12ft.io is a website that allows users to selectively browse any site with JavaScript disabled. It also allows some online

paywall A paywall is a method of restricting access to content (media), content, with a purchase or a subscription business model, paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their website ...

s to be bypassed. It is currently owned by its creator Thomas Millar. In November 2023, its hosting platform

Vercel Vercel is an American cloud application company. The company created and maintains the Next.js web development framework. Vercel provides developer tools, frameworks, and cloud infrastructure to build and maintain websites. It is the maker of ...

took the website offline. It was back online the following month.

Blocking

Some websites have blocked 12ft, such as

Bloomberg Bloomberg may refer to: People * Daniel J. Bloomberg (1905–1984), audio engineer * Georgina Bloomberg (born 1983), professional equestrian * Michael Bloomberg (born 1942), American businessman and founder of Bloomberg L.P.; politician a ...

, ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' and ''

The Athletic ''The Athletic'' is a subscription-based sports journalism department of ''The New York Times''. It provides national and local coverage in 47 North American cities as well as the United Kingdom. ''The Athletic'' also covers national stories ...

''.

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 A search engine is a software system that provides hyperlinks to web pages, and other relevant information on World Wide Web, the Web in response to a user's web query, query. The user enters a query in a web browser or a mobile app, and the sea ...

crawler when requesting a webpage.

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". 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". 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

had removed his account access. Vercel stated this was because 12ft broke their Terms of Service. 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: *

Private browsing Private browsing (also known as incognito mode or private mode) is a feature in most web browsers that enhances user privacy. In this mode, the browser initiates a temporary session separate from its main session and user data. The browsing ...

for some websites, though often with access limits * Through a

virtual private network Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not con ...

, the

Tor network Tor is a free overlay network for enabling anonymous communication. It is built on free and open-source software run by over seven thousand volunteer-operated relays worldwide, as well as by millions of users who route their Internet traffic ...

or a proxy server * Several

browser extension A browser extension is a software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow users to install a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and st ...

s * Several

archive site In web archiving, an archive site is a website that stores information on webpages from the past for anyone to view. Common techniques Two common techniques for archiving websites are using a web crawler or soliciting user submissions: # Using ...

s, including

Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...

and

archive.today archive.today (formerly archive.is) is a web archiving website that saves snapshots on demand. It has support for JavaScript-heavy sites such as Google Maps and Twitter. Archive.today records two snapshots: one replicates the original webpa ...

* Several web content converters, including txtify.it and PrintFriendly

References

External links