Everything is both legal and illegal until a lawsuit happens. Then it collapses depending a little bit on the facts and mostly on who has the better lawyers.
I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an access control device (DMCA 1201).
At the end of the day, as an individual or a team or a company, regardless of the statue and case law, you have to perform the calculus on your monetary and legal resources versus your counterparty.
Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.
As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.
According to Wikipedia:
> In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies
But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?
Notice it says "terms of service or copyright". If X's lawyers have any intelligence, they'll have a reason why XCancel is not identical to Bright Data. Perhaps this time, instead of claiming it's a copyright violation, they'll claim it's wire fraud because multiple accounts are used.
There’s an OpenAI billboard in union square right now of a kid eating Chinese food at his desk working on something and every time it just reminds me of that suchir kid because they said he had takeout :/
I wonder what legal gymnastics are needed for "I can scrape anything off the web ignoring copyright and build a product from this, but you can’t even display what’s on my webpage elsewhere”.
Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.
Precedent is pretty clear: competitive uses bad, transformative uses good. Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.
> Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.
It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.
I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.
I think that's more true in image generation than in text? At least, all the money is in LLMs that write code, not LLMs that write O'Reilley-style coding books.
If a society operates under a rule like this, it is no better than Russia or any other tyranny where law is for me but not for thee. This is not how it should work in a supposedly free and lawful country.
There's a difference between creating a market for something better, so that nobody wants the old thing, and competing _in_ the market for the old thing by copying it directly.
And what would be a read-only version of X like XCancel compete against, exactly? Ads impressions? That would be the only possible thing yet they don't add any ads.
It's depriving X of impressions that they could monetise, no? Xcancel doesn't have to make money itself, it just has to impair the rights of the copyright holder. Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...
> Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...
Which is in a few jurisdictions, or at least is not prosecuted if it's for personal use.
Also, according to your definition, the creator of uBlock Origin or any other adblock system should be sued in the same way, because they are depriving $ADS_CORP of their precious impressions.
Bartz v Anthropic. Though the plaintiffs did get something, it was because of the piracy to the original works (competing against the legal market for the books), not the use of them to train the LLM.
Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no.
Taking something someone else made, modify it or use parts of it in some bigger thing or completely change it: Fine, if you have money and/or run a company
So in theory if you took twitter content and then transformed it so it "summarizes" all tweets with an AI rather than posting the exact text, would that be allowed?
That's exactly the way UK courts are heading, see Getty vs Stability AI. The court ruled that there's no infringment because the model doesn't store exact copies, just derived weights, and therefore when it generates new images those aren't copies of protected works.
I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?
You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one wants to do anything.
Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.
So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run
mtr xcancel.com
I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?
No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downloading, although it'd still be a copy.
Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.
It makes more sense when you remember it's not a computer program and the things that are written in the law are not the things that will actually happen in the way that "if(foo) bar;" makes bar happen if foo is true. It's more like a book of excuses you could use for why you didn't do your homework.
Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.
If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.
And this example is not just due to people not taking the trouble to write fully specified rules. I don't think such rules could even be written. You can just do your best to cover the cases you can think of. The complexity of society is incomprehensibly vast and constantly changing, and the law has to have wiggle room to account for it.
Could you elaborate in what way you find the law mostly doesn't make sense? It has to be flexible in order to work with actual humans. Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying? Usually when we talk about copying it's someone making a duplicate so it can be accessed later. Only a very technical user is going to be diving into their cache to view that content after the fact. The vast majority of people don't understand that the browser is storing anything on their computer, much less how to access it before it's purged.
I can't remember the court case, but Blizzard did argue and win in court that WoW Glider's producers violated copyright law. If I recall correctly violating the TOS meant that an unauthorized copy made by executing the file chasing it to load WoW into RAM was created.
> Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying?
Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).
So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.
> Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.
That is what all LLMs could do in 2023, verbatim, before they trained it out of them in order to keep up the pretense that there is no plagiarism. Now they all obfuscate the original or refuse to cite.
scraping content is mostly legal, redistributing content is not.
if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.
sites like archive.ph are in a similar bucket btw, and yet nobody's complaining (except websites seeing people evading their paywall). but at the end of the day it's not really fair to apply laws differentially on the basis of whose political ideas we like more.
It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but 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.
