible via Twitter than anywhere else.
It's a little relevant. Twitter limits what you can see when you're logged out now, and if Twitter were breached your personally identifying information could leak out and put you in a dangerous situation.
it's a little relevant if you're the person sharing sensitive information that the government is trying to suppress. And if you're doing that, then yeah, take steps to keep yourself safe.
if you're just trying to read information, like 99% of the people on twitter, then it's not really relevant. it's an unlikely hypothetical in the first place that twitter leaks those phone numbers, but no government is using phone numbers to hunt down consumers of information.
Whom do you trust your identity with more? Twitter or the regime you're under?
As much as I despise Twitter, I'd much rather that they exclusively know my identity than both they and the regime. This isn't to say that I agree with Twitter requiring phone numbers.
Twitter is not a "leftist organization". Contrary to the belief of the somewhat unhinged, there's no conservative-hating conspiracy of tech giants, which are on the whole not particularly left-leaning where it counts. There are absolutely conservatives on Twitter; there have always been and it remains that way now.
Twitter literally banned the sitting President of the United States, a Republican. Other Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene have had their accounts banned, while this has never happened to a Democrat. People were banned for questioning COVID (e.g. the lab leak hypothesis), banned for questioning the 2020 Presidential election's integrity (yet nobody was banned for speculating on Russian interference and calling Trump illegitimate in 2016), banned for misgendering or deadnaming transgenders. Conveniently all the wrongthink that fall squarely in opposition to progressive ideology.
I don't think anyone believes there's a secret conspiracy, it's more that the type of people who work in programming, and particularly for a Bay Area company like Twitter, tend to be very progressive. It's the same miasma that clouds the mainstream media, academia, and now most corporate PR.
Tried it two times in last six months. Once via the Android app and the second time on the website on my laptop. Both accounts were blocked after less than 15 minutes without even doing anything (except following a few accounts which Twitter suggested based on my interests... [0]). Both times they wanted a phone number to unlock.
I tried to contact the support, but they never responded.
[0] different accounts, based on different interests
It's getting even better. I just logged into one of the suspended accounts. Pretty much everything is locked, but without any information about the suspension. It's pretty much "Oops, something went wrong. Please try again later." on everything.
Ok, let's try it with the "Twitter privacy policy inquiries" form (while logged in). Nope, can't submit anything, because of the suspension. So why not have some fun? Just sent a GDPR request via the "suspension appeal" form. Why? For the lulz and to have some legal leverage.
Not even five minutes passed and I got a email. My account is not suspended anymore... WTF twitter?
meh. without the mandatory mobile verification, twitter is simply pointless to use via tor. maybe you are registered via mobile in a different country and you are currently in a hostile nation. if you are registered in the same country you are in, speaking against the government is pointless.
maybe there is a usecase, i dont know. i stopped twitter back in 2013 i think. the signal to noise ratio was difficult back then, i cant imagine what it is now. sorry.
i would disagree. ISPs "generally" do not willy nilly restrict access to websites out of pleasure. it is either those anti-piracy shenanigans or other than that almost always government mandated. if a government DOES NOT want you to use twitter, your using it signifies to them you are a person of interest and they can put more efforts into finding you. i know because i have been a subject to those enquiries. They are not fun
It's not well phrased; I think OP is trying to say that if/since you cannot pass Twitter's mandatory mobile verification, you can't do anything on Twitter anyway, so Tor is pointless.
I could be mis-interpreting.
I agree that supporting Tor, but mandating phone, are completely contradictory stances for a platform to take. None of the posts here so far about "circumventing ISP blocks" feel persuasive or even realistic - if ISP is blocking platform such as twitter, they are doing it for a reason, and 9 times out of 10, that reason extends to you not wanting to give up your phone.
To all the people who complain that Twitter over Tor is pointless because you have to login: it's not.
A lot of people might have no concerns with identifying themselves with twitter but might be blocked by their ISPs or worried about some governments tracking them down.
In those cases twitter over Tor makes a lot of sense.
