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Comment by Leonard_of_Q | Hacker News Reader

On that same page:

UPDATE: Following legal advice, the Nitter project will continue. More details will be announced soon.

That update was made 9/6: 5 days prior to archival and on the same day xcancel.com previously also "returned". I can find no public updates regarding Nitter project after the 9/11 archival.

The repo being archived happened after that UPDATE post that you mention. So the project has gone from suspended, to un-suspended, and now it's suspended again (and the repo got archived this time).

Edit: I see I'm being downvoted for just providing facts, so here's some evidence: you can see on the main project page that the repo was archived on 11 Sep[0]. Looking in the commits, the "UPDATE" message was commited on 6 Sep[1].

[0] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter

[1] https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/commit/1428b4c2b4246f92a7e5...

> Following legal advice

It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but the software project itself is probably fine. The legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Those people should seek their own legal advice.

I imagine it will be hosted in jurisdictions other than the US.

In cases like these, companies often try to go after the upstream project, not just operators. The law gives them lots of tools for this: the CFAA has a conspiracy provision; The DMCA has a provision against making software for circumventing copyright; Trademark law might make the name nitter or xcancel illegal; and finally even if the claims are weak the litigation itself is an enormous burden

> Computer Fraud and Abuse Act

Meanwhile it's OK for OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to hack companies all willy-nilly. Mad world!

It's about risk tolerance. Some people stop when there's a hint of legal trouble. Others keep going when there's nothing more to lose.

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