The repo being archived happened after that UPDATE post that you mention. So the project has gone from suspended, to un-suspended, and now it's suspended again (and the repo got archived this time).
Edit: I see I'm being downvoted for just providing facts, so here's some evidence: you can see on the main project page that the repo was archived on 11 Sep[0]. Looking in the commits, the "UPDATE" message was commited on 6 Sep[1].
I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.
My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
This may be a situation where revealing a solution may end up harming it. For those who use iOS and other Apple OSes, I learned of this recently released free Safari extension called Litterbox that allows looking at one post on x.com.
People really need to just not visit it. You don’t need to browse Twitter to be on top of current events. Anything posted there will be available elsewhere within minutes (and hopefully it will have been vetted somewhat)
Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?
> users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content
They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.
Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.
Excuse my pedantry but "market" implies a possible audience/demographic to _sell_ to. If a user can't be arsed to sign up for Twitter (an action that costs nothing, AFAIK), what makes you think they will pay for read-only access to tweets?
Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.
They clearly realize it and are doing something to stop it. I understand the idea of imagining this as an underserved market they could do something about. Twitter worked that way. X intentionally doesn't want to, and wants to guard its monopoly over the information is controls.
It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."
For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.
I'm calling bullshit. Twitter was always hostile to logged-out users. You could say "Well technically I was talking about 2006 before it got big" so I'll just say it was just as bad 10 years ago as it is today.
And remember, Elon only granted that so he wouldn't be (rightfully) banned from Google. At first you couldn't view anything, then Google delisted X because it only indexes public pages, then Elon conceded you can view the direct thing you linked to, and then Google relisted it.
The whole point of butchered websites is to direct people to install their more invasive app. It's not like all companies just got bad at making websites somehow. There are conflicting incentives.
The reasons it's unusable are precisely the reasons they don't want you using anything else. Direct control over your eyeballs. They decide where the ads go on the page, they decide what comes next in your feed, they track everywhere you look or move the mouse. Anything that circumvents this is a business risk to them.
So media outlets, influencers, etc have something to link to, and a way to promote Twitter by including tweets in their articles.
If it's public, people can link to it and promote the site. If it's not, then either info there doesn't get free publicity or people just screenshot the tweets instead.
So they can try to nag you into signing up and installing the app? Which doesn't work in 99.9% of cases, but try telling that to your boss if his name is Elon Musk...
Sadly, the success rate is significantly better than 0.1%. as a broad strategy, it clearly works. I wish it didn't, but there is a reason why all these companies do it.
Elmo himself has conflated "free speech" with his own site. He's also done everything he can to limit that same "free speech".
Yes, we all know what "free speech" really means and it has nothing to do with X, but when the owner of X conflates what it means, we can mock that SOB for it.
I would argue that when he is talking about "free speech" he is always referring to the more general, non-US-Constitutional meaning of the phrase; i.e. the freedom to say what you want without being censored. So when a discussion about free speech on Twitter comes up, I assume that's the kind of free speech we're discussing. To bring in the the more narrow, first amendment meaning of the term is just a distraction or diversion.
You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.
I'm very much on the side of xcancel and nitter on this one, but I do think it's fair to point out that Twitter is free of monetary charge. It's not free in the sense that you do have to provide some personal information and data to them in exchange for that free account, but it isn't a huge roadblock for most people, however annoying it may be.
Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
The biggest frustration for a lot of people is that their municipalities use Twitter almost exclusively to communicate with their constituents, it _sucks_. I've pleaded and begged my city and county to have some other form of communication, in addition to Twitter/X, to mass distribute information.
The phrase "free speech" does not typically mean "free as in beer," rather it means "free as in freedom," so in this case you're conflating the two meanings of "free" in English.
The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.
Twitter is heavily login-gated, to the point that I can't see Twitter threads at all unless I have an account. I do not wish to make an account. Services like Nitter/XCancel allow me to read those threads, making that speech more free.
Yes, it is. It seems self-evident to me that the speech on Twitter is more free when it isn't behind a login wall. How could it not be? If you'd like to provide an actual counter-argument, I'd be happy to consider it.
"Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it.
It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost". Twitter is a paid service. To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
Then they should be glad Nitter instances are offloading some of their traffic, right? Some requests are cache hits, so I handled that whole request myself and spared an Elon server from handling it.
