12ft

12ft.io is a website that allows users to selectively browse any site with JavaScript disabled. It also allows some online paywalls to be bypassed. It is currently owned by its creator Thomas Millar.^[1]

12ft

Type of site	No JavaScript proxy browser
Owner	Thomas Millar
URL	12ft.io
Commercial	No
Registration	No

In November 2023, its hosting platform Vercel took the website offline. It was back online the following month.^[2]

Blocking

Some websites have blocked 12ft, such as Bloomberg, The New York Times and The Athletic.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[3]

Outage history

On August 31, 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][better source needed]} The site came back online on September 1st, but was disabled again on September 10th. The site was available again as of September 11th, 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 July 30, 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 August 3rd.

On November 2, 2023, the site only displayed an error 402 with a message "402: Payment Required. This Deployment has been disabled. Your connection is working correctly. Vercel is working correctly." Thomas Millar announced that provider Vercel had removed his account access. Vercel stated this was because 12ft broke their Terms of Service.^[6] As of November 19, 2023, the site is up and running, and seems to be hosted on a new provider.

Alternatives

Alternatives to 12ft include:^[7]

• 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^[8][9]
• Several archive sites, including Internet Archive and archive.today
• Several web content converters, including txtify.it^[10] and PrintFriendly^[11]

See also

• Bypass Paywalls Clean
• Open Access Button
• Unpaywall