So you kill the thing you are enabling access to, seems sensible. This goes to show X is successful after he took it over and saved it, the evidence is all this crying and faux indignation, "Elon bad, me no support him, me hate him coz media told me so", yet they still want to access it.
I don’t use it, but some government organizations keep doing it. Why on earth they do that, I will never know, but I’m not making an account to read a tweet.
Because some people in positions of power ignore the consequences of using external services.
There has been a bit of a wake up call in this regard in Europe, with many governments making efforts to detach themselves from US corporations, but it's a much larger problem. When a government entity chooses to rely on Whatsapp, or Android, or some other piece of technology bound to a corporation, they are creating a bond between the rights and services they enable and interaction with that corporation.
This nuance is often ignored because "Well everybody uses (thing) anyway" and other shortsighted trains of thought. I'm by no means against opposing X in principle, but the issue at hand is not itself about X, and I suspect a lot of people wouldn't care if it was still Twitter.
This is just like the ad-blocker discussion and Nitter is just as fine as ad blockers. Sometimes official sources make announcements via services they should be prohibited by law from using, so you need to buy into the sour apple and read these announcements by other means, whether that means using an ad blocker or Nitter. There is no copyright infringement because X does not hold the copyright on the (vast majority) of that content.
Also worth noting: I click on Nitter links but I would never in my life click on an "X" link. When I use Nitter, X loses zero ad revenue.
For the decade+ there has been an unofficial town square known as twitter. As the town square has slowly become more gated and overgrown with weeds some people thought giving people a way to access the town square without paying the entrance fee would be helpful. Many found this useful.
Now I think the whole thing is trash, and agree, why use Twitter? But people like journalists and AI executives are still announcing things on Twitter because having a large following seems like a dopamine booster. In this world where people see the following as a source of legitimacy, having a single company own that town square seems...problematic.,
Can I just add too, it's why 'popularity' is an incredibly terrible metric for successfulness on the web
Look at Twitter. If it was good under Dorsey (debatable, it did have pretty notable censorship) and Musk ruins it, why are people 'still on it'? Because Musk did a good job? Not necessarily. It takes time to build a new product, and get your friends to switch over. Switching costs. I'm on a platform because Avicebron is on it, because Alice is on it, because Bob is on it
Same goes for sites like (especially) Facebook. It's 'popular'! 3 billion active users! (They lie a lot and probably about that and they make it very easy to be 'active', by faking the notifications or giving you none at all, like increasingly with messages over the years) Well, it's hard to 'just move'. Facebook has become and has been for a while an utterly shit product that deserves the corporate death penalty. People being on it is not the slam dunk people think it is
This comes across to me as a surprising question - why do you assume there's such a bio at all, rather than it being developed by someone anonymous, as is the case for many questionably legal privacy tools?
Nitter is/was a free, open-source alternative front-end for X (formerly Twitter) that lets users view public posts without an account, ads, or tracking scripts.
I don’t think nitter can run legally. It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn. I think its (or systems like it) only possible future is to acknowledge it doesn’t have a legal future.
Normally I'd agree, but in this case the people on the other end of the issue rarely care about how vague the legality of something is before going forward with it, so I think it's only reasonable to extend the same logic to nitter.
If one party is reckless in legal terms, then that's their right and they will bear the consequences. It's generally considered to be a bad attitude to have, which is why people generally don't have it, and I'm going to need an explanation on how wishing that onto Nitter isn't in practice wanting someone else to burn at the stake to spite a third party, especially given the enormous difference in economical, and as a result legal standing on both of those entities.
Said more explicitly, wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
It is not my wish for nitter to shoulder any more burden than they can reasonably carry, which at this point unfortunately seems zero.
What I'm stating is that I'd normally be against a project like nitter on moral grounds had it been targeting a forum such as mineralenthusiasts.com that required you to log in to view posts, but since the counterparty in this case is a habitual bad actor extending the same goodwill to them only empowers them, and it would be best for nitter to function as much as it can unless its illegality is established in court.
I could accuse you of things as equally unpleasant as psychopathy for making me spell this out, which I had hoped would be incredibly obvious from my original comment, but I'll refrain from doing so.
> wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
Speaking only for myself: I agree with the spirit of this statement (perhaps minus the use of the word “psychopathic”).
However, it seems like the author of Nitter wants to continue to engage in this risky activity, and is requesting resources to help. If they ever wish to stop developing Nitter/XCancel, I will absolutely respect that. But assuming they wish to continue, I consider supporting them and doing my part to frustrate a man-child, unrepentant fascist, and murderer of thousands a noble thing to do.
Who’s the man-child here though? Elon is running multiple companies, spread his DNA and ideas everywhere, and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
And then there’s you. Who believes it’s “noble” to frustrate someone you don’t like. In reality, you’re not frustrating anyone but yourself.
So I ask again.. who’s the man child? Elon? Or you?
And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business, and doing his thing? Or the guy who desperately wants to tell that man what to do?
Much to my dismay. Most of his ideas have a long track record of being drastically incorrect or dangerous. And he treats his children like shit, so much that at least one of his children wants nothing to do with him. Also “spreads his DNA everywhere” is a really weird way to talk about how many children he has.
> and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
Agreed. He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life. But since we don’t live in a just world, I’m trying to do my (admittedly extremely small) part in correcting that.
> And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business,
This is a hilariously wrong way to describe him. The fascist is the man who sieg heil’ed, twice, in front of a large audience, and then backed it up via every politically-related action he’s taken since then.
> In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life.
