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Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

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Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#621

Post by dredmorbius »

SECProto wrote: post #582
dredmorbius wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you using "old.reddit.com" to visit, or "www.reddit.com" and relying on JS for the old-site experience? I'm doing the latter (in large part so that I post old.reddit.com links), and I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired.

uh... I go to www.reddit.com not old.reddit.com - I don't actively do anything at all, other than change a flag in my user settings. Looking at old.reddit.com in an incognito window looks the exact same as what i see at www.reddit.com. Firefox, ublock origin, no other addons. On mobile and desktop. > I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired. in what sense? Seems like it's been the same for ~8yrs, othe…

That's a significant difference.

I both want myself and others to experience Old Reddit. So I use Old Reddit URLs, both for my own interactions and when posting links to the site.

And if I do that, I do not remain on Old Reddit.

With JS disabled for New Reddit (one mechanism for reminding me not to use it), the interface doesn't persist.

Note that this has similarly been a long-standing issue when using i.reddit.com, the lightweight mobile interface. So long as you're clicking on interface-related links, you're OK (e.g., posts within a subreddit, or short-style links to users or subs: /u/ or /r/). But if there's a hardcoded fully-qualified link to a given Reddit URL (post, comment, wiki, user, etc.), then whatever the governing host-part is is applied, and bang, I'm off my preferred interface.

Many subreddit sidebars explicitly code the fully-qualified hostname to their Wiki or various support pages. This is especially infuriating.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#622

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

Google+ literally had billions of registered profiles. Somewhat fewer than 99.99% actively used the site.

I sampled a random selection of ~50,000 profiles to find out how many were actually actively using the site.

9% of all profiles had ever posted anything at all to the site. This is somewhat fewer that 99.99%.

And only 0.016% of all G+ profiles had posted publicly in the first 18 days of 2015, when I performed my sampling.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq

And again, you're talking to the guy who ran that experiment.

Eric Enge of (then) Stone Temple Consulting independently replicated my analysis using a much larger sample of 500,000 profiles, confirming the results I'd found and providing additional details:

https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the...

I had absolutely no idea Enge was doing this until he published his results. They're a completely independent validation. Which is how science is supposed to work.

Your other comments about G+ are at best speculation, and largely fail to match my knowledge and understanding of the site and service.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#623

Post by jvanderbot »

RedComet wrote: post #578
jvanderbot wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can remove your phone number easily under account settings. This trickery is still a very effective way to get phone information for masses of people, but on the individual level, it's possible to avoid.

Yes, but once you've added it, they have it, even if you can't see it in your settings.

You're assuming they keep it, but is there evidence of that? Regardless, it's a good assumption. I'll actually ask twitter support right now!

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#624

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #621
SECProto wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uh... I go to www.reddit.com not old.reddit.com - I don't actively do anything at all, other than change a flag in my user settings. Looking at old.reddit.com in an incognito window looks the exact same as what i see at www.reddit.com. Firefox, ublock origin, no other addons. On mobile and desktop. > I can assure you It Does Not Work As Expected Or Desired. in what sense? Seems like it's been the same for ~8yrs, othe…

That's a significant difference. I both want myself and others to experience Old Reddit. So I use Old Reddit URLs, both for my own interactions and when posting links to the site. And if I do that, I do not remain on Old Reddit. With JS disabled for New Reddit (one mechanism for reminding me not to use it), the interface doesn't persist. Note that this has similarly been a long-standing issue when using i.reddit.com,…

Disabling JS makes you keep going back to the new layout? Interesting that it's essentially being done client-side then.

I don't use any blanket JS blocking browser addons. I find it frustrating how much of the web gets broken with them, and having to manually flag damn near every site just to get them to work is tedious. Just using uBlock Origin to block all the trackers and ads is good enough for me.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#625

Post by Anunayj »

addandsubtract wrote: post #606
hn_99 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. As someone who hasn't done any mobile dev at all, is there a way to prevent something like this from happening? Can't you somehow encrypt such secrets in the app?

You could proxy requests over a server you control. This might just shift your problem, depending on the use case.

Rate-limiting works really well in most cases, though CGNATs makes that a horror nowadays too.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#626

Post by aabbcc1241 »

hn_99 wrote: post #224
arsome wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting. As someone who hasn't done any mobile dev at all, is there a way to prevent something like this from happening? Can't you somehow encrypt such secrets in the app?

Frontend is in the hand of enemy. There is no secret on the client side.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#627

Post by yosame »

treesknees wrote: post #475
silicon2401 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit is unusable without which app, the official one? Because I've been on reddit for a decade and never once used their app. It's either reddit is fun on android or the browser. Never had a problem. Even if you don't have an account, old.reddit.com and i.reddit.com (for mobile) bypass all the atrocious new UI changes

Probably referring to the regular reddit mobile website. It constantly bombards you with requests to open the app, you can't open anything from NSFW subs. It's pretty unusable. At least Twitter and Instagram I can use in the browser without 3rd party sites or apps.

It's also started blocking subs that aren't on r/popular, so it's become even more unusable.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#628

Post by IlPeach »

young_unixer wrote: post #526
riffic wrote: post #35

I posted this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281472 this is an issue (and I fail to see this mentioned here today) in that public sector agencies use Twitter to disseminate emergency information. With a login wall, this information is not getting out to the people who need it the most. I mod /r/Twitter and saw about a week ago a number of threads complaining about a new login-wall. This shit is 100…

The real culprits here are these public sector agencies. They shouldn't use inaccessible mediums like Twitter as their primary channel of information.

Yes, and no. They use what's available and what gets them in front of the users. IMO I don't see anything wrong with that.

The problem comes if they don't provide any other way to access their information.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#629

Post by xvector »

emptysongglass wrote: post #517
xvector wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe solutions like SafetyNet on Android might help here. AFAIK no one has successfully reversed SafetyNet enough to spoof it.

Please don't legitimize SafetyNet. It is an existential threat to real ownership of your phone as any flavor of Android but that blessed by Google trips SafetyNet. It's the equivalent of barring people from running software on their laptop because they've installed a flavor of Windows that wasn't shipped from the factory. People everywhere have a right to do with their phone what they want to.

I agree with all your points, but what's the reasonable alternative? There is a reason that apps have decided to go with SafetyNet as a requirement. It dramatically reduces abuse.

Re: Twitter starts to require login to view tweets

#630

Post by mikro2nd »

djrogers wrote: post #577
mikro2nd wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's odd. I've never given Twitter a phone no. (Granted my account predates their phone no. fetish.) Still use Twitter daily without any issue. Perhaps it's because I'm still logged in and not trying to re-login?

> Granted my account predates their phone no. fetish I doubt that - twitter started as an SMS service…

Doubt all you like - that's how it is.
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