Comment by Terretta
7 hours ago
Given caching, blocking, userscripts, etc., most client things are have things built in that are effectively smart proxies or glorified layer 7 application gateways.
You can write your own client for arbitrary services. You can run your own client on your own hardware, and you can host your client on someone else's hardware. Your client can render the content however it likes. You can have someone else do the work to render it like you like it and run that, locally or remotely.
There are a lot of ways to get to an "apparatus" that's analogous to both nitter and to a proxy for nytimes that ensure consuming public comments by other users doesn't suck.
As far as I know, there's no law requiring billboards to be seen by all drivers using the public road it sits beside, nor requiring all web clients to render ads. As far as I know, in most of the world there's no law saying users can't buy DNS or proxy or application firewall or ad blocking services from a third party -- services that can run between you and host, on your router, on your device at various OS levels, or as extensions to your browser.
On the contrary, there seem to be increasing numbers of laws requiring servers to deliver their content to arbitrary clients even when a firm makes its own servers, content, and preferred client devices and wishes to "protect the user's experience" or whatever the firm's justification might be.
Given a decade or two of marketing the "public square", other people's public posts, intended for public consumption, and expected to reach the public, picking that content as worthy of banning "useragents" should be shaky ground. Should be an interesting battleground for digital rights.
It's enough to wonder if a reason to go after the nitters is to establish misfortunate legal precedent using a target that can't defend itself?
Clients are not proxies. The fundamental difference is who accesses the target server. If you’re using a client (in the sense of a local program that renders your request, like a browser or a browser with extensions) then you are the one accessing the information, and once you have that information it’s hard to make a legal argument against transforming it however you want for your own consumption.
But a proxy means you request information from someone else, not from the target server, and the proxy requests from the target server. This is also fine! Except: a) the target server can absolutely say “Proxy A is not allowed to access me.” [1] and b) if the target server has copyright on the material being requested, then the proxy may be violating that copyright by making the data available for your request.
[1] there’s a weird middle ground here where if a server can tell you’re using a client it doesn’t like, then technically it could use its arbitrary denial ability to deny access on that basis, but that doesn’t seem to be legally accepted? IANAL. Or maybe that just doesn’t happen because there’s no way for it to tell what client you’re using. They certainly do try to deny service when they can figure out you’re using an ad-blocker.