Let's hope X doesn't pressure GitHub to take the repo down.
It's actually sad to see how deeply do we depend on monopolies.
Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
21–30 of 437 posts
Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
#22I once consulted a lawyer when a large company contacted me. His response was - they've got a team of lawyers on payroll whose job it is to make you run out of money...
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
Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
#23When 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.
Have citations of case law that doesn't exist been addressed? It seemed like that kind of outcome being punished might make people less likely to try relying on LLM output for legal situations without an expert human performing a review.
Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
#24When 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.
You presume opposing counsel isn't using GPT-6 and other, legal-specific models trained on data ChatGPT will never gain access to. Hint: they are.
Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.
Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
#25> 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 was to stay functional after X removed guest accounts. This exposes them to a legal attack through the terms of service that must be accepted for the account, and to technical attack by blocking the scraping accounts.
Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You presume opposing counsel isn't using GPT-6 and other, legal-specific models trained on data ChatGPT will never gain access to. Hint: they are. Regardless of advice quality, legal proceedings aren't free-to-play, and the adversary in question here has bottomless pockets.
Such speculation is just fear mongering and that is exactly what the daft bullies want.
Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
#27> 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.
Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
#28Probably the first time I've read a headline of some kind where good news followed something like "Due to legal advice". I hope the best for any service using Nitter, because the split between X and Bluesky is becoming another red vs. blue making life difficult for everyone else.
It's a split between user expirences that do and don't optimize for rage and culture wars and engagement bait. If there's also a de facto red vs. blue split, it's due to which community gravitates to which model of what a social network should be.
Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
#29It seems like it would be a trivial statistical exercise to find all the nitter instance X accounts and just ban them, it's actually embarrassing they got lawyers involved instead of just doing that if they didn't want nitter to function.
Re: Nitter and XCancel resume service after legal advice
#30Probably the first time I've read a headline of some kind where good news followed something like "Due to legal advice". I hope the best for any service using Nitter, because the split between X and Bluesky is becoming another red vs. blue making life difficult for everyone else.
Maybe there could be a joining path: an ActivityPub joining ATProto and Nitter/X or something so no need to miss out on anything by being on "the other".