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
Nobody is being censored by the inability of a third party to act as a parallel distribution channel. Nor does freedom of speech have anything to do with entitlement to an audience. No website infringes upon freedom of speech by having a paywall on UGC, as neither the contributors nor readers are worse off than if the site didn't exist.
IMO, if you hate Elon so much, you shouldn't be visiting his website.
You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".)
If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives like "Bluesky" out there that might be good for you.
There's plenty of other instances running on nitter, some secret/invite only (and as such more chance to fly under the radar). The code is open source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter albeit X DMCA'd the repo.
No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.
Seems you're right. They have done this in the past though, so wouldn't exactly be a surprise.
Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:
> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.
This to me is a big issue. You have politicians, government entities and other public institutions posting to twitter, but to access we need to log in.
There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
We used to have that, it was called a blog. I used to subscribe to all my local politicians and journalist blogs back in the late 2000s and would recieve everything I needed in my inbox, but now everyone posts on Twitter. That's where we have ActivityPub.
Indeed, the shitter authors recommended you buy a bundle of Twitter accounts with 2FA details when setting up your own instance, to avoid getting rate-limited.
There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.
It's not that they can't. They don't want to. The reasons it is unusable are the things that make them so much money. If they made a usable one they'd lose even more money.
It just feels like every social media site is login-walling public posts. I can't think of a major social media site (reddit, Instagram, FB, Twitter, etc) that doesn't do this to varying degrees. I can only think of minor sites (bluesky, truth social, etc) that allow access.
A good idea would be: Make a decision. A trade-off.
Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform.
Or you dislike the platform so much that you even wonder why these people are there. You definitely don't want to be in contact with the platform. If so, then give up these people.
There's no free lunch, right? You also (typically) cannot buy steak, but then somehow not pay the money by showing some fake credit card. That would typically involve crime, right?
Make decisions, guys!!! Make decisions!
Your cat and mouse games are embarrassing...
And that doesn't get better in any way just by downvoting me. ;) ;) ;)
These people includes pretty much every politician. I personally do have an X account and I do use X, but I completely understand why someone would want to read what their politicians are saying without wanting to create an account anywhere
It reduces Twitter's traffic a little. It screws with some of their metrics a little, with the shared accounts having access patterns of several humans all mixed together. It might affect revenue a little.
It doesn't do much to address the underlying issue of there being people who you might want to hear from who primarily post their content on a platform owned by a white nationalist. If you want that to get better, you have to something other than continue to use the platform.
The platform's user base, including accounts created for XCancel/Nitter purposes, forms the value that causes others to post there. Accessing the platform through a proxy still provides value to the platform in terms of user attention.
Xcancel allows HN users and adjacent to swear that they have left Twitter because it has nothing to offer them because its all shit, but still consume Twitter content because every other similar platform really sucks and is boring and has no content
Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.
Everything is both legal and illegal until a lawsuit happens. Then it collapses depending a little bit on the facts and mostly on who has the better lawyers.
I suspect Nitter's first round with lawyers pointed out that scraping is legal, but now they have been threatened with something else than scraping - Elon claims something else the way Nitter runs is illegal, such as the use of fake accounts to circumvent an access control device (DMCA 1201).
At the end of the day, as an individual or a team or a company, regardless of the statue and case law, you have to perform the calculus on your monetary and legal resources versus your counterparty.
Obviously ungrounded and frivolous cases tend to be easier to defend asymmetrically, but if I was X's legal team, there's no shortage of semi-plauisble claims I could throw at the wall and see what sticks.
As an example of this imbalance in action, BrightData is a 'gray area' company that basically does this exact kind of scraping. They have somehow won against Meta Platforms suing them, and even got X's lawsuit against them for scraping -- identical (?) activity to XCancel -- dismissed.
According to Wikipedia:
> In May 2024, a federal judge dismissed the suit, ruling that Bright Data did not violate X's terms of service or copyright by scraping publicly accessible data.[24] The judge emphasized that such scraping practices are generally legal and that restricting them could lead to information monopolies
But does XCancel have the resources of a company like Bright Data, that's funded and used by companies like Deloitte and Moodys?
Notice it says "terms of service or copyright". If X's lawyers have any intelligence, they'll have a reason why XCancel is not identical to Bright Data. Perhaps this time, instead of claiming it's a copyright violation, they'll claim it's wire fraud because multiple accounts are used.
