Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nitter is working again

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 102 posts

Re: Nitter is working again

#91

Post by immibis »

klardotsh wrote: post #66
malermeister wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tinfoil hat time: what if that was the point all along? twitter was a vital space for organizing protests - think arab spring, occupy wall street. one of the richest guys in the world (who's also very anti-union, btw!) buys it up in a time where inequality is getting worse and worse and social fabrics are starting to tear and makes it unusable. no more space for organizing. one fewer threat to capital.

Given the dude paid $44B for a site clearly worth significantly less than that, and then promptly ran it into the ground, your "tinfoil hat time" answer honestly seems like the only rational answer. It checks out on more levels than any of his actions have.

Why is this downvoted? It makes a lot of sense, and it's not some outlandish conspiracy theory (it's very inlandish) as we've seen rich people do similar things before, more than once, and dictators do it very frequently.

Re: Nitter is working again

#92

Post by immibis »

charcircuit wrote: post #73
beepbooptheory wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a lawyer but take your word for it. Is it illegal specifically in US, or elsewhere too? Either way, you'd surely agree its a noble pursuit? Just considering the wider context here!

It in illegal in most jurisdictions to access data which you are unauthorized to. >Either way, you'd surely agree its a noble pursuit? Considering it hurts Twitter's profitability by not showing ads, hurts Twitter's metrics by not having people sign in or sign up, hurts users who were accidently signed out from signing in to twitter and having a better user experience, and hurts content creators because nitter doesn'…

More people need to remember that freedom works both ways. Twitter has the freedom to put up walls on its own property, and other people have the freedom to put up ladders on theirs so they can see over the walls. Although law enforcement always seems to end up biased towards the billionaires, it's not an automatic process and they have to go through some contortions to find an excuse, because the law says you and Elon Musk are equal.

There's the CFAA, which is a blatantly unfair law targeting any computer activity billionaires don't like. I hear it hasn't been used in this way for a while, and not many times ever, but if it does get used on you you'll wish you were dead, but some people seem to be okay with low-probability high-impact risks. You might even be found innocent if you convince the judge you are authorized to access public tweets. It's not like you're running an SQL injection.

There's the DMCA's anti-circumvention clause, but that's written by Hollywood billionaires for Hollywood-bought judges to abuse. Elon Musk can have a fun time trying to convince them his platform is equivalent to Disney to get a favourably corrupt judgement.

Other than that, what's stopping you from sending any request you like to access public data? You can say your user agent is Snoopy the Dog, you can say you would prefer to accept MIME type ascii/emojipoo, you can pass the server 1000 IDs at once even though it won't give you that many, and you can tell it you're the Twitter app on Android.

Remember: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Re: Nitter is working again

#93

Post by immibis »

sangnoir wrote: post #76
ilikehurdles wrote: post #39

Anyone remember threads? Whatever happened to that app?

Last I heard, it had 100M sign-up by its 5th day, nbd.

That number doesn't mean anything though. That's the number of people who looked at the app at least once. Give it a month and we'll see how much traffic it gets per day.

Re: Nitter is working again

#94

Post by immibis »

jakear wrote: post #84
Macha wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A device specific ID would be a fingerprinting mechanism that would conflict with the privacy goals though? It would then have to be resettable, like the ad identifier already is.

They already have a device specific ID, this isn't asking for a new ID. See the link above. It's not considered a fingerprinting mechanism because it's only specific to a device/app-vendor pair, so can't be shared to fingerprint across apps. The problem is you can't use it for rate limiting because a bad actor could just generate a random ID and use that. That's why an endpoint for validating a given ID was issued fo…

Now you have Google dictating who can make Android phones that actually work. That has to be in violation of GPL somewhere.

Re: Nitter is working again

#95

Post by charcircuit »

immibis wrote: post #92
charcircuit wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It in illegal in most jurisdictions to access data which you are unauthorized to. >Either way, you'd surely agree its a noble pursuit? Considering it hurts Twitter's profitability by not showing ads, hurts Twitter's metrics by not having people sign in or sign up, hurts users who were accidently signed out from signing in to twitter and having a better user experience, and hurts content creators because nitter doesn'…

More people need to remember that freedom works both ways. Twitter has the freedom to put up walls on its own property, and other people have the freedom to put up ladders on theirs so they can see over the walls. Although law enforcement always seems to end up biased towards the billionaires, it's not an automatic process and they have to go through some contortions to find an excuse, because the law says you and El…

Saying that if you ignore the law then it is legal is not a useful point.

Even if the tweets are public that doesn't mean you can steal an authorization token to use an API to query for them. If you hacked into so server and downloaded /usr/bin/bash you still accessed data you were not authorized to even though it was a public binary.

Twitter's terms of service makes it clear that you aren't allowed to reverse engineer the android app to take its token and start scraping twitter.

Re: Nitter is working again

#97

Post by immibis »

charcircuit wrote: post #95
immibis wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More people need to remember that freedom works both ways. Twitter has the freedom to put up walls on its own property, and other people have the freedom to put up ladders on theirs so they can see over the walls. Although law enforcement always seems to end up biased towards the billionaires, it's not an automatic process and they have to go through some contortions to find an excuse, because the law says you and El…

Saying that if you ignore the law then it is legal is not a useful point. Even if the tweets are public that doesn't mean you can steal an authorization token to use an API to query for them. If you hacked into so server and downloaded /usr/bin/bash you still accessed data you were not authorized to even though it was a public binary. Twitter's terms of service makes it clear that you aren't allowed to reverse engine…

Which law prohibits you from modifying your copy of the Twitter mobile app in a way that doesn't piss off Hollywood?

Re: Nitter is working again

#98

Post by Aerbil313 »

paxys wrote: post #69
malermeister wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tinfoil hat time: what if that was the point all along? twitter was a vital space for organizing protests - think arab spring, occupy wall street. one of the richest guys in the world (who's also very anti-union, btw!) buys it up in a time where inequality is getting worse and worse and social fabrics are starting to tear and makes it unusable. no more space for organizing. one fewer threat to capital.

He owns the site. If this is truly his intention then all he has to do is turn off the main switch. There's really no reason to give him the benefit of doubt and twist the narrative into "Musk is a genius and everything is going according to plan". The simpler theory is likely to be the correct one – he has never run a social network before and has no idea how to stop bleeding users and cash so is desperately throwin…

I too don't believe Elon is that dumb. He could let the site just be. Especially after rate limits, it really smells something. You wouldn't rate limit a social media platform even if you bills are hard to pay, if you want the platform to be around.

Re: Nitter is working again

#99

Post by sangnoir »

immibis wrote: post #93
sangnoir wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I heard, it had 100M sign-up by its 5th day, nbd.

That number doesn't mean anything though. That's the number of people who looked at the app at least once. Give it a month and we'll see how much traffic it gets per day.

100M users in 5 days doesn't mean anything? I understand waiting to see MAU & stickiness - but having the fastest-adopted platform of all time is something. Instagram could not have hoped for a better launch - all they have to do now is not screw it up like the other guy.

Re: Nitter is working again

#100

Post by Tokumei-no-hito »

ec109685 wrote: post #96

This is like the analog loophole. If data is transferred from Server to Client, it's always possible to scrape. Though Apple is trying to make this harder: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/devicecheck/prepar...

I am not an iOS dev. What is the significance of App Attest wrt the loophole used here?
Post reply on HN