Everyone is well aware that the fascistic, violent, envious left wants everyone who won’t say a man wearing a dress is a woman in prison or dead. Really weird hill to die on, but the left did die there.
The good news for me and all the other people who didn’t descend into severe mental illness when Trump was elected is that you don’t matter and can’t do anything.
Elon just can’t stop mattering, and can’t stop doing very real things. Literal opposite of your average marxist.
> He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
Name one of the millions of people he murdered. Just one. It’s funny that you can’t. But you will go on telling huge lies on the internet anyway.
There is a strong distinction between news articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
So I don't think nytimes, or cnn is an apt comparison.
It's more like your cellular provider claiming intellectual ownership over the web you browsed and conversations you read when people start sharing their downloaded pages.
> articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
It gives me both a sense of schadenfreude but also a deep depression to watch the shoe on the other foot.
It was only a couple years ago that the talking point was "It's a private company!!", used to defend mass censorship on old Twitter, defend delisting of Parler on app stores, etc.
Yes, but that's not a high hurdle to clear. All Twitter has to do is have an exclusive content program, and now they have standing to sue for copyright infringement on those exclusively-licensed Tweets. The burden falls on Nitter instance hosters to filter that out. And there is no legal obligation on Twitter to actually provide reliable signals to block exclusively licensed content.
then they would be legally viable for the content on the website, the only reason why youtube, twitter can exist is because they do not own the user content for exactly this reason.
> the only legal hurdle would be complying with takedown requests.
If you mean 'takedown requests' related to X content that should not be a problem since nitter does not cache content so anything taken down by X is inaccessible to nitter. If you mean takedown requests for nitter instances the question is on what grounds those requests are made - TOS violations or legal grounds? If it is the former it would be easy for X to just block the user IDs and no takedown request is needed. If it is the latter, which laws would those be based on?
> It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn
It's a much grayer area, considering NYTimes owns their content and x does not own the content they serve. I think this question deserves zealous representation.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. If they say “you’re giving us your copyright when you press the POST button” then that would seem to be that.
Seems like a bad place for them to be, given the whole argument of “you can’t sue us for what other people said on our platform, that’s not our speech!” but that seems complicated and IANAL.
They don't. Maybe they could get away with the ToC change but that's not the situation.
> What does X's User Retention of Content Ownership clause do?
> The clause states: “You retain your rights to any Content, including anything referenced therein, you submit, input, create, generate, post, or display on or through the Services. What's yours is yours — you own your Content.”
Given caching, blocking, userscripts, etc., most client things are have things built in that are effectively smart proxies or glorified layer 7 application gateways.
You can write your own client for arbitrary services. You can run your own client on your own hardware, and you can host your client on someone else's hardware. Your client can render the content however it likes. You can have someone else do the work to render it like you like it and run that, locally or remotely.
There are a lot of ways to get to an "apparatus" that's analogous to both nitter and to a proxy for nytimes that ensure consuming public comments by other users doesn't suck.
As far as I know, there's no law requiring billboards to be seen by all drivers using the public road it sits beside, nor requiring all web clients to render ads. As far as I know, in most of the world there's no law saying users can't buy DNS or proxy or application firewall or ad blocking services from a third party -- services that can run between you and host, on your router, on your device at various OS levels, or as extensions to your browser.
On the contrary, there seem to be increasing numbers of laws requiring servers to deliver their content to arbitrary clients even when a firm makes its own servers, content, and preferred client devices and wishes to "protect the user's experience" or whatever the firm's justification might be.
Given a decade or two of marketing the "public square", other people's public posts, intended for public consumption, and expected to reach the public, picking that content as worthy of banning "useragents" should be shaky ground. Should be an interesting battleground for digital rights.
It's enough to wonder if a reason to go after the nitters is to establish misfortunate legal precedent using a target that can't defend itself?
Clients are not proxies. The fundamental difference is who accesses the target server. If you’re using a client (in the sense of a local program that renders your request, like a browser or a browser with extensions) then you are the one accessing the information, and once you have that information it’s hard to make a legal argument against transforming it however you want for your own consumption.
But a proxy means you request information from someone else, not from the target server, and the proxy requests from the target server. This is also fine! Except: a) the target server can absolutely say “Proxy A is not allowed to access me.” [1] and b) if the target server has copyright on the material being requested, then the proxy may be violating that copyright by making the data available for your request.
[1] there’s a weird middle ground here where if a server can tell you’re using a client it doesn’t like, then technically it could use its arbitrary denial ability to deny access on that basis, but that doesn’t seem to be legally accepted? IANAL. Or maybe that just doesn’t happen because there’s no way for it to tell what client you’re using. They certainly do try to deny service when they can figure out you’re using an ad-blocker.
Of course it can run legally. What might not be possible is to open a running instance to the general public, certainly not to paying public but an argument could be made that even allowing free access would violate some law or other. This is not a certainty though and the continued existence of products like Opera Mini speak against there being such legal prohibitions to allowing public access to content-changing proxies.
Surely Nitter is open source and has 1.4K forks alread. So it should be easy to ramp that up to several thousand more, which can make it harder to stop? or am i being naive?
A lot of important information is on Twitter. Being able to access it without giving them your personal information and without jumping through hoops is a good thing.
What the people defacto running the world's most powerful economy are saying seems quite important to get from a primary source. It's so easy to take a few screenshots of a few tweets and write many completely contradictory stories.
I can assure you, you don’t need to access Twitter to get that information, they are relayed everywhere. Which is really unfortunate because they don’t deserve the attention they receive. Try for yourself, stop using the platform for like a month, you won’t miss anything of value
You don't have to talk to me like a twitter-addicted baby, I was never on it and I probably open a twitter like three times per year.