Pretty sure it's legal when you do it for your own use (same as browsing a website) but it's illegal to redistribute web scraped results.
Thats "Billionaire Use" -- its like a "Fair Use" exemption but for billionaires.
Aaron Swartz died so that "AI" billionaires can live.
There’s an OpenAI billboard in union square right now of a kid eating Chinese food at his desk working on something and every time it just reminds me of that suchir kid because they said he had takeout :/
Someone should add a hitman to the corner of the image
I wonder what legal gymnastics are needed for "I can scrape anything off the web ignoring copyright and build a product from this, but you can’t even display what’s on my webpage elsewhere”.
Perhaps that is it in fact. The act of protecting it from scraping means you object. 99% of the blogged contents etc. Big AI helped themselves to was just… there. Public. Not free from copyright but still not paywalled.
Precedent is pretty clear: competitive uses bad, transformative uses good. Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.
> Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.
It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.
I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.
I think that's more true in image generation than in text? At least, all the money is in LLMs that write code, not LLMs that write O'Reilley-style coding books.
I thought LLM-authored books were rampant in Amazon, though?
I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...
Remember the golden rule of the golden rules:
Who has the gold makes the rules.
If a society operates under a rule like this, it is no better than Russia or any other tyranny where law is for me but not for thee. This is not how it should work in a supposedly free and lawful country.
No kidding. I dunno what kind of traffic loss Wikipedia has had but SO is really dead these days
If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?
There's a difference between creating a market for something better, so that nobody wants the old thing, and competing _in_ the market for the old thing by copying it directly.
And what would be a read-only version of X like XCancel compete against, exactly? Ads impressions? That would be the only possible thing yet they don't add any ads.
It's depriving X of impressions that they could monetise, no? Xcancel doesn't have to make money itself, it just has to impair the rights of the copyright holder. Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...
> Otherwise piracy would also be legal as long as it were non-profit...
Which is in a few jurisdictions, or at least is not prosecuted if it's for personal use. Also, according to your definition, the creator of uBlock Origin or any other adblock system should be sued in the same way, because they are depriving $ADS_CORP of their precious impressions.
> Precedent is pretty clear:
What cases are you citing when you say this?
Bartz v Anthropic. Though the plaintiffs did get something, it was because of the piracy to the original works (competing against the legal market for the books), not the use of them to train the LLM.
Bartz is an author though.
Is X claiming ownership of the posts people make because pretty much every single social media site doesn't so they have section 230 protection.
They can just round up some friendly users and sue under their names. Starting with their own corporate accounts?
Perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc....
Transformation.
Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no.
Taking something someone else made, modify it or use parts of it in some bigger thing or completely change it: Fine, if you have money and/or run a company
So in theory if you took twitter content and then transformed it so it "summarizes" all tweets with an AI rather than posting the exact text, would that be allowed?
Because that's stupid. These laws are stupid.
That's exactly the way UK courts are heading, see Getty vs Stability AI. The court ruled that there's no infringment because the model doesn't store exact copies, just derived weights, and therefore when it generates new images those aren't copies of protected works.
except a bunch of paywalled stuff did end up in training corpora
It’s the rehosting of the content not the scraping
Edit: not a moral stance
I love how the content belongs to them when someone else reposts it but it belongs to the user if the content is illegal. Such a double standard with these social media and AI companies. Why do we put up with it?
> Why do we put up with it?
You let it happen. Once people stop letting it happen, it'll stop. But social media is apparently the new "opium of the masses" so here we are and no one wants to do anything.
I actually do want to do something. I started to scrape Twitter to make it freely available. The web should stay open.
Did the users of X consent to XCancel copying their posts to their servers?
Everyone who goes to twitter copies the posts to their computers.
Spot on. This is where a lot of these "terms and conditions" break down logically. Viewing some content on the internet is literally copying it.
So is the distinction that xcancel served the content? But when I run
I see a bunch of hops between me and them. Every one of those hops is literally copying and retransmitting all the content. Are they not also serving it?No, this is where programmers rules-lawyer in ways that actual lawyers don't and then get law stuff hilariously wrong. No judge thinks that viewing an HTML page is downloading it, because downloading means saving a copy to your computer, not just looking at it. Even having an internet cache folder doesn't count as downloading. Even copying the file from the internet cache folder to somewhere might not count as downloading, although it'd still be a copy.