(and no, I'm not a fan of twitter myself and I don't use it)
why would it be pointless? everything should be anonymous by default. that's how the internet always worked before corpo scum shat all over it.
now the next question is whether you can actually _do_ anything over Tor on there. do they block you from half the functionality, such as searching, scrolling, etc? do they still pointlessly force a phone number as opposed to it being optional (why did this trend start right after snowden anyway)? can you even write a post? is this article just some PR generated crap and tor is still actually fully blocked? are they able to implement their trivial web application without javascript yet (so tor browser can be run in safe mode)? i made some accounts on tor 10 years ago there and they silently got deleted / shadowbanned (it seems the ones i used to DM a pre existing account got deleted)
The post you reply to implies that you have to login in order to access it.
That's a good first step IMO, as this should balance out some fears of abuse from them. But I wouldn't be surprised if you can't create an account from Tor.
I wish this page elaborated on what "Additional domains used to enable parts of site functionality" means. What additional functionality is available when I use the different links?
Just poking at the two home pages (tor and not) twitterhbmit57bzbcjnujedrn7uk73geo4ackio4lxdj6t7w6f4zsid.onion is the equivalent of the abs.twimg.com CDN, so assets, javascript files, fonts, etc
I don't immediately see what twitterhpgjerufcvrmzerg2novpipy42rk3anvb5b7np4zggm4rwaqd.onion is being use for though.
IMO this is not very useful because any speech for which you’d want anonymity will likely be banned on Twitter anyway.
You can jump through the hoops of procuring anonymous email address and phone numbers but in the end Twitter will ban any real political dissent. Cf. Last two years.
> He was banned for misinformation regarding the Covid-19 vaccine...
Your summary of his work is grossly overstating the connection to mRNA vaccines — it's about as accurate as saying someone who contributed to ViolaWWW was the inventory of React — but he's definitely a great example of how politics can cloud even an accomplished scientist's judgment. Fortunately for the rest of us, however, the scientific process doesn't take past accomplishments into account and his later non-rigorous claims were quickly found wanting.
> The first mRNA vaccine experiments were carried out by P. Felgner, J. Wolff, G. Rhodes, R.W. Malone and D. Carson. P. They completed a number of mRNA vaccination studies that resulted in nine patents on mRNA vaccination with a shared priority date of March 21, 1989. One experiment documented that NEF (an HIV protein) mRNA vaccination in mice, followed by HIV challenge reduced positively stained cells by 2-fold and p24 expression was reduced by 50% at eight weeks
Is this inaccurate to you? Because there are 9 US patents that say otherwise.
> Your summary of his work is grossly overstating the connection to mRNA vaccines
Yeah, he only ran the first mRNA vaccine experiments and designed the first mRNA platforms is all.
> it's about as accurate as saying someone who contributed to ViolaWWW was the inventory of React
Terrible analogy, Malone worked directly on the first mRNA vaccine experiments.
> but he's definitely a great example of how politics can cloud even an accomplished scientist's judgment.
Or it's a great example of how politics can cloud your judgement of scientists going against the status quo. It's not new.
> Fortunately for the rest of us, however, the scientific process doesn't take past accomplishments into account and his later non-rigorous claims were quickly found wanting.
Truth is being arbitrated by tech monopolies and politicians, not mRNA scientists like Dr. Malone. The scientific process is not being followed by Twitter.
The scientific method needs criticism, it's strange to ban dissent in the name of science.
Nobody is being banned for dissent, they're having incorrect claims challenged and removed from sources like Wikipedia which are supposed to be conveying accurate information. His work which met the standards of science is accurately described in his Wikipedia page; his later claims which did not meet scientific standards are also accurately described.
> The first mRNA vaccine experiments were carried out by P. Felgner, J. Wolff, G. Rhodes, R.W. Malone and D. Carson. P. They completed a number of mRNA vaccination studies that resulted in nine patents on mRNA vaccination with a shared priority date of March 21, 1989. One experiment documented that NEF (an HIV protein) mRNA vaccination in mice, followed by HIV challenge reduced positively stained cells by 2-fold and p24 expression was reduced by 50% at eight weeks
Is that accurate or not?
> Nobody is being banned for dissent, they're having incorrect claims challenged and removed from sources
Dr. Robert Malone was banned from Twitter (and LinkedIn, and Youtube) for his views on the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines.
