12ft
12ft.io is a website that allows online paywalls to be bypassed. It was created by Thomas Millar.[1][2]
Type of site | Paywall bypass |
|---|---|
| Owner | Thomas Millar |
| URL | 12ft |
| Commercial | no |
| Registration | no |
Function
The website's name is based on the phrase "show me a 10 foot wall and I'll show you a 12 foot ladder." It bypasses paywalls by pretending to be a search engine crawler when requesting a webpage. Websites with paywalls often allow access to search engine crawlers to ensure their pages appear in search engines.[3]
Blocking
Some websites block 12ft, such as Bloomberg, The New York Times and The Athletic.
Outage history
On 31 August 2022, the site was offline, with the hosting provider displaying the error message of "DEPLOYMENT DISABLED," and the HTTP 451 status code, meaning "Unavailable For Legal Reasons".[4] The site came back online on 1 September, but was disabled again on 10 September. The site was available again as of 11 September, but was no longer showing cached versions of pages for NYTimes.com, instead displaying a message of "12ft has been disabled for this site".[5] On 30 July 2023, the site's security certificate appeared to be invalid. The certificate in question was issued by Cisco Umbrella Secondary SubCA lax-SG with an expiration date of 3 August.
Alternatives to 12ft
Alternatives to 12ft include:[6]
- Private browsing for some websites, though often with access limits
- Through a virtual private network, the Tor network or a proxy server
- Several browser extensions[7][8]
- Several archive sites, including Internet Archive and archive.today
- Several web content converters, including PrintFriendly[9]
References
- Martin, Alexander. "Paywall-breaking tool 12ft asks users to subscribe to cover costs". Sky News. Retrieved 2022-04-08.
- Sobiraj, Lars (2021-10-07). "12ft.io hilft beim Überwinden von PayWalls". Tarnkappe. Retrieved 2022-04-08.
- Danielle (2022-02-21). "12ft.io is Your Friend for Bypassing Paywalls. But is That Okay?". Leaf&Core. Retrieved 2022-04-08.
- "451: DEPLOYMENT_DISABLED". 12ft.io. Archived from the original on 31 August 2022. Retrieved 1 September 2022.
This Deployment has been disabled. Your connection is working correctly. Vercel is working correctly.
- "12ft has been disabled for this site". 12ft.io. Retrieved 2023-06-01.
- "15 Free Ways to Get Around Paywalls". All About Cookies.
- "12ft Ladder Alternatives". AlternativeTo.
- "5 Best Chrome extensions to bypass a paywall". Bardeen.ai.
- "PrintFriendly".