Same as when LG said their TVs don't record you and then Hacker News said "how can they detect voice commands if they don't record your voice"... facepalm.
I don't pretend to understand law, mostly it just doesn't make sense at all.
It makes more sense when you remember it's not a computer program and the things that are written in the law are not the things that will actually happen in the way that "if(foo) bar;" makes bar happen if foo is true. It's more like a book of excuses you could use for why you didn't do your homework.
Then the other side also has to bring an excuse for why you were supposed to do it, and if the principal thinks their excuse is better than yours, you get detention.
If you tell the principal "I don't have to do my homework because work means employment and it's illegal to employ a minor" you'll get detention for not doing your homework and extra detention for being a smartass.
And this example is not just due to people not taking the trouble to write fully specified rules. I don't think such rules could even be written. You can just do your best to cover the cases you can think of. The complexity of society is incomprehensibly vast and constantly changing, and the law has to have wiggle room to account for it.
Could you elaborate in what way you find the law mostly doesn't make sense? It has to be flexible in order to work with actual humans. Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying? Usually when we talk about copying it's someone making a duplicate so it can be accessed later. Only a very technical user is going to be diving into their cache to view that content after the fact. The vast majority of people don't understand that the browser is storing anything on their computer, much less how to access it before it's purged.
I can't remember the court case, but Blizzard did argue and win in court that WoW Glider's producers violated copyright law. If I recall correctly violating the TOS meant that an unauthorized copy made by executing the file chasing it to load WoW into RAM was created.
> Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying?
Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Note this is distinct from broadcast systems like analog television or radio. Packet switching networks only function by copying information and storing multiple copies around the internet, including in your computer's RAM (and disk, if cached).
So a legal definition that says "this kind of copying is copying but that other kind of copying isn't copying" makes no sense at all. Like many other legal definitions--it's all about what has been successfully snuck past a jury at one point or another in the past, without any heed for how things actually work.
> Because there's no physical mechanism for the information to be transmitted over a computer network other than by copying the bytes.
Your response seems to ignore everything in my comment other than the second sentence. I was asking why that detail should matter as far as the law is concerned, and I gave some reasons I don't think that would be good or practical.
I think users implicitly consent to their public data being public data when they put it in public together with other public data.
How I view that public data they decided to make public data, is none of their business.
i just screenshotted this comment without your consent
Why can't they distill twitter when AI companies distill everything including twitter? Distilling is copying and redistributing.
That is what all LLMs could do in 2023, verbatim, before they trained it out of them in order to keep up the pretense that there is no plagiarism. Now they all obfuscate the original or refuse to cite.
Grok can do that if you give it an HN thread or other websites.
There's a button on X that allows me to repost someone else's content.
there's a setting to disable that
That’s not rehosting
Edit: iPhone autocorrected my OP which meant to say rehosting not reposting
scraping content is mostly legal, redistributing content is not.
if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.
sites like archive.ph are in a similar bucket btw, and yet nobody's complaining (except websites seeing people evading their paywall). but at the end of the day it's not really fair to apply laws differentially on the basis of whose political ideas we like more.
Of more concern, the Nitter github repository was permanently archived a couple of days ago.
https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
On that same page:
UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.
> Following legal advice
It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but 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.
I imagine it will be hosted in jurisdictions other than the US.
The repo being archived happened after that UPDATE post that you mention. So the project has gone from suspended, to un-suspended, and now it's suspended again (and the repo got archived this time).
Edit: I see I'm being downvoted for just providing facts, so here's some evidence: you can see on the main project page that the repo was archived on 11 Sep[0]. Looking in the commits, the "UPDATE" message was commited on 6 Sep[1].
[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter
[1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5...
Zedeus said "it's hopefully temporary, but it'll remain that way until further notice." in the matrix room
> permanently archived
Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.
Regardless of the legality of the service:
I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment.
My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
This may be a situation where revealing a solution may end up harming it. For those who use iOS and other Apple OSes, I learned of this recently released free Safari extension called Litterbox that allows looking at one post on x.com.