Again, nobody is saying that he wasn’t one of the people involved in the early days but as your own quote shows he wasn’t “the inventor” but one of a group and his work was only a small part of the work by hundreds of other scientists which lead to the vaccines in use 4 decades later. Since the question wasn’t how the vaccines work conceptually but rather whether they were safe, the people who actually did that work and got specific vaccines through rigorous safety testing have more relevant expertise and, of course, actual data.
The bigger point you’re missing, however, is that it’s science, not religion, and is about testable claims rather than someone’s past reputation. The fact that he was involved in an advance doesn’t mean he’s authoritative about the entire field for all time or remove the need for any new claims he makes to be critically tested. His Twitter account was banned for lying, not asking questions. He would have been fine if he’d been participating in the scientific process — asking questions, submitting meta-analysis papers, running experiments, etc. are all easily available options to someone with his background should he be willing to hold himself to scientific standards again. He hasn’t done that because he knows these claims won’t hold up to scrutiny.
> Nobody is being banned for dissent, they're having incorrect claims challenged and removed from sources like Wikipedia
Dissent is disagreement. People are in fact and explicitly being banned for disagreeing with the official information on COVID vaccines. Science is always changing and dissent is necessary to advancing our understanding of the world, whether it ends up being correct or not. When you ban people for “misinformation” you are impeding the scientific process.
It is still the case that nobody is getting banned for simple dissent. Malone knowingly lied about safety, making claims he knew were untrue at the time he made them and continued to do so. Had he simply said “I don’t agree with this” his account would still be active like all of the other people who do this.
Twitter is also not the scientific process. If he wanted to go back to holding himself up to the standards of a scientist, that would involve doing actual research or participating in the community processes - for example, I’m sure his reputation is enough that he’d have no trouble submitting a letter or meta-analysis to any journal and having it be read. He’s chosen not to do that because he knows that these claims won’t pass muster.
> Malone knowingly lied about safety, making claims he knew were untrue at the time he made them and continued to do so.
What is your source for this? Aren’t you assuming bad faith?
Regardless I think you are missing the point. Dissent by definition will not have to conform to your worldview or notions of what is true or who is considered a scientist. If you only allow things which your worldview considers true, that is not real dissent. Twitter does not permit real dissent on their platform.
There was a time when the claims Galileo was making about the sun were not considered true nor were they acknowledged by scientists. Really consider that.
> Had he simply said “I don’t agree with this” his account would still be active like all of the other people who do this.
No, if I tweeted “I do not agree that the vaccines are safe enough.” I would get banned. How do I know this? Because I tweeted this and I was banned from Twitter. You’re not being honest.
There are certainly examples of political dissent that are not regularly banned by Twitter but that doesn’t negate the fact that there are also examples of political dissent that are regularly banned by Twitter, which is the point of the OP.
Shallot (at least that version) is for v2 onions only which are truncated sha1 hashes of RSA keys. v3 onions are base32-encoded ed25519 so 7 characters translates to needing to force 35 bits of ed25519, which according to [2] should be in the same ballpark but does not get specific as far as I read.
twitter3e4tixl4xyajtrzo62zg5vztmjuricljdp2c5kshju4avyoid.onion does not work due to CORS. (For me, it doesn't matter much since Twitter depends on JavaScript and Nitter does not.)
Big fan of Nitter. Switched to it when Twitter killed off non-javascript last year, and I rewrite all Twitter links in it when resharing with others. Works great in w3m, or in NoScript without need to whitelist a social media tracker.
Would it be possible for one of you experienced NoScript'ers to write a set of tips and tricks? I have been using NoScript for about a month since someone mentioned it here, and it has been wonderful. I never imagined I could opt out of just the trackers and APM bloat so easily, and my phone battery life is improved dramatically too. But I bet there are more things like Nitter that I haven't yet discovered.
I'm not sure what to focus on. On the desktop, I combine uMatrix+NoScript for better coverage of CSS, cookies and images across domains, while still having convenient one click whitelisting in NoScript. That's just a personal preference.
