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Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

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Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#41
I'm so here for an age where some of this IP protectionism felony anti-circumvention nonsense gets absolutely bulldozed. Please please please.

It's entirely unacceptable, is suicidal corporatism to riff off the bad man, to have humanity's "public" messaging system be off limits to researchers, academics, observers. To trust a network at their word that they and they alone have a right to defend and protect us from propaganda, from malicious & shadow influence. This is not an ok basis that our information driven civilization can rest on.

I look forward to getting out of this trap. https://bsky.app/profile/jauntywunderkind.bsky.social/post/3...

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#42

> Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. The word "project" doesn't make a clear distinction between the repo and the instances. Nitter is on good ground with respect to the repo. The instances will be much harder to defend. From that one sentence it isn't clear if this is what the legal advice says or not. Nitter changed their design such that it now requires an X account to scrape through. This w…

The major instances are coming back online.

Twitter has a history of tracking down leakers by watermarks.

https://theintercept.com/2022/12/15/elon-musk-leaks-twitter/

Nitter might want to make sure that their scrapes are bit-identical to other accounts to defeat this.

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#43
post #17

When I got my first cease and desist my lawyer basically asked me if this is a hill you are willing to die on (i.e. spend enormous amounts of time and money on). I with them luck. I suspect a Go Fund Me announcement coming soon.

You're thinking of pre-LLM times. Nowadays GPT-6 can probably advise them better than all the worlds law firms combined. And probably win too, considering the incompetence (and tech illiteracy) of human lawyers.

Advice? Maybe ballpark quality if you can avoid hallucinations. The legal connections that will help net you a win, certainly not.

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#44
post #22
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be unfortunate for xAI, which abused the TOS of OpenAI for distilling via user accounts, to get a ruling that forbids scraping via user accounts. The entire business model of the AI industry, who resell and launder the scraped data, would collapse. Nitter just makes it visible to a human and has anti-scraper measures necessitated by the thieves like xAI. Additionally, a GoFundMe would reach astronomical prop…

Latter is probably a factor, because merely being right doesn't mean you won't run out of money while defending yourself from lawyers

While true, parent comment's first point (that the plaintiff would be unwilling to make the winning argument) would have an impact on their ability to spend the defendent to death. Judges do notice when you don't have an actual argument.

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#45

Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer.

Pay celebrities (and now influencers I guess) like the Twitter early days

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#46

Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer.

I think adversarial compatibility is the way to go.

Move people over slowly as you add new features the old platform doesn't porvide.

Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice

#48

Somebody needs to figure out how to move millions of people from one platform to other. Otherwise we will never get better platforms and our current techlords will keep getting richer.

There's always the big bad scary word, "decentralization".

But of course, even among HNers, there's amazing cognitive dissonance among "decentralization is hard and takes effort" and "omg, of course the next centralized platform won't be bought by an insecure dictator-wannabe".

I'm not that old, it's played out over and over. I shouldn't even comment here. Decentralization or bust.

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