If you're happy getting your information second-hand, I guess that's your choice, but not everyone is. If I read a news article that cites a tweet as a source, I'd like to see the rest of the tweet thread for context. It might not be what it seems.
For better or worse, some important people only post on X. Whenever an X post makes it to front page HN, it's convenient to have Libredirect installed and then it takes you to Nitter instead so you can actually read it.
It's for worse. Stop clicking on twitter/nitter/xitter links, stop following those people. If they care to keep you as an audience, they will move to another platform.
I think it's the saddest thing that the X-articles thing has somewhat caught on there. Some of it is slop, sure, but people started hosting their longer form opinions on X instead of their own blogs, which is unfortunate.
IANAL but unfortunately the law isn't really in Nitter's favor, as Elon could easily win the fight that Nitter can be considered as a read-only scrapping mirror, which itself makes total sense why Elon tries to C&D it since it is a loophole for other AI companies, probably especially OpenAI, to read the feeds for free.
tl;dr Elon's ground can easily be that there is an official paid service that let's you read the feeds unrestricted (this will be a good counter-challenge however IMO) while Nitter tried to run around it. So the First Amendment defense from Nitter should be shit outta luck
I used it until they required i download the mobile app. Was fine having an account and viewing via web but requiring I download the app was a bridge too far.
It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but it was always a dubious claim.
The software project itself is probably fine. The legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Those people should seek their own legal advice and not listen to anything this guy says.
I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I have not given legal advice to any Nitter operators, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say?
>I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.
Wouldn't be unprecedented. Megamind Musk got scammed out of $ 50.000,- USD by someone claiming to be a PI on then Twitter [0], despite having access to (as near as makes no difference) infinite investigatory resources. If someone claimed to be a pro bono legal team, a less affluent project threatened by letters from high class lawyers, could easily fall for that and I could easily see it be malicious. Maybe trolls, maybe investors wanting to help SpaceXAI or whatever it is called, maybe incompetence after all.
Hanlon might say never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence, but I've found more often than not that the two happen to come together.
More and more, this has been weaponised: "No, we're not evil! We never intended for this to happen. It was just an accident" Is something I hear too often
Hi. I was briefly following the developments regarding legal representation and thought everything was going well. Is there anything more you could disclose as to how you were misled or what happened here? Thank you again for creating and maintaining Nitter, it's such a valuable tool and I've donated a few times over the years.
I am quite surprised by the number of comments critical of Nitter.
I personally don't use it but frontends like these are very important in today's day and age.
As sad as it is, the majority of online discourse nowadays happens on platforms whose algorithms and interfaces are controlled by corporations.
A project like Nitter probably can't run legally, and that's okay. Custom mobile clients for Reddit still work after they banned it, life finds a way. I'm all for funding these projects though because at the end of the day, someone has to build it.
Despite the VC firm trying to assimilate the word “hacker” to humanize itself, this place is Tech-bro News and the userbase will always tend to take the side of capital.
It wasn’t always like this, it changed in the last 10 ish years as the industry became more lucrative. Or maybe it’s been happening more slowly over a longer period of time, but I do think the earlier founders were more idealistic
+1. There is endless bullshit nitpicking that goes on here. Sometimes useful because we don't want a hive mind, but it becomes... really unnecessary with a lot of apologism (sometimes)
Musk is well-known for spending lots of many on viral marketing and online reputation services with bot accounts and astro-turfing. He has an extremely fragile ego and a pathological desire to be liked and, oddly, he desires to be considered a funny person, too (which he isn't). To cut a long story short, you cannot and should not trust comment sections about Musk anywhere. That's true for more than 10 years already.
His interviews. You have to watch many of them, which is kind of hard since he's such a bad public speaker, but I still find personalities like him entertaining and he used to have moderately interesting laymen science fiction ideas before he turned to self-destructive radical Twitter psycho politics as a hobby.
You've got legal and moral layers, then you've got to engage with the root problem that some services choose to use X as a channel to communicate with the general problem, but on top of that there's also the political intent to use Nitter explicitly to boycott Musk.
This is very clearly an attempt by X to use the legal system to harass people doing perfectly legal things. The chilling effect on speech is the whole point
This is very clearly an attempt by X to use the legal system to harass people doing perfectly reasonable things, but are you sure they are legal? I would assume that is against the ToS and I don't think the law makes an exception for cases like this (IANAL of course).
Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.
In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
X cannot expect anyone to behave in accordance with terms and conditions they never agreed to.
> In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
That's not true. Publicly available source code with licenses dispute your claim.
(IANAL) That's copyright law and not contract law. Perhaps X could try to put a clause in its ToS that publishing content there grants the copyright to itself, but I'm pretty sure it won't be accepted well even if it's legal.
> Copyright law applies to all citizens whether or not they've agreed to a contract.
Funny enough SpaceX just ignores copyright law a lot of the time by refusing to comply with some of the GPL licenses for their dishy firmware. I think Tesla does as well to some degree. They generally publish some code but not the complete corresponding source code for the firmware they actually ship.
We need to revise the law around
terms of service, we are allowing companies to impose all kinds of monopolistic, anti competitive, user hostile, privacy invasion, and other measures against the public interest simply by burying provision in a wall of text they know no one will understand even if they read it.
We don't need new laws--we just need existing courts to start finding these terms of service to be unconscionable and refuse to enforce them. They certainly fit the description:
• Unequal Bargaining Power: A large gap in power or knowledge between a large corporation and an individual consumer or employee.