Expand/collapse sections that default to collapsed. Particularly annoying if no one bothered to put fallback CSS in a noscript block. Using custom CSS style rules can help with this. Unfortunately Mozilla killed the vast majority of their extension ecosystem on the phone. One silly hack workaround I found was that their darkmode extension they did whitelist allows custom CSS rules that can be used to fix things like this. It isn't nearly as elegant as using Stylus on the desktop for this.
Reader mode can help with broken sites. Disabling all CSS also a quick fix if you just want to read stuff. Almost like browsing with w3m. (View→Page Style→No Style)
Dynamic image loading - regrettably despite HTML support for it, many sites use JS hacks and are probably pretty disinclined to support NoScript users. I've made custom fixes in violentmonkey for sites I care about on the desktop - mostly out of sheer cussedness. No solution on mobile that I know of apart from whitelisting.
old.reddit.com ♥ - shame Mozilla killed the addon to autorewrite the urls.
The entire Internet is available via Tor but only via exit nodes, saying that it "doesn't make it any more available" to offer it directly within Tor shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how Tor works.
If you can access a service, any service, completely within Tor without having to exit to the Internet, this significantly improves your anonymity[1] since you no longer have to go through an exit node, and as such the amount of nodes you can "exit" from increases substantially.
[1]: That is, the anonymity that Tor already provides. Obviously signing up for Twitter under your real name with your phone number will compromise your anonymity regardless, but that is not the problem that Tor solves.
I'm pretty sure I'm right, and that I understand how Tor works.
The existence of the Twitter onion service does not help a single person access Twitter that couldn't already access it anonymously without the onion service just by using Tor normally.
Right, I didn't mention it explicitly, but that was part of the anonymity guarantees.
A middle node has no way of knowing what your final destination will be. An exit node can see you're contacting twitter. Luckily, traffic is mostly encrypted these days, but not always, and there are ways to attack https (looking at packet length and traffic patterns can tell you what kind of activity is being done, researchers even showed that they could tell what movie someone was watching on Netflix).
I get the arguments he's listed. But to be honest, and this may just be me being pessimistic, I suspect the real reason is that it's just a cool thing for an interested dev to want to set up, and the list of reasons at that URL is really just a list of excuses.
This Ukraine crisis is a goldmine for fans of hypocrisy and cant.
I thought Shell's [0] trying to grab the moral high ground by withdrawing from Russia would take some beating. But "cancel culture central" Twatter spluttering about censorship gives it a run for its money.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 260 ms ] threadhttps://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-supported-... lists the Tor network as a supported browser
Implemented using https://github.com/alecmuffett/eotk/
Edit: made URLs clickable as well.
More details from the thread:
* https://help.twitter.com/en/using-twitter/twitter-supported-... lists the Tor network as a supported browser
* Implemented using https://github.com/alecmuffett/eotk/
Twitter does not want Twitter users to have privacy or pseudonymity from Twitter.
I could use one of the European numbers but given my experience with how sensitive Twitter is to sketchiness I'm guessing I'd get more random phone number verification requests.
This move is actually hilarious considering Twitter's policies.
"Since December 1st, some Internet providers in Russia have started to block access to Tor."
https://blog.torproject.org/tor-censorship-in-russia/
So I'm not sure if Twitters Tor support helps a lot.
Now please get rid of the 'have you signed in yet?' popup, and you'll be back to being an actual useful resource on the internet.
[edit]: and in the meantime, I'll keep on using nitter.net
This was in the days before legit smartphones so running an actual "twitter client" was out of the question. Of course that all quickly changed with the advent of smartphones like the iPhone.
I may be in minority, but yes.
Understanding that "Free" is the only way to grow a platform, once there, I'd happily pay $X/month for Facebook, Twitter, etc that's customizable to the format and amount of tracking that I want.
That is completely unrealistic, of course, but that wasn't your question, so I can happily and honestly answer "Yes" :)
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20130116194906/https://app.net/a...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140922104251/http://pic.favd.n...
Do you know what's the best thing about that? It's okay if only a part of the population pays for each service.
If enough people have Twitter Blue to make Twitter profitable, and are enjoying the comments and type of content the tons of non-paying users are making, it's win-win.
