"I continue to not understand how Twitter has managed to trick an entire generation of developers into believing they need Twitter's permission to develop a thi

"I continue to not understand how Twitter has managed to trick an entire generation of developers into believing they need Twitter's permission to develop a third-party Twitter client. " It's Twitter's API, and Twitter's servers. "Has the law changed in some noticeable way to make reverse engineering the official Twitter client and extracting their first party keys for purposes of interoperability suddenly illegal?" If you don't have permission to use someone else's stuff, you don't use it. We were all taught that in kindergarten. "We used to do this all the time" The fact that you abused other's web servers back then doesn't mean that it was right then or now.