• Lack of Meaningful Choice: "Take-it-or-leave-it" adhesion contracts where the weaker party cannot negotiate any terms.
None of these so-called "agreements" should bind people. There is no actual agreement or "meeting of the minds." It's just one party writing one-sided rules that only they get to enforce.
> Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.
Companies are perfectly entitled to tell people they aren't allowed to use their services anymore. That's what the C&D was. It's perfectly legal to say "here's an API anyone can use, except you, Anish Kapoor."
It's like if Reddit bans you, you aren't entitled to use the site after they've told you you're banned. Even if you can find a technical means around the ban, it's still trespass.
I am sure. In relation to banned entitlement, they talk about being logged in or anonymous, which are technical details pertaining to the ability to enforce, as though the technical enforcement details are what create a ban.
If I ban you from my house and you show up in disguise, you may be able to sneak in, but you are still not entitled to be inside.
> It does not seem logical to me that Reddit could "ban" anyone from using their public frontends as anonymous users.
It's already there:
"By using the Services, you state that: . . . You have not been permanently suspended or removed from the Services."
They have in other ways, too: "No one under 13 is allowed to use or access the Services." That's literally a prohibition from using Reddit, even anonymously.
Furthermore,
> By accessing or using our Services, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree to these Terms, you may not access or use our Services
That right there already says you're legally prohibited from using Reddit, even without logging in, if you don't agree to the terms. It's like how I can say "if you don't agree with the rules of my house, you aren't allowed inside."
Why do you think you have a legal right to use someone's service if you don't abide by their rules? Because they "left their front door unlocked"?
IANAL, but if I were a lawyer, I would be making the case that Nitter is not using X's services. Nitter is no different than Firefox or Chrome, it's a user-agent acting on behalf of the user.
Completely different users! It's using authorized accounts of people who agreed to the Terms of Use. Not just those, but the Developer Terms apply to the API.
But the "users" who are viewing Nitter content are not those same authorized users. They are unauthorized users. They are not authenticated by X. They are unknown, anonymous, and untraceable to X. That is unacceptable for any service--especially a service that's restricted to authorized users. Especially a service that puts forth Terms of Use that apply to the actual user using the service.
It is patently absurd for someone to say that, since there are "public endpoints" hanging out there, that X has no right or authority to govern how they're used, and who uses them. Of course they do.
When I access X with Chrome, I sign in... I'm the same user authenticated and authorized by them, and Chrome is my interface. It's not a proxy, a scraper, or an API gateway. It's my client and X knows exactly who I am. I agreed to use X properly, and conduct myself properly on their platform. Nitter did none of this.
At least in Europe, there's an argument to be made about a Nitter instance being an interoperability service for clients that do not use cookies/JavaScript, and could be argued that it's protected under the interoperability exception under EU directive on legal protection of computer programs.
The directive gives quite wide exemptions for reverse engineering, but as there's no reverse engineering here, just documenting public APIs, codifying and interfacing with them, it seems it is more than OK for the compatibility layer to exist.
> they are unknown, anonymous, and untraceable to X. That is unacceptable for any service
Every day we stray further from God's light. Imagine how "unacceptable" the first 30 years of Internet history must have been to a commenter with this mentality.
X can make it annoying, but they aren’t going to stop everyone. Someone is going to rip, ingest, aggregate, and serve the data from somewhere outside of the US legal framework.
Isn't it the entire premise of Nitter and the other scrapers, to use accounts in order to access the API, access non-public posts, and proxy them to the public?
If Nitter is creating accounts for access then it doesn't matter whether they use the API or the web client (which is also API). Because creating an account binds you to the Terms of Use. It's not rocket science.
Also, to further cement this comment's unpopularity: it's unconscionable and appalling that this Nitter team, these cheats and thieves, that they are now begging for money and attorneys to bail them out of this legal grave they've dug for themselves. I sincerely hope that they are dragged in court, that they lose, and that they are severely financially damaged by trying to fight this stupid battle.
There is no reason to bypass authentication just because you hate X or Musk or you think it's somehow unjust that people can't access shit without simply signing up and agreeing to contract terms. Most sane idiots would simply shut down, take their "L" and do something productive. Doubling down and begging for legal fee donations is brazen and shameless and, honestly, insane.
Or maybe, just maybe, they have their principles and try to follow and defend them. Yes, it's difficult and you usually seems "the bad guy" when fighting against the status quo.
I'm pretty sure that the ButlerianJihads of the beginning of the 20th century had the same opinion about the suffragettes (saving all the differences, for sure)
Wild to stare down the entire history of civil disobedience, close your eyes, and say "just because you think rules are unjust, that's no reason to ignore them". Some real "all the orders were on display at your local office in Alpha Centauri" energy.
If you ever find yourself on the pointy end of an unjust system, I hope the people in a position to fight against it for you can see a little further.
> give my phone number to a company to receive various important government alerts
Yeah, in general this is how it works: to send alerts to people, the company needs some contact info. If you want an authenticated user account, they do need to know who you are. You can even apply for blue-check status.
If they were actually "important" then the government would send them through the official channels. The EAS has plenty of tiers of importance, and it works a treat. There is nothing on X that is so important, that anyone is missing out by not having an account there. I mean, seriously.
In days past, the government sent out alerts via radio and TV. I have reason to believe that EAS and other channels still work over radio and TV, which are 100% unauthenticated and passive, without giving away your phone number. The commercial news channels will even send you unimportant alerts. You just seem envious of X users that we get a nice interface, and global aggregation of stuff there.