One person hast Twitter Blue, another one has Facebook Deluxe, and some others don't pay for online services at all. But these who don't pay are creating content people are willing to pay for.
That's how free to play games work, so it's not unrealistic.
The situation with Ukraine and a lot of news and media breaking on twitter are a current, glaring representation of how twitter makes money on people's suffering... but it isn't the first and sadly won't be the last, because of people like you.
If a tweet has 100 replies, it generally only shows the most pro-neocon/PC response, and you have to click "Load More", then it will show 1 more response, you keep clicking "Load More", and eventually there's no more "Load More" button, and you've only seen 5 responses. Where are the other 95 responses that Twitter deemed to be wrongthink?
Why would anyone use a website like that when you're only getting curated propaganda? It's like sitting in front of the TV and only watching ads with no actual content.
My favorite case of this is that you used to be able to create a google account through android without a phone number. Assuming this is still possible, if you do this your account will be immediately suspended for “suspicious activity” and require a phone to unlock.
Don't open a Tesla, Facebook, or crypto article, you'll be shocked to see how many people hate those things and are commenting anyway!
"Hate" / "Dislike" / Critical Post / Negative comment, is just as valid as "Love" / "Like" / Positive Comment. Either may be productive (constructive feedback or earned support) or unproductive (pointless criticism as much as baseless love).
In fact, as owner of any service/product/store, constructive negative feedback is valuable. My wife is a store manager and subscribes to "Feedback is a gift" philosophy - is a customer is going to leave, she'd appreciate knowing, in constructive way, why they are leaving.
But that gives me a weird feeling to be honest.
We need to be in an international military crisis in order that basic values of privacy prevail at home?
That does not speak well of our quiescent "western values"
It also doesn't speak ill of those values, it says nothing about the values. You're conflating two separate matters: the values, and the effort required to hold/protect them.
Liberty requires a persistent effort to maintain against politicians, malevolent actors generally, that lust after increased power (for themselves and frequently the state as well).
It makes sense that that would be a process of erosion and (hopefully) rejuvination across years, decades, generations, centuries - as the counter forces battle. If you're really fortunate you live in a system that makes it a lot more difficult for the power-seeking politicians to trample on your rights.
Just because something of value requires effort to keep or maintain, that doesn't debase its value or otherwise speak to how great or how little the value is. Very valuable things often require an enormous investment to acquire and keep over time. At all times entropy is trying to destroy well ordered systems (eg democratic, constitutional, rights-protecting governments), it takes a huge amount of resources just to forestall that and you can never stop investing into it for long.
It also takes an enormous investment of resources to maintain authoritarian, anti-rights systems. They can never stop using force to oppress the population, they have to constantly crush the spirit of the population. They have to divert human potential on a persistent basis toward destruction, oppression, violent actions against the citizenship, actions inspiring fear/terror/dread. They can never stop spewing propaganda meant to keep the population in check, docile, in fear, etc.
That systems require active effort and mental attention to maintain, tells you very little about whether they're good or bad, the same goes for values a person holds (which also require effort to maintain), or the values a culture of people broadly holds.
Politicians do not in general work to abolish democracy. The vast majority, in democratic countries, accepts and supports it. To just label them "malevolent actors" without even feeling the need to explain it is nihilistic cynicism: if all you ever do is scream at the top of your lung that someone is a corrupt scumbag, they will either adapt and become someone like that or quit.
> It also doesn't speak ill of those values
Well actually it does, at least in that it highlights them as inconsistent. Clearly my issue is that values prone to change according to circumstance are weaker, as generally one holds consistent values higher than fickle ones. However, your further points are interesting and deserve thought.
> You're conflating two separate matters, the values, and the effort required to hold/protect them.
Perhaps in a short, pithy comment I'm not taking time to distinguish the values (which I love and live by, and believe most of my countrymen uphold) and the laziness by which some fail to consistently and robustly stand up for them.
> Liberty requires a persistent effort to maintain against politicians, malevolent actors generally
Absolutely, and would you agree that we've slipped dreadfully in that duty in recent years?
> Just because something of value requires effort to keep or maintain, that doesn't debase its value or otherwise speak or how great or how little the value is.
I am glad you think that, and we agree. I am not sure if you thought I said otherwise?
