X sends in the lawyers to shut down open source project

LEGAL

Cease and desist letters from patient headed by free reside absolutist

X, the societal media mouthpiece of free reside absolutist Elon Musk, has reportedly sent ineligible takedown notices to Nitter and related work XCancel complete alleged information scraping and rules violations.

XCancel's home page now contains immoderate minimal matter stating: "On Monday 24th August astatine 8 PM EST, we received astatine [sic] missive from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the work XCancel."

It says the work has been halted "until further notice."

Nitter's maintainer, zedeus, adds successful a abstracted connection : "nitter.net is offline and improvement has stopped for the clip being. I'm seeking ineligible proposal and won't beryllium commenting further connected the specifics for now." 

Although the repository is still connected GitHub, it is marked arsenic archived and read-only, pinch immoderate explanatory matter added to the README.MD.

Nitter provided a measurement for users to publication posts connected X without requiring an account. There was nary JavaScript aliases ads, a user's IP could not beryllium tracked, and it was mostly a bully woody snappier than the charismatic X client, conscionable read-only. It was the work down platforms specified arsenic XCancel.

It has besides been a thorn successful X's broadside for years, giving privacy-minded users a measurement to position posts without logging into Elon Musk's societal media mouthpiece.

This isn't the first clip Nitter has reeled astatine the hands of X. In January 2024, zedeus announced the extremity of the task aft Twitter (the original sanction of X) removed the impermanent relationship feature. A twelvemonth later, the task was back aft it recovered a measurement to activity astir the restrictions.

However, this appears to person triggered the lawyers, judging by reports that the missive alleges information scraping and violations of X's rules.

The Register asked X for comment, but has yet to person a response.

X isn't unsocial successful taking objection to information scraping. Meta, for example, fired a sueball astatine Israel-based web scraping patient Bright Data successful 2023, but X's cease and desist announcement sits awkwardly alongside Musk's ain proclamations astir free speech, and his corporation's usage of nationalist X information to train Grok.

Plenty of organizations proceed to station connected X, but accessing those posts without an X relationship has go an bid of magnitude much difficult without services specified arsenic Nitter and XCancel. ®