> the entire history of civil disobedience
I'm sorry; I should be accustomed to HN redefining terms like "malware" and "evil" but this is just bonkers. Do you even know what "civil disobedience" looks like?
I know! I'll go to the mall tomorrow, sneak into a movie, toss an e-scooter into the river, and steal a teddy bear from Target! As the cops shove me into the squad car, I'll shout "CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE" and hire Johnny Cochran for my defense!
It's absolutely wild to see, on hacker news of all places, people suggesting that I should have to give my phone number to a company to receive various important government alerts. Not to mention condemnation of someone trying to improve the situation for everyone.
Public as in visible to all is not the same as public as in allowed to all. You appear to be conflating the former definition with the latter. My front door is visible to all, but a person isn't allowed to walk into my house without permission.
> Public as in being visible to all is not the same as public as in allowing use by all
Where's the limit of that? Can I have port 443 open with a website behind it but sue anyone that accesses it because the fact that it being visible doesn't mean that I allow anyone to access it?
This being the whole idea behind lawfare. If you can’t afford to prove that you’re right, the guy that doesn’t notice the cost can financially drain you to get his way, since the law itself, nor the enforcement of the same, wasn’t ever really the point.
It's impossible for the nitter person to defend against X Corporation and so X will have what it wants done.
So access to X content will be restricted to X servers.
X server operators, Musk, etc, are subject to rules themselves of their home locale, and they are not a disinterested party in many discussion subjects. So one can reasonably expect that the content on X will be regulated by state parties as well as corporate interests.
Also, X has login requirements in order to view a lot of its content.
So, nitter is a backup That has no necessary obligation to corporate or locale jurisdictions, and it has no login restrictions.
Regular average everyday citizens can speak into x, and have distribution through it. But they can expect for their speech to be restricted per the above.
Perhaps Musk is in his legal right to turn Twitter into a walled garden, but it certainly seems like false advertising to me after he kept describing his model as a public square. You can be a public square or a walled garden, but not both.
I don't think the first one is how anyone in modern times would define a public square.
Literal public squares in real life also don't have gatekeepers. They're just open spaces where anyone can naturally congregate. Emphasis on the "open".
The EFF and FSF don’t throw money at hopeless causes. No matter how much uninformed armchair lawyering there is on this thread, Nitter simply has absolutely no case and they’re going to lose. It would be a complete waste of limited resources to defend them.
Lookup eBay vs BiddersEdge. BE was scraping eBay's site, eBay sued, eBay won on "trespass to chattles" legal grounds. eBay, as owner of the servers BE was scraping, has the right to prevent anyone from accessing those servers. Whether eBay "owns" the data is not relevant; they own the servers being accessed.
I just asked Gemini "do X's TOS allow anyone to access X via the api?" and it said "No", with a long list of conditions for accessing X via their API.
Please, any time you find yourself saying such a thing in any context just stop talking. It's not useful. It's noise. No one needs your regurgitation of a chat bot any more than they desire your regurgitation of a topical web search. It adds nothing of value.
It's fine in countries with normal laws that are easy to parse and understand, and has the preparatory work publicly available. Having to involve lawyers for everything feels like a very US thing.
I don’t use Twitter, but if I did, I would certainly want to archive the content of my timeline so I could refer back to it for journalistic reasons, perhaps, via a browser extension? No reason to lock down my “ownership” here, because it’d only be public posts. There are obvious fair use reasons for when I want to quote someone when I do acts of journalism. I’d even be willing to share my archive with anyone else, and advertise the tweet_ids I have in case another journalist wanted them. Sort of like… I dunno, napster? That’d be great.
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[ 0.47 ms ] story [ 10.6 ms ] threadWhat’s the purpose of Nitter?
Elevator pitch if you will?
And where can one read a bio of the creator(s)?
To allow people to check X without feeling they are contributing to the success of the platform, by bypassing the account requirement.
I think that's the point
What an amazingly dumbass thing to say. Yes, there's no reasons why a person would rationally dislike Elon, sure.
I hope you realize how people perceive you when you utter such inanity.
Because some people in positions of power ignore the consequences of using external services.
There has been a bit of a wake up call in this regard in Europe, with many governments making efforts to detach themselves from US corporations, but it's a much larger problem. When a government entity chooses to rely on Whatsapp, or Android, or some other piece of technology bound to a corporation, they are creating a bond between the rights and services they enable and interaction with that corporation.
This nuance is often ignored because "Well everybody uses (thing) anyway" and other shortsighted trains of thought. I'm by no means against opposing X in principle, but the issue at hand is not itself about X, and I suspect a lot of people wouldn't care if it was still Twitter.
Also worth noting: I click on Nitter links but I would never in my life click on an "X" link. When I use Nitter, X loses zero ad revenue.
For the decade+ there has been an unofficial town square known as twitter. As the town square has slowly become more gated and overgrown with weeds some people thought giving people a way to access the town square without paying the entrance fee would be helpful. Many found this useful.
Now I think the whole thing is trash, and agree, why use Twitter? But people like journalists and AI executives are still announcing things on Twitter because having a large following seems like a dopamine booster. In this world where people see the following as a source of legitimacy, having a single company own that town square seems...problematic.,
Look at Twitter. If it was good under Dorsey (debatable, it did have pretty notable censorship) and Musk ruins it, why are people 'still on it'? Because Musk did a good job? Not necessarily. It takes time to build a new product, and get your friends to switch over. Switching costs. I'm on a platform because Avicebron is on it, because Alice is on it, because Bob is on it
Same goes for sites like (especially) Facebook. It's 'popular'! 3 billion active users! (They lie a lot and probably about that and they make it very easy to be 'active', by faking the notifications or giving you none at all, like increasingly with messages over the years) Well, it's hard to 'just move'. Facebook has become and has been for a while an utterly shit product that deserves the corporate death penalty. People being on it is not the slam dunk people think it is
This comes across to me as a surprising question - why do you assume there's such a bio at all, rather than it being developed by someone anonymous, as is the case for many questionably legal privacy tools?