[1]: https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox
People really need to just not visit it. You don’t need to browse Twitter to be on top of current events. Anything posted there will be available elsewhere within minutes (and hopefully it will have been vetted somewhat)
Who uses twitter for current events? I’m there for extremely niche hobby related posts.
Yeah as long as the audience is there, people will keep posting on Twitter.
I mean, you clearly don't use Twitter if you think that's how it's used.
I don't use twitter but it feels like a platform for bothering terminally-online celebrities
Maybe instead of trying to get rid of services that provide a more convenient access to X to non-logged-in users, they should realize that there is a real market behind these services - users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content without the incessant nagging and limitations that X subjects non-logged-in users to?
> users that will likely never sign up to X, but who want to read/watch some content
They probably don't want their echo chamber leaking to the wider internet, because external discussion of the content would reveal it for the siloed thought bubble that it is.
Consider X now requires personal information to sign up, and after handing that info over, signups are often still rejected with no explanation given. Yet another tell they're very interested in maintaining that echo chamber.
Do they not understand you can still serve ads to non-logged-in users? They can still be tracked nearly as effectively with fingerprinting.
Reddit says hello
And Reddit has also started blocking signed out users in my region.
And demanding ID!
Excuse my pedantry but "market" implies a possible audience/demographic to _sell_ to. If a user can't be arsed to sign up for Twitter (an action that costs nothing, AFAIK), what makes you think they will pay for read-only access to tweets?
Speaking only for myself, well, no. If Elon doesn't want non-users to be able to read tweets then that's simply one section of the internet I'm swearing off. I'll get my news from actual news sites and I have plenty of hot takes on my own to last me this life and the next.
They clearly realize it and are doing something to stop it. I understand the idea of imagining this as an underserved market they could do something about. Twitter worked that way. X intentionally doesn't want to, and wants to guard its monopoly over the information is controls.
It's like paywalls. Some news companies share free news as a sort of loss leader. Others say, "if you aren't going to pay we simply don't want you here."
Web version of Twitter has become unusable now. So much so that I wonder why they still keep it.
For years Twitter stood out among major platforms for having an actually-usable mobile web interface that seemed to be a first-class citizen / wasn’t intentionally degraded to force you into the app, and didn’t even nag you about it. Unsurprising they’ve since ruined it.
I'm calling bullshit. Twitter was always hostile to logged-out users. You could say "Well technically I was talking about 2006 before it got big" so I'll just say it was just as bad 10 years ago as it is today.
I disagree. There was a noticeable change some time after Elon bought it to make it even worse.
Nah 10 years ago I could view the whole website logged out. Now it's been reduced to a single post with no replies.
And remember, Elon only granted that so he wouldn't be (rightfully) banned from Google. At first you couldn't view anything, then Google delisted X because it only indexes public pages, then Elon conceded you can view the direct thing you linked to, and then Google relisted it.
The whole point of butchered websites is to direct people to install their more invasive app. It's not like all companies just got bad at making websites somehow. There are conflicting incentives.
So that you can be linked to it and told to make an account.
It did that long before Elon took over. He's made it worse, sure. But it was never really usable at any point.
The reasons it's unusable are precisely the reasons they don't want you using anything else. Direct control over your eyeballs. They decide where the ads go on the page, they decide what comes next in your feed, they track everywhere you look or move the mouse. Anything that circumvents this is a business risk to them.
So media outlets, influencers, etc have something to link to, and a way to promote Twitter by including tweets in their articles.
If it's public, people can link to it and promote the site. If it's not, then either info there doesn't get free publicity or people just screenshot the tweets instead.
I don't know why but to me the worse bit of it is the giant emoji finger that keeps trying to click the sign up button.
You normally only see that crap on Chinese apps like Temu.
So they can try to nag you into signing up and installing the app? Which doesn't work in 99.9% of cases, but try telling that to your boss if his name is Elon Musk...
Sadly, the success rate is significantly better than 0.1%. as a broad strategy, it clearly works. I wish it didn't, but there is a reason why all these companies do it.
> You can find the content you were looking for on the original website
*if you log in to an account
A big reason many people use Nitter instances is that X has become very locked down for unauthenticated users.
Free speech absolutist, btw.
What does proxying someone else's content have to do with free speech?
Elmo himself has conflated "free speech" with his own site. He's also done everything he can to limit that same "free speech".
