Twitter starts to require login to view tweets • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#591

Post by richardfey » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:17 AM UTC

fsiefken wrote: post #433

habibur wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to revive the ad free, commercial interest free Internet of the 90s. It will be small in size, but so was the internet back then. Someone should come up with a pub-sub distribute micro blogging service like how emails work.

gemini https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ fediverse: mastodon, pleroma, pixelfed indieweb: https://indieweb.org/ twtxt: https://indieweb.org/twtxt scuttlebutt https://scuttlebutt.nz/ hypercore https://hypercore-protocol.org/ (see iris.to for an implementation) https://quitsocialmedia.club/solutions

On the IM side there's also https://delta.chat/en/

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#592

Post by richardfey » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:21 AM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #557

dredmorbius wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. It took me way too long to find the usage numbers (which ironically were within an arm's reach on my bookshelf most of the time), but ~1988 Usenet was under 1 million potential users, and fewer than 150,000 active readers. Even by the mid-1990s, it was under 1 million active participants. Google+ was considered a failed social network with at least 10--100 million active users (by my own conservative estimates b…

On the google+ 99.99% if offered would gladly take google+ for free. It was a huge success. Google closed it down because they realize they never needed it. You were rarely providing new information to google because you already had an account and they already were tracking you everywhere. Your posts on other social networking sites google knows about and uses. What sites you visit google knows about. The only thing…

> Your posts on other social networking sites google knows about and uses.

Source?

> They probably leveraged access to facebook's data for ads in exchange for shutting it down.

Speculation?

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#593

Post by richardfey » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:22 AM UTC

turminal wrote: post #247

hk__2 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is just a protocol; it’s not immune to these issues (see the last Freenode debacle).

It is immune, precisely because it's a protocol. Freenode is dead but switching to another network is literally as simple as pointing the client to a different domain name.

And recreating all existing channels

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#594

Post by richardfey » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:23 AM UTC

joecool1029 wrote: post #479

Saris wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a 'sats'? What is the list of services used for? This needs a lot more explanation built into the site!

>What is a 'sats'? Techbro lingo for bitcoin's smallest unit, the satoshi.

Techsis use a different one?

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#595

Post by ahartmetz » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:41 AM UTC

ipaddr wrote: post #553

thereddaikon wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point isn't that meaningful conversation is impossible on twitter. Its that the majority isn't and most abuse the gift of an instant global platform. Its tragedy of the commons on an unprecedented scale. Of course there are worthwhile interactions to be made. But the people making them would have been doing so on the less accessible older internet anyways.

The old internet was filled with hate, racism, sexism, people fighting, hating and swearing. Things are actually better. The news seems just as negative as social media.

These things existed, but you usually had to go seek them out specifically. You weren't reading a friend's, say, blog, when suddenly a link to some exciting online argument about some nonsense appeared. That does happen on ~all social media. Unfortunately, many news(paper) websites are baiting with "hot" controversial topics now as well.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#596

Post by alanhaha » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 7:23 AM UTC

arsome wrote: post #176

miohtama wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Twitter had changed their policy regarding API keys. You no longer just ”get” them. You need to apply. I was rejected for getting key to export my own tweets. Of course, this means everyone is using web scrapers for what was used API keys before, because of you can use public internal API.

I prefer to just steal keys by reverse engineering mobile apps. So easy to get keys for just about anything and charge someone else for it that way.

But as a developer, I won't put the API key in the client.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#597

Post by ElFitz » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 7:25 AM UTC

kubanczyk wrote: post #507

whoooooo123 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well damn, that ruins one of my favourite points. But I'm still not quite sure what the French word "salut" means. Is there not a simple one-word English translation? What exactly is the remit implied by the name Comité de salut public ?

"Salut" in this context translates as "salvation" in the sense of "preservation or deliverance from harm, ruin, or loss".

Exactly. "Committee of Public Salvation". Sounds weird.

So, in this case, considering they considered themselves the defenders of the greatest ideology of all time and the (worthy) people, and were at war with both foreign countries and some of their own people, I’d say it'd mean something like:

"Committee in charge of delivering the country, the Republic (the idea of Republic itself; not just it’s French incarnation) and freedom / democracy (even though they weren’t quite democratic) from utter ruin and certain doom"

But that’s quite a mouthful.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#598

Post by anon9001 » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 7:31 AM UTC

arsome wrote: post #176

miohtama wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also Twitter had changed their policy regarding API keys. You no longer just ”get” them. You need to apply. I was rejected for getting key to export my own tweets. Of course, this means everyone is using web scrapers for what was used API keys before, because of you can use public internal API.

I prefer to just steal keys by reverse engineering mobile apps. So easy to get keys for just about anything and charge someone else for it that way.

Excellent replies to everyone in this thread. You're spot on.

Just out of curiosity, is there a marketplace for private APIs? I'd love if you could elaborate on the "charge someone else for it" part.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#599

Post by saagarjha » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 7:46 AM UTC

arsome wrote: post #356

powvans wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mobile developers can implement certificate pinning to prevent man in the middle snooping. Twitter's app does this.

That achieves nothing against someone who uses something like apktool/baksmali to do static RE, let alone inject something like Frida to perform dynamic RE. There are even Xposed modules designed to just bypass certificate pinning. Certificate pinning is a good security measure, but not a counter-RE one.

Certificate pinning is neither a good security measure nor a good obfuscation one.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#600

Post by Mordisquitos » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 8:01 AM UTC

queuebert wrote: post #101

Mordisquitos wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine that they have two motivations in mind: 1. Get more useful data from users like myself who have a Twitter account but are not logged in by default. Every time I click on a tweet that a friend sent me by IM or that I saw linked elsewhere, they are not getting that juicy detailed data regarding my user having seen this tweet. 2. Just assume that mainstream users will simply go "Oh well, I'll make an account"…

They still have cookies and your browser fingerprint. You might be surprised how complete their picture already is.

They would if I meant "not logged in by default" on the same browser, but I mean on completely separate devices which have never even touched my Twitter account—not out of paranoid sandboxing on my part, mind you, just no motivation to log in. I barely tweet anything at all, so why bother login in.

Could they still know it's my "user" who is seeing this or that tweet, by using intelligence-agency level analysis on usage, personal connections, and networking patterns to determine that it's me? I'm sure they could. But why bother to such a massive level of complexity when they could simply require login to view tweets instead?