Yet another Hacker News

XCancel suspended "due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings"

107 points unfocso 1 hour ago 59 comments

dpmartinez 51 minutes ago | parent

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.

unfocso 42 minutes ago | parent

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.

amiga386 30 minutes ago | parent

> 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/

embedding-shape 13 minutes ago | parent

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...

esarbe 49 minutes ago | parent

https://status.d420.de/

goda90 49 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

yoz-y 48 minutes ago | parent

Web version of Twitter has become unusable now. So much so that I wonder why they still keep it.

rob74 43 minutes ago | parent

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...

freedomben 9 minutes ago | parent

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.

uurrnn 43 minutes ago | parent

So that you can be linked to it and told to make an account.

macNchz 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

Zambyte 25 minutes ago | parent

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.

figmert 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

jmclnx 47 minutes ago | parent

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.

DaedalusII 44 minutes ago | parent

but how to do that without protecting the content from enemy LLM companies scraping?

jasonlotito 30 minutes ago | parent

On the off chance someone thinks this is serious, being locked behind a login doesn't prevent your site from being scraped.

amiga386 24 minutes ago | parent

Indeed, the Nitter 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...

zImPatrick 14 minutes ago | parent

This wasn‘t recommended officially by the authors, right? I saw it on someone‘s codeberg fork but not on the official repo

pamcake 46 minutes ago | parent

Of more concern, the Nitter github repository was permanently archived a couple of days ago.

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

latexr 38 minutes ago | parent

> permanently archived

Why do you say it’s permanent? Unarchiving a GitHub repository is reversible, and just as easy as archiving it.

zImPatrick 36 minutes ago | parent

Zedeus said "it's hopefully temporary, but it'll remain that way until further notice." in the matrix room

Leonard_of_Q 20 minutes ago | parent

On that same page:

UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.

petcat 7 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

angoragoats 6 minutes ago | parent

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).

accountrequired 46 minutes ago | parent

i just want to unmute the video and full screen it without logging in. i click twitter link and it is muted.

rob74 44 minutes ago | parent

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?

pluc 42 minutes ago | parent

Reddit says hello

Waterluvian 35 minutes ago | parent

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."

swed420 23 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

p-o 41 minutes ago | parent

Free speech absolutist, btw.

arrowsmith 23 minutes ago | parent

What does proxying someone else's content have to do with free speech?

Forgeties79 20 minutes ago | parent

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.

freedomben 11 minutes ago | parent

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.

angoragoats 9 minutes ago | parent

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.

angoragoats 16 minutes ago | parent

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.

mbmbn 21 minutes ago | parent

Can you point the way where Free Speech is being countered here?

zqwt3k 36 minutes ago | parent

Thanks Elon, now we know that scraping is illegal! Very good to clarify that for future proceedings against the AI thieves.

wahnfrieden 32 minutes ago | parent

It’s the reposting of the content not the scraping

zqwt3k 30 minutes ago | parent

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.

echelon 25 minutes ago | parent

Grok can do that if you give it an HN thread or other websites.

jm4 20 minutes ago | parent

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?

HumblyTossed 6 minutes ago | parent

There's a button on X that allows me to repost someone else's content.

blitzar 22 minutes ago | parent

Thats "Billionaire Use" -- its like a "Fair Use" exemption but for billionaires.

HumblyTossed 7 minutes ago | parent

Aaron Swartz died so that "AI" billionaires can live.

newscracker 32 minutes ago | parent

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

Forgeties79 22 minutes ago | parent

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)

stingraycharles 9 minutes ago | parent

Yeah as long as the audience is there, people will keep posting on Twitter.

pino83 18 minutes ago | parent

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?

bananaflag 17 minutes ago | parent

I want to know what intelligent people say on X.

embedding-shape 16 minutes ago | parent

> 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?

small_model 7 minutes ago | parent

Good, it's a woke, left wing EDS scam. It takes away earnings from X users and XAI who spend money developing X.