Yes, we all know what "free speech" really means and it has nothing to do with X, but when the owner of X conflates what it means, we can mock that SOB for it.
I would argue that when he is talking about "free speech" he is always referring to the more general, non-US-Constitutional meaning of the phrase; i.e. the freedom to say what you want without being censored. So when a discussion about free speech on Twitter comes up, I assume that's the kind of free speech we're discussing. To bring in the the more narrow, first amendment meaning of the term is just a distraction or diversion.
You are the only one who brought up that distraction from the fact that he routinely violates the first definition you mentioned.
Can someone please explain to me any actual guidelines-based reason for the parent comment to have been flagged and killed (I vouched for it)?
The reason is likely not guidelines-based.
You have to admit, the “free speech” shield-wielding megalomaniac working so hard to keep people from freely accessing info isn’t exactly great optics.
Optics and logic are two different things. The optics seem to be working out well for him, for some reason.
I'm very much on the side of xcancel and nitter on this one, but I do think it's fair to point out that Twitter is free of monetary charge. It's not free in the sense that you do have to provide some personal information and data to them in exchange for that free account, but it isn't a huge roadblock for most people, however annoying it may be.
Now that said, I sure hope Elon will pivot this and make these services unnecessary. I'm not holding my breath though.
The biggest frustration for a lot of people is that their municipalities use Twitter almost exclusively to communicate with their constituents, it _sucks_. I've pleaded and begged my city and county to have some other form of communication, in addition to Twitter/X, to mass distribute information.
right, it's not free, like you said
The phrase "free speech" does not typically mean "free as in beer," rather it means "free as in freedom," so in this case you're conflating the two meanings of "free" in English.
The fact that Twitter is login-gated makes it objectively less free as in freedom.
Elon Musk, gratis speech absolutist.
Twitter is heavily login-gated, to the point that I can't see Twitter threads at all unless I have an account. I do not wish to make an account. Services like Nitter/XCancel allow me to read those threads, making that speech more free.
That’s not what free speech is.
Yes, it is. It seems self-evident to me that the speech on Twitter is more free when it isn't behind a login wall. How could it not be? If you'd like to provide an actual counter-argument, I'd be happy to consider it.
"Freedom of speech" means you are allowed to express your opinion without fear of being censored or persecuted for it.
It is not the same kind of "free" as in "no cost". Twitter is a paid service. To access Twitter, you have to pay for it. Either by purchasing a subscription or viewing ads.
Think of it as having to buy a newspaper before being able to read it. That doesn't stop the paper's editors from being able to criticize the government.
Then they should be glad Nitter instances are offloading some of their traffic, right? Some requests are cache hits, so I handled that whole request myself and spared an Elon server from handling it.
> Freedom of speech is a principle that supports the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions and ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction.
Nobody is being censored by the inability of a third party to act as a parallel distribution channel. Nor does freedom of speech have anything to do with entitlement to an audience. No website infringes upon freedom of speech by having a paywall on UGC, as neither the contributors nor readers are worse off than if the site didn't exist.
Nobody is arguing about the legal boundary of Freedom of speech, you're the only one making this argument.
We're talking about the quolloquial "free speech", here.
Could you give your colloquial definition, because its clearly different than mine.
"Nothing can shut down open source" - Elon Musk, LITERALLY TODAY: https://nitter.click/elonmusk/status/2099026767357120523
He speaks out both sides of his mouth.
Can you point the way where Free Speech is being countered here?
IMO, if you hate Elon so much, you shouldn't be visiting his website.
You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".)
If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives like "Bluesky" out there that might be good for you.
I don't visit his website. That's the whole point.
I don't want to use "X", I want to read updates from orgs and people who, unfortunately, don't post them elsewhere.
My municipality, and many other governmental entities, post official updates to x.com
https://nitter.click still works right as rain, and so do many other Nitter instances.
Their browser verification never made it into the same room as my browser anyway...
Makes sense, the legal system is pay to play.
Bluesky is here anyway.
Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
Are there other instances available? X can't ban them all.
I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.
Privacy is important more than ever as many of us don't want to login into X.
There's plenty of other instances running on nitter, some secret/invite only (and as such more chance to fly under the radar). The code is open source: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter albeit X DMCA'd the repo.
> X DMCA'd the repo.
