So are you, dear reader, for intellectual property laws or not. I see a lot of "anti-this" sentiment confused with "anti-AI [data collection]."<p>The consistent view is one regarding IP in general - not reverse engineering your morals based on the case.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>According to Wikipedia:<p>> 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<p>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.
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 <i>display</i> what’s on my webpage elsewhere”.<p>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.<p>It seems unreasonable to stop there though; the agentic bots are designed and marketed as able to compete with the initially-scraped sources.<p>I'm not convinced that a competitive use at one remove should be treated as not competitive.
I think LLMs providers pretty directly compete with content they scrape like Wikipedia and SO...
Remember the golden rule of the golden rules:<p>Who has the gold makes the rules.
No kidding. I dunno what kind of traffic loss Wikipedia has had but SO is really dead these days<p>If they weren't competing with AI then why is AI killing it?
> Precedent is pretty clear:<p>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.
Perhaps <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc._v._WTV_Systems,_Inc" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warner_Bros._Entertainment_Inc...</a>.
<i>Transformation</i>.<p>Taking something someone else made and showing it as-is, bypassing their own restrictions: No no.<p>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
except a bunch of paywalled stuff did end up in training corpora
Thats "Billionaire Use" -- its like a "Fair Use" exemption but for billionaires.
It’s the rehosting of the content not the scraping<p>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?<p>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 <i>wants</i> to do anything.
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.
I think users implicitly consent to their public data being public data when they put it in public together with other public data.<p>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.
scraping content is mostly legal, redistributing content is not.<p>if you started doing the same to, say, instagram content both meta and individual creators would sue you as well.<p>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.
Regardless of the legality of the service:<p>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.<p>My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
Of more concern, the Nitter github repository was permanently archived a couple of days ago.<p><a href="https://github.com/zedeus/nitter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zedeus/nitter</a>
On that same page:<p><i>UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.</i>
> Following legal advice<p>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.<p>Those people should seek their own legal advice.
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).<p>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].<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/zedeus/nitter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zedeus/nitter</a><p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5b2673438e5fb39fcc4a3" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5...</a>
Zedeus said "it's hopefully temporary, but it'll remain that way until further notice." in the matrix room
> permanently archived<p>Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.
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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox" rel="nofollow">https://andadinosaur.com/launch-litterbox</a>
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<p>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.<p>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
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?<p>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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.
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<p>*if you log in to an account<p>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".<p>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.
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)?
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.<p>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.<p>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.
"Nothing can shut down open source" - Elon Musk, LITERALLY TODAY: <a href="https://nitter.click/elonmusk/status/2099026767357120523" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.click/elonmusk/status/2099026767357120523</a><p>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.<p>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".)<p>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
Makes sense, the legal system is pay to play.<p>Bluesky is here anyway.<p>Hell, you’re arguably on a Twitter alternative right now.
<a href="https://nitter.click" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.click</a> still works right as rain, and so do many other Nitter instances.
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.<p>There needs to be a free, non-ad, non-login environment people can use to access this information posted by public entities.<p>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.<p>RSS.
but how to do that without protecting the content from enemy LLM companies scraping?
Their browser verification never made it into the same room as my browser anyway...
Are there other instances available? X can't ban them all.<p>I wish legal issues wouldn’t exist for this project and X would stop attacking projects that provide information for free.<p>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: <a href="https://github.com/zedeus/nitter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/zedeus/nitter</a> albeit X DMCA'd the repo.
> X DMCA'd the repo.<p>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.<p>No reference to nitter in <a href="https://github.com/github/dmca/" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/github/dmca/</a>
Seems you're right. They have done this in the past though, so wouldn't exactly be a surprise.<p>Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub:<p>> 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.<p><a href="https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff81529b86c701f296/2026/03/2026-03-27-x-corp.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/b2c88bad7dd771dc7d1842ff...</a>
<a href="https://status.d402.de/" rel="nofollow">https://status.d402.de/</a> and many other index pages<p>Consider running your own to spread out the HN/Slashdot effect.
i just want to unmute the video and full screen it without logging in. i click twitter link and it is muted.
<a href="https://status.d420.de/" rel="nofollow">https://status.d420.de/</a>
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.<p>Despicable behavior.
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.<p>It feels like an end of an era.
[flagged]
> It takes away earnings from X users<p>Oh no! How awful! So terrible! People who produce nothing of value might earn slightly less!<p>Moving on to more pressing matters...
Anything that takes money away from narcoleptic, right wing [self]-abusers of the COA^1 is a net good for humanity.<p>^1: Concept of Acronyms
There is no reason for xcancel to exist.<p>Either you cancel X. Meaning: NOT consuming X content.<p>Or you just visit X.com.<p>Right? Right?
> There is no reason for xcancel to exist<p>A bit like your comment.<p>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.<p>Either these people are important enough to you, and you don't disfavor the platform soo much. Then visit that platform.<p>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.<p>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?<p>Make decisions, guys!!! Make decisions!<p>Your cat and mouse games are embarrassing...<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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
I want to know what intelligent people say on X.