12ft.io

12ft.io, also known by its website title as the 12ft Ladder, is a website and a tool that helps bypass any paywall. The quote of the website is "Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder".
The user can prepend the URL of this website (12ft.io/) to the URL of any paywalled page, and then this website would attempt to remove the paywall and gain temporary access to the article.
==History==
It was founded by Thomas Millar in 2020 due to the fact that news sites want Google to index their content so it shows up in search results. So they don't show a paywall to the Google crawler. Though, the Google crawler will cache a copy of the site every time it crawls it, and the website would hence show the cached, unpaywalled version of the page.
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".https://web.archive.org/web/20220831063530/https://12ft.io/ 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".https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com 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."12ft is down, @vercel banned me" As of November 19, 2023, the site is up and running, and seems to be hosted on a new provider.
==References==
Category:Websites
Category:Websites with the .io domain
Category:Tool websites
Category:Websites registered in 2020