> Very valuable things often require an enormous investment to acquire and keep over time.
Like previous wars in which my family have fought at great cost.
> At all times entropy is trying to destroy well ordered systems
No. Sorry. That's too simplistic a take. I'm not talking about the constant gardening required to maintain structures of value, I am alluding to the malevolent domestic forces who would sell our hard won freedom, democracy and liberal values down the swanny for their own aggrandisement and profit when it suits them, and sing a different song when virtue signalling calls.
Let me try to be clearer what I am attacking here. It is sloppy and selective values. It is a laziness that lies somewhere between "sworn enemies unite against a common foe", and a prejudiced framing effect.
We're all very happy to cheer on Tor, VPNs or other instruments that circumvent tyranny, so long as it's not _our_ tyranny. All of us have benefited hugely from the freedoms immanent therein. We built these tools (US Navy), and the internet itself (DARPA), in pursuit of spreading the same values that we no longer have the stomach to robustly defend here.
Yet when a tyrant goes crazy in Overthereistan we're all sweetness and light and our digital "doors are always open for freedom". Those double standards are not a good look.
I need more time to think about it, but maybe what irks me here is simple hypocrisy.
Pretty much, yes. The US benefitted hugely from defining itself in opposition to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. It's a major countervailing force to growing to resemble your opponent.
Arguably, the US hasn't really figured out how to effectively define itself in opposition to China, given how liberally China has been copying parts of the US economic playbook (ie. "Capitalism with Chinese characteristics"), which itself is a trick the Soviets never managed.
If most Tor traffic to your service is abuse where it may be worthwhile to block it completely, then a catastrophic event that gets more honest people using Tor may make it worthwhile to unblock it.
i feel like websites like this, and archive.ph are a sign of the future web. very little or now javascript, very light and fast - it inspires me to want to build something again.
Or is zapper a separate add on?
i think a better solution is blocking cookies as another comment mentioned, but for me that seems to cause an infinite reload loop.
Guess I am gonna go for nitter in the future.
Also just realized there are one or two other services they could redirect (e.g. Medium -> scribe.rip). Will see if it's feasible for them to easily add...
twitter on Tor circumvents that censorship. giving twitter your phone number is irrelevant to that.
Tell that somebody that websites exists.
I don't think there is so essential information on Twitter that anyone would take the hassle to read it through Tor.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/01/wh...
Be careful out there friends!
if you're just trying to read information, like 99% of the people on twitter, then it's not really relevant. it's an unlikely hypothetical in the first place that twitter leaks those phone numbers, but no government is using phone numbers to hunt down consumers of information.
Until the country you're living in gets your phone number from Twitter...
As much as I despise Twitter, I'd much rather that they exclusively know my identity than both they and the regime. This isn't to say that I agree with Twitter requiring phone numbers.
I don't think anyone believes there's a secret conspiracy, it's more that the type of people who work in programming, and particularly for a Bay Area company like Twitter, tend to be very progressive. It's the same miasma that clouds the mainstream media, academia, and now most corporate PR.
The pattern of "not having provided a phone number" perhaps?
I tried to contact the support, but they never responded.
[0] different accounts, based on different interests
Ok, let's try it with the "Twitter privacy policy inquiries" form (while logged in). Nope, can't submit anything, because of the suspension. So why not have some fun? Just sent a GDPR request via the "suspension appeal" form. Why? For the lulz and to have some legal leverage.
Not even five minutes passed and I got a email. My account is not suspended anymore... WTF twitter?
maybe there is a usecase, i dont know. i stopped twitter back in 2013 i think. the signal to noise ratio was difficult back then, i cant imagine what it is now. sorry.
i literally cannot understand your post. why would you ever want mobile verification unless for (crappy) 2fa purposes?
I could be mis-interpreting.
I agree that supporting Tor, but mandating phone, are completely contradictory stances for a platform to take. None of the posts here so far about "circumventing ISP blocks" feel persuasive or even realistic - if ISP is blocking platform such as twitter, they are doing it for a reason, and 9 times out of 10, that reason extends to you not wanting to give up your phone.