No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution.
No reference to nitter in https://github.com/github/dmca/
Seems you're right. They have done this in the past though, so wouldn't exactly be a surprise.
Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:
> X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, proprietary behavioral pattern detection, TLS fingerprint validation, and x-clienttransaction-id checks. The repository referenced above appears specifically designed to circumvent these measures using browser cookies, curl_cffi TLS impersonation, fake headers, request jitter, and reverse-engineered GraphQL queries.
https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff...
https://status.d402.de/ and many other index pages
Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.
This to me is a big issue. You have politicians, government entities and other public institutions posting to twitter, but to access we need to log in.
There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
This comment also applies to facebook too, which I think is even worse than twitter.
We used to have that, it was called a blog. I used to subscribe to all my local politicians and journalist blogs back in the late 2000s and would recieve everything I needed in my inbox, but now everyone posts on Twitter. That's where we have ActivityPub.
> There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.
RSS.
but how to do that without protecting the content from enemy LLM companies scraping?
On the off chance someone thinks this is serious, being locked behind a login doesn't prevent your site from being scraped.
Indeed, the shitter authors recommended you buy a bundle of Twitter accounts with 2FA details when setting up your own instance, to avoid getting rate-limited.
There are millions of accounts for sale, roughly $0.10 per account.
https://hstockplus.com/accounts/twitter-x-accounts?sortBy=pr...
This wasn‘t recommended officially by the authors, right? I saw it on someone‘s codeberg fork but not on the official repo
Sure, let's say shitter's authors: https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter/wiki/Creating-session-...
also, public broadcasts should be scraped as much as possible
i just want to unmute the video and full screen it without logging in. i click twitter link and it is muted.
https://status.d420.de/
Xitter can't make a web UI that's actually usable to save their lives - so they're going after the one platform that does with lawfare.
Despicable behavior.
It's not that they can't. They don't want to. The reasons it is unusable are the things that make them so much money. If they made a usable one they'd lose even more money.
It just feels like every social media site is login-walling public posts. I can't think of a major social media site (reddit, Instagram, FB, Twitter, etc) that doesn't do this to varying degrees. I can only think of minor sites (bluesky, truth social, etc) that allow access.
It feels like an end of an era.
Reddit is still viewable, though they did finally axe "old" reddit for those not logged in.
But at least reddit still has lots of nitter-style mirrors as an alternative.
New reddit was getting login popups for a while as well. From my rudimentary checks it varied from subreddit to subreddit.
There is no reason for xcancel to exist.
Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.
Or you just visit X.com.
Right? Right?
> There is no reason for xcancel to exist
A bit like your comment.
It's possible that other people you want to read, are using a platform you don't want to use. Have this perhaps never happened to you, even once?
A good idea would be: Make a decision. A trade-off.
Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform.
Or you dislike the platform so much that you even wonder why these people are there. You definitely don't want to be in contact with the platform. If so, then give up these people.
There's no free lunch, right? You also (typically) cannot buy steak, but then somehow not pay the money by showing some fake credit card. That would typically involve crime, right?
Make decisions, guys!!! Make decisions!
Your cat and mouse games are embarrassing...
And that doesn't get better in any way just by downvoting me. ;) ;) ;)
These people includes pretty much every politician. I personally do have an X account and I do use X, but I completely understand why someone would want to read what their politicians are saying without wanting to create an account anywhere
One possible decision is to use a deshittifying front-end, like Nitter.
It is a half-measure, though.
It reduces Twitter's traffic a little. It screws with some of their metrics a little, with the shared accounts having access patterns of several humans all mixed together. It might affect revenue a little.
It doesn't do much to address the underlying issue of there being people who you might want to hear from who primarily post their content on a platform owned by a white nationalist. If you want that to get better, you have to something other than continue to use the platform.
The platform's user base, including accounts created for XCancel/Nitter purposes, forms the value that causes others to post there. Accessing the platform through a proxy still provides value to the platform in terms of user attention.
Of course not.
Xcancel allows HN users and adjacent to swear that they have left Twitter because it has nothing to offer them because its all shit, but still consume Twitter content because every other similar platform really sucks and is boring and has no content
The way the platform works can be shit while the content on it can be good.
I want to know what intelligent people say on X.
Well, there's X.com for that.