What's wrong with violating TOS?
If one party is reckless in legal terms, then that's their right and they will bear the consequences. It's generally considered to be a bad attitude to have, which is why people generally don't have it, and I'm going to need an explanation on how wishing that onto Nitter isn't in practice wanting someone else to burn at the stake to spite a third party, especially given the enormous difference in economical, and as a result legal standing on both of those entities.
Said more explicitly, wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
What I'm stating is that I'd normally be against a project like nitter on moral grounds had it been targeting a forum such as mineralenthusiasts.com that required you to log in to view posts, but since the counterparty in this case is a habitual bad actor extending the same goodwill to them only empowers them, and it would be best for nitter to function as much as it can unless its illegality is established in court.
I could accuse you of things as equally unpleasant as psychopathy for making me spell this out, which I had hoped would be incredibly obvious from my original comment, but I'll refrain from doing so.
Speaking only for myself: I agree with the spirit of this statement (perhaps minus the use of the word “psychopathic”).
However, it seems like the author of Nitter wants to continue to engage in this risky activity, and is requesting resources to help. If they ever wish to stop developing Nitter/XCancel, I will absolutely respect that. But assuming they wish to continue, I consider supporting them and doing my part to frustrate a man-child, unrepentant fascist, and murderer of thousands a noble thing to do.
Who’s the man-child here though? Elon is running multiple companies, spread his DNA and ideas everywhere, and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
And then there’s you. Who believes it’s “noble” to frustrate someone you don’t like. In reality, you’re not frustrating anyone but yourself.
So I ask again.. who’s the man child? Elon? Or you?
And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business, and doing his thing? Or the guy who desperately wants to tell that man what to do?
So? Nothing about that is inherently noble.
> spread his DNA and ideas everywhere
Much to my dismay. Most of his ideas have a long track record of being drastically incorrect or dangerous. And he treats his children like shit, so much that at least one of his children wants nothing to do with him. Also “spreads his DNA everywhere” is a really weird way to talk about how many children he has.
> and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
Agreed. He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life. But since we don’t live in a just world, I’m trying to do my (admittedly extremely small) part in correcting that.
> And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business,
This is a hilariously wrong way to describe him. The fascist is the man who sieg heil’ed, twice, in front of a large audience, and then backed it up via every politically-related action he’s taken since then.
Everyone is well aware that the fascistic, violent, envious left wants everyone who won’t say a man wearing a dress is a woman in prison or dead. Really weird hill to die on, but the left did die there.
The good news for me and all the other people who didn’t descend into severe mental illness when Trump was elected is that you don’t matter and can’t do anything.
Elon just can’t stop mattering, and can’t stop doing very real things. Literal opposite of your average marxist.
> He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
Name one of the millions of people he murdered. Just one. It’s funny that you can’t. But you will go on telling huge lies on the internet anyway.
So I don't think nytimes, or cnn is an apt comparison.
It's more like your cellular provider claiming intellectual ownership over the web you browsed and conversations you read when people start sharing their downloaded pages.
you can "de facto" a lot from this arrangement :(
It gives me both a sense of schadenfreude but also a deep depression to watch the shoe on the other foot.
It was only a couple years ago that the talking point was "It's a private company!!", used to defend mass censorship on old Twitter, defend delisting of Parler on app stores, etc.
It's just not government censorship.
(It made everything worse if you ask me but they did do it.)
If you mean 'takedown requests' related to X content that should not be a problem since nitter does not cache content so anything taken down by X is inaccessible to nitter. If you mean takedown requests for nitter instances the question is on what grounds those requests are made - TOS violations or legal grounds? If it is the former it would be easy for X to just block the user IDs and no takedown request is needed. If it is the latter, which laws would those be based on?
It's a much grayer area, considering NYTimes owns their content and x does not own the content they serve. I think this question deserves zealous representation.
Do they not? And if they wanted to, couldn't they, pretty trivially, with a ToC change?
Seems like a bad place for them to be, given the whole argument of “you can’t sue us for what other people said on our platform, that’s not our speech!” but that seems complicated and IANAL.
Fyi this is illegal at least in the EU.
> What does X's User Retention of Content Ownership clause do?
> The clause states: “You retain your rights to any Content, including anything referenced therein, you submit, input, create, generate, post, or display on or through the Services. What's yours is yours — you own your Content.”
https://conductatlas.com/platform/x/x-terms-of-service/provi...
You can write your own client for arbitrary services. You can run your own client on your own hardware, and you can host your client on someone else's hardware. Your client can render the content however it likes. You can have someone else do the work to render it like you like it and run that, locally or remotely.
There are a lot of ways to get to an "apparatus" that's analogous to both nitter and to a proxy for nytimes that ensure consuming public comments by other users doesn't suck.
As far as I know, there's no law requiring billboards to be seen by all drivers using the public road it sits beside, nor requiring all web clients to render ads. As far as I know, in most of the world there's no law saying users can't buy DNS or proxy or application firewall or ad blocking services from a third party -- services that can run between you and host, on your router, on your device at various OS levels, or as extensions to your browser.