A lot of people might have no concerns with identifying themselves with twitter but might be blocked by their ISPs or worried about some governments tracking them down.
In those cases twitter over Tor makes a lot of sense.
(and no, I'm not a fan of twitter myself and I don't use it)
now the next question is whether you can actually _do_ anything over Tor on there. do they block you from half the functionality, such as searching, scrolling, etc? do they still pointlessly force a phone number as opposed to it being optional (why did this trend start right after snowden anyway)? can you even write a post? is this article just some PR generated crap and tor is still actually fully blocked? are they able to implement their trivial web application without javascript yet (so tor browser can be run in safe mode)? i made some accounts on tor 10 years ago there and they silently got deleted / shadowbanned (it seems the ones i used to DM a pre existing account got deleted)
That's a good first step IMO, as this should balance out some fears of abuse from them. But I wouldn't be surprised if you can't create an account from Tor.
Sure it is.
So they may need additional Tor domains to map the additional domains they normally use.
I don't immediately see what twitterhpgjerufcvrmzerg2novpipy42rk3anvb5b7np4zggm4rwaqd.onion is being use for though.
You can jump through the hoops of procuring anonymous email address and phone numbers but in the end Twitter will ban any real political dissent. Cf. Last two years.
“You may not use Twitter’s services to share false or misleading information about COVID-19 which may lead to harm.”
https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/medical-misin...
Only blessed dissent is permitted.
(had to use l33tspeak, was insta-flagged for saying his name, bot?)
He invented the initial mRNA platform and performed the first mRNA vaccine experiments in 1989.
That info was removed from wikipedia, but here's an archived version:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210614140319/https://en.wikipe...
There's 9 patents in his name for the platforms and his name is all over the original mRNA experiments.
He was banned for misinformation regarding the Covid-19 vaccine...
Your summary of his work is grossly overstating the connection to mRNA vaccines — it's about as accurate as saying someone who contributed to ViolaWWW was the inventory of React — but he's definitely a great example of how politics can cloud even an accomplished scientist's judgment. Fortunately for the rest of us, however, the scientific process doesn't take past accomplishments into account and his later non-rigorous claims were quickly found wanting.
Is this inaccurate to you? Because there are 9 US patents that say otherwise.
> Your summary of his work is grossly overstating the connection to mRNA vaccines
Yeah, he only ran the first mRNA vaccine experiments and designed the first mRNA platforms is all.
> it's about as accurate as saying someone who contributed to ViolaWWW was the inventory of React
Terrible analogy, Malone worked directly on the first mRNA vaccine experiments.
> but he's definitely a great example of how politics can cloud even an accomplished scientist's judgment.
Or it's a great example of how politics can cloud your judgement of scientists going against the status quo. It's not new.
> Fortunately for the rest of us, however, the scientific process doesn't take past accomplishments into account and his later non-rigorous claims were quickly found wanting.
Truth is being arbitrated by tech monopolies and politicians, not mRNA scientists like Dr. Malone. The scientific process is not being followed by Twitter.
The scientific method needs criticism, it's strange to ban dissent in the name of science.
> The first mRNA vaccine experiments were carried out by P. Felgner, J. Wolff, G. Rhodes, R.W. Malone and D. Carson. P. They completed a number of mRNA vaccination studies that resulted in nine patents on mRNA vaccination with a shared priority date of March 21, 1989. One experiment documented that NEF (an HIV protein) mRNA vaccination in mice, followed by HIV challenge reduced positively stained cells by 2-fold and p24 expression was reduced by 50% at eight weeks
Is that accurate or not?
> Nobody is being banned for dissent, they're having incorrect claims challenged and removed from sources
Dr. Robert Malone was banned from Twitter (and LinkedIn, and Youtube) for his views on the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines.
https://twitter.com/rwmalonemd
The bigger point you’re missing, however, is that it’s science, not religion, and is about testable claims rather than someone’s past reputation. The fact that he was involved in an advance doesn’t mean he’s authoritative about the entire field for all time or remove the need for any new claims he makes to be critically tested. His Twitter account was banned for lying, not asking questions. He would have been fine if he’d been participating in the scientific process — asking questions, submitting meta-analysis papers, running experiments, etc. are all easily available options to someone with his background should he be willing to hold himself to scientific standards again. He hasn’t done that because he knows these claims won’t hold up to scrutiny.