On the contrary, there seem to be increasing numbers of laws requiring servers to deliver their content to arbitrary clients even when a firm makes its own servers, content, and preferred client devices and wishes to "protect the user's experience" or whatever the firm's justification might be.
Given a decade or two of marketing the "public square", other people's public posts, intended for public consumption, and expected to reach the public, picking that content as worthy of banning "useragents" should be shaky ground. Should be an interesting battleground for digital rights.
It's enough to wonder if a reason to go after the nitters is to establish misfortunate legal precedent using a target that can't defend itself?
But a proxy means you request information from someone else, not from the target server, and the proxy requests from the target server. This is also fine! Except: a) the target server can absolutely say “Proxy A is not allowed to access me.” [1] and b) if the target server has copyright on the material being requested, then the proxy may be violating that copyright by making the data available for your request.
[1] there’s a weird middle ground here where if a server can tell you’re using a client it doesn’t like, then technically it could use its arbitrary denial ability to deny access on that basis, but that doesn’t seem to be legally accepted? IANAL. Or maybe that just doesn’t happen because there’s no way for it to tell what client you’re using. They certainly do try to deny service when they can figure out you’re using an ad-blocker.
Are you talking about WeChat, or truth social? I didn’t know nitter worked on either
If you're happy getting your information second-hand, I guess that's your choice, but not everyone is. If I read a news article that cites a tweet as a source, I'd like to see the rest of the tweet thread for context. It might not be what it seems.
Why not invest your time on better services.
tl;dr Elon's ground can easily be that there is an official paid service that let's you read the feeds unrestricted (this will be a good counter-challenge however IMO) while Nitter tried to run around it. So the First Amendment defense from Nitter should be shit outta luck
I’m not a lawyer but I’ve been involved with litigation between publishers and tech companies regarding scraped content.
It’s much more complicated than you’d ever think.
Personally, I think Nitter is in a strong position.
The software project itself is probably fine. The legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Those people should seek their own legal advice and not listen to anything this guy says.
I have not given legal advice to any Nitter operators, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say?
I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/report-musks-500...
But when accessing a nitter host, you're not accessing Twitter itself, just a copy.
I personally don't use it but frontends like these are very important in today's day and age.
As sad as it is, the majority of online discourse nowadays happens on platforms whose algorithms and interfaces are controlled by corporations.
A project like Nitter probably can't run legally, and that's okay. Custom mobile clients for Reddit still work after they banned it, life finds a way. I'm all for funding these projects though because at the end of the day, someone has to build it.
Despite the VC firm trying to assimilate the word “hacker” to humanize itself, this place is Tech-bro News and the userbase will always tend to take the side of capital.
The original founders created YCombinator, the most prestigious startup incubator, and Hacker News used to be named Startup News.
Move fast and break other people.
I've been here for well over a decade. Let me tell you, it used to be so, so much worse.
You've got legal and moral layers, then you've got to engage with the root problem that some services choose to use X as a channel to communicate with the general problem, but on top of that there's also the political intent to use Nitter explicitly to boycott Musk.
In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
X cannot expect anyone to behave in accordance with terms and conditions they never agreed to.
That's not true. Publicly available source code with licenses dispute your claim.
Using software with specific licenses? Or making modifications to it?
That is substantially different from reading the public APIs.
Copyright law applies to all citizens whether or not they've agreed to a contract.
Funny enough SpaceX just ignores copyright law a lot of the time by refusing to comply with some of the GPL licenses for their dishy firmware. I think Tesla does as well to some degree. They generally publish some code but not the complete corresponding source code for the firmware they actually ship.
• Unequal Bargaining Power: A large gap in power or knowledge between a large corporation and an individual consumer or employee.
• Lack of Meaningful Choice: "Take-it-or-leave-it" adhesion contracts where the weaker party cannot negotiate any terms.
None of these so-called "agreements" should bind people. There is no actual agreement or "meeting of the minds." It's just one party writing one-sided rules that only they get to enforce.
Companies are perfectly entitled to tell people they aren't allowed to use their services anymore. That's what the C&D was. It's perfectly legal to say "here's an API anyone can use, except you, Anish Kapoor."
It's like if Reddit bans you, you aren't entitled to use the site after they've told you you're banned. Even if you can find a technical means around the ban, it's still trespass.
I would say that you are not allowed to use their site as a logged in user (i.e. upvoting, downvoting, commenting, making posts).
It does not seem logical to me that Reddit could "ban" anyone from using their public frontends as anonymous users.
They could only do something like that, in my opinion, if access to all their content was gated behind a login.
If I ban you from my house and you show up in disguise, you may be able to sneak in, but you are still not entitled to be inside.
It's already there:
"By using the Services, you state that: . . . You have not been permanently suspended or removed from the Services."
They have in other ways, too: "No one under 13 is allowed to use or access the Services." That's literally a prohibition from using Reddit, even anonymously.
Furthermore,
> By accessing or using our Services, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree to these Terms, you may not access or use our Services
That right there already says you're legally prohibited from using Reddit, even without logging in, if you don't agree to the terms. It's like how I can say "if you don't agree with the rules of my house, you aren't allowed inside."
Why do you think you have a legal right to use someone's service if you don't abide by their rules? Because they "left their front door unlocked"?
https://docs.x.com/developer-terms/agreement
But the "users" who are viewing Nitter content are not those same authorized users. They are unauthorized users. They are not authenticated by X. They are unknown, anonymous, and untraceable to X. That is unacceptable for any service--especially a service that's restricted to authorized users. Especially a service that puts forth Terms of Use that apply to the actual user using the service.