Dissent is disagreement. People are in fact and explicitly being banned for disagreeing with the official information on COVID vaccines. Science is always changing and dissent is necessary to advancing our understanding of the world, whether it ends up being correct or not. When you ban people for “misinformation” you are impeding the scientific process.
Twitter is also not the scientific process. If he wanted to go back to holding himself up to the standards of a scientist, that would involve doing actual research or participating in the community processes - for example, I’m sure his reputation is enough that he’d have no trouble submitting a letter or meta-analysis to any journal and having it be read. He’s chosen not to do that because he knows that these claims won’t pass muster.
What is your source for this? Aren’t you assuming bad faith?
Regardless I think you are missing the point. Dissent by definition will not have to conform to your worldview or notions of what is true or who is considered a scientist. If you only allow things which your worldview considers true, that is not real dissent. Twitter does not permit real dissent on their platform.
There was a time when the claims Galileo was making about the sun were not considered true nor were they acknowledged by scientists. Really consider that.
> Had he simply said “I don’t agree with this” his account would still be active like all of the other people who do this.
No, if I tweeted “I do not agree that the vaccines are safe enough.” I would get banned. How do I know this? Because I tweeted this and I was banned from Twitter. You’re not being honest.
I like that quote from your profile, I think I'll start using it!
Fun fact, it's attributed to Socrates often but there's no record of that.
Snopes says they couldn't find any usage earlier than 2008.
But like most Snopes articles that was wrong as there's someone using it from 2006 here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20060529060643/http://freedomkey...
It's easy to get lost in the "evil corporate overlord" idea and forget that companies only ever commit evil because evil is sometimes profitable.
[1] https://github.com/katmagic/Shallot
[1]https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/tree/rend-spec-v3....
[2]https://github.com/cathugger/mkp224o
Thanks!!
Expand/collapse sections that default to collapsed. Particularly annoying if no one bothered to put fallback CSS in a noscript block. Using custom CSS style rules can help with this. Unfortunately Mozilla killed the vast majority of their extension ecosystem on the phone. One silly hack workaround I found was that their darkmode extension they did whitelist allows custom CSS rules that can be used to fix things like this. It isn't nearly as elegant as using Stylus on the desktop for this.
Reader mode can help with broken sites. Disabling all CSS also a quick fix if you just want to read stuff. Almost like browsing with w3m. (View→Page Style→No Style) Dynamic image loading - regrettably despite HTML support for it, many sites use JS hacks and are probably pretty disinclined to support NoScript users. I've made custom fixes in violentmonkey for sites I care about on the desktop - mostly out of sheer cussedness. No solution on mobile that I know of apart from whitelisting.
old.reddit.com ♥ - shame Mozilla killed the addon to autorewrite the urls.
If you can access a service, any service, completely within Tor without having to exit to the Internet, this significantly improves your anonymity[1] since you no longer have to go through an exit node, and as such the amount of nodes you can "exit" from increases substantially.
[1]: That is, the anonymity that Tor already provides. Obviously signing up for Twitter under your real name with your phone number will compromise your anonymity regardless, but that is not the problem that Tor solves.
The existence of the Twitter onion service does not help a single person access Twitter that couldn't already access it anonymously without the onion service just by using Tor normally.
Exit nodes are rarer than other nodes, as they're difficult to host. That limits the bandwidth.
An onion adress doesn't rely on DNS at all.
I think this should provide better bandwidth, availability, and anonimity.
A middle node has no way of knowing what your final destination will be. An exit node can see you're contacting twitter. Luckily, traffic is mostly encrypted these days, but not always, and there are ways to attack https (looking at packet length and traffic patterns can tell you what kind of activity is being done, researchers even showed that they could tell what movie someone was watching on Netflix).
But instead, you cant comment, interact at all. Its just empty profiles that one browses.
I thought Shell's [0] trying to grab the moral high ground by withdrawing from Russia would take some beating. But "cancel culture central" Twatter spluttering about censorship gives it a run for its money.
[0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/06/shell-complic...