It is patently absurd for someone to say that, since there are "public endpoints" hanging out there, that X has no right or authority to govern how they're used, and who uses them. Of course they do.
When I access X with Chrome, I sign in... I'm the same user authenticated and authorized by them, and Chrome is my interface. It's not a proxy, a scraper, or an API gateway. It's my client and X knows exactly who I am. I agreed to use X properly, and conduct myself properly on their platform. Nitter did none of this.
The directive gives quite wide exemptions for reverse engineering, but as there's no reverse engineering here, just documenting public APIs, codifying and interfacing with them, it seems it is more than OK for the compatibility layer to exist.
Every day we stray further from God's light. Imagine how "unacceptable" the first 30 years of Internet history must have been to a commenter with this mentality.
Judge: "do you agree to the terms?"
"No"
Judge: "then you can't use the API"
Example: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/recap/oiillickanjla... (RECAP the law)
X can make it annoying, but they aren’t going to stop everyone. Someone is going to rip, ingest, aggregate, and serve the data from somewhere outside of the US legal framework.
That is the purpose of public APIs. Usage without prior agreements.
If the API providers want to restrict the usage of their APIs, they are free to make them non-public.
Even if both parties agree to them, are there any legal consequences for breaking the terms of service?
If Nitter is creating accounts for access then it doesn't matter whether they use the API or the web client (which is also API). Because creating an account binds you to the Terms of Use. It's not rocket science.
Also, to further cement this comment's unpopularity: it's unconscionable and appalling that this Nitter team, these cheats and thieves, that they are now begging for money and attorneys to bail them out of this legal grave they've dug for themselves. I sincerely hope that they are dragged in court, that they lose, and that they are severely financially damaged by trying to fight this stupid battle.
There is no reason to bypass authentication just because you hate X or Musk or you think it's somehow unjust that people can't access shit without simply signing up and agreeing to contract terms. Most sane idiots would simply shut down, take their "L" and do something productive. Doubling down and begging for legal fee donations is brazen and shameless and, honestly, insane.
I'm pretty sure that the ButlerianJihads of the beginning of the 20th century had the same opinion about the suffragettes (saving all the differences, for sure)
If you ever find yourself on the pointy end of an unjust system, I hope the people in a position to fight against it for you can see a little further.
Yeah, in general this is how it works: to send alerts to people, the company needs some contact info. If you want an authenticated user account, they do need to know who you are. You can even apply for blue-check status.
If they were actually "important" then the government would send them through the official channels. The EAS has plenty of tiers of importance, and it works a treat. There is nothing on X that is so important, that anyone is missing out by not having an account there. I mean, seriously.
In days past, the government sent out alerts via radio and TV. I have reason to believe that EAS and other channels still work over radio and TV, which are 100% unauthenticated and passive, without giving away your phone number. The commercial news channels will even send you unimportant alerts. You just seem envious of X users that we get a nice interface, and global aggregation of stuff there.
> the entire history of civil disobedience
I'm sorry; I should be accustomed to HN redefining terms like "malware" and "evil" but this is just bonkers. Do you even know what "civil disobedience" looks like?
I know! I'll go to the mall tomorrow, sneak into a movie, toss an e-scooter into the river, and steal a teddy bear from Target! As the cops shove me into the squad car, I'll shout "CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE" and hire Johnny Cochran for my defense!
> All comments by this account herein are generated by a neural network, unless otherwise specified.
> All comments by this account herein are generated by a neural network, unless otherwise specified.
Public as in visible to all is not the same as public as in allowed to all. You appear to be conflating the former definition with the latter. My front door is visible to all, but a person isn't allowed to walk into my house without permission.
It's a totally different thing.
Where's the limit of that? Can I have port 443 open with a website behind it but sue anyone that accesses it because the fact that it being visible doesn't mean that I allow anyone to access it?
This being the whole idea behind lawfare. If you can’t afford to prove that you’re right, the guy that doesn’t notice the cost can financially drain you to get his way, since the law itself, nor the enforcement of the same, wasn’t ever really the point.
So access to X content will be restricted to X servers.
X server operators, Musk, etc, are subject to rules themselves of their home locale, and they are not a disinterested party in many discussion subjects. So one can reasonably expect that the content on X will be regulated by state parties as well as corporate interests.
Also, X has login requirements in order to view a lot of its content.
So, nitter is a backup That has no necessary obligation to corporate or locale jurisdictions, and it has no login restrictions.
Regular average everyday citizens can speak into x, and have distribution through it. But they can expect for their speech to be restricted per the above.
So speeches is freer through nitter.
TOU is contract law. It falls into the same vein as “no shirts, no shoes, no service”.
It’s contract law.
We may all hate this (I still morn Apollo) - but legally, ‘I hate it” is not law.
Nice you fucking gottem! You're so elite bro. Give me a turn with your dick when you're done with it.
Also in a public square you’re not supposed to masquerade as another person, which what all these services are trying to do.
Literal public squares in real life also don't have gatekeepers. They're just open spaces where anyone can naturally congregate. Emphasis on the "open".
https://status.d420.de/
And does the access act as a kind of fair use? Not like Nitter is making money from the access to the content
I just asked Gemini "do X's TOS allow anyone to access X via the api?" and it said "No", with a long list of conditions for accessing X via their API.
Nitter should give up and call it a day.
Please, any time you find yourself saying such a thing in any context just stop talking. It's not useful. It's noise. No one needs your regurgitation of a chat bot any more than they desire your regurgitation of a topical web search. It adds nothing of value.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/scraping-public-websit...
https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/