

News Publishers Take Paywall-Blocker 12ft.io Offline (theverge.com) 79
The Verge's Emma Roth reports: The News/Media Alliance, a trade association behind major news publishers, announced that it has "successfully secured" the removal of 12ft.io, a website that helped users bypass paywalls online. The trade association says 12ft.io's webhost took down the site on July 14th "following the News/Media Alliance's efforts." 12ft.io -- or 12 Foot Ladder -- also allowed users to view webpages without ads, trackers, or pop-ups by disguising a user's browser as a web crawler, giving them unfettered access to a webpage's contents. Software engineer Thomas Millar says he created the site when he realized "8 of the top 10 links on Google were paywalled" when doing research during the pandemic. [...]
In its announcement, News/Media Alliance says 12ft.io "offered illegal circumvention technology" that allowed users to access copyrighted content without paying for it. The organization adds that it will take "similar actions" against other sites that let users get around paywalls. The News Media Alliance recently called Google's AI Mode "theft." (Like many chatbots, Google's AI Mode eliminates the need to visit a website, starving publishers of the pageviews they need to be compensated for their work.) "Publishers commit significant resources to creating the best and most informative content for consumers, and illegal tools like 12ft.io undermine their ability to financially support that work through subscriptions and ad revenue," News/Media Alliance president and CEO Danielle Coffey said in the press release. "Taking down paywall bypassers is an essential part of ensuring we have a healthy and sustainable information ecosystem."
In its announcement, News/Media Alliance says 12ft.io "offered illegal circumvention technology" that allowed users to access copyrighted content without paying for it. The organization adds that it will take "similar actions" against other sites that let users get around paywalls. The News Media Alliance recently called Google's AI Mode "theft." (Like many chatbots, Google's AI Mode eliminates the need to visit a website, starving publishers of the pageviews they need to be compensated for their work.) "Publishers commit significant resources to creating the best and most informative content for consumers, and illegal tools like 12ft.io undermine their ability to financially support that work through subscriptions and ad revenue," News/Media Alliance president and CEO Danielle Coffey said in the press release. "Taking down paywall bypassers is an essential part of ensuring we have a healthy and sustainable information ecosystem."
Free to Crawl not Free to Read? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait what?
What legal action can you take? (Score:5, Insightful)
The claim that the information and reporting is so good, that it warrants a paywall, is stupid. If it's so good, ask for donations and support, and prove the work is good, by having people offer to pay, out of being impressed. Paywalls give the impression that the information / reporting behind them is low quality, and you're only hiding the work because it can't stand on its own.
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Bypassing the lacking paywall filter simply by changing your user agent, or, disabling JavaScript, or using the inspector and deleting the node (yes that sometimes works), doesn't constitute any kind of theft, your browser can already do all of that. Which means a website should expect all of that by design.
While it is true that is how a browser functions, if you use that capability to get around copyright restrictions, it can still be against the law. That is why the DMCA is so annoying.
Re:What legal action can you take? (Score:5, Interesting)
That is why the DMCA is so annoying.
The DMCA is annoying, but nothing 12ft does violates the DMCA. The thing does not descramble a scrambled work does not decrypt an encrypted work, etc. It does nothing to a copyright work. It causes their server to think you are a search engine and lets you see what the website is publicly presenting to search engines.
Naturally the news companies want the search engines to fully index their articles, so that they can benefit from having traffic towards their website driven by searches. They just don't want to let normal browsers see the content they allow search engines to see. In other words: The news companies want to have their cake and eat it too.
As for 12ft.IO; It does not matter that what they are doing does not break any laws - media companies find out and Do not like it, And can bully them with lawyers anyways.
They have a history.. in 2022 I see the media companies got them shut down by their hosting provider Vercel for "Terms of Service" violation They were reinstated a month later..
Obviously if there was a DMCA claim to be made: It would have been made a long time ago.
Media companies can still threaten to sue you over various claims that Don't even have a thing to do with copyright.
Every news agency has their own lawyers, and my guess would be it gets too annoying for a single website to deal with them all after awhile.
Also; Some of the most notorious paywalls blocked 12ft.io from working with their website.
I read that: "Some websites have blocked 12ft, such as Bloomberg, The New York Times and The Athletic."
I mean.. the News websites banning their IPs from accessing the website pretty much makes them useless, so you are better off with a self-hosted solution anyways. At that point it makes sense for them to just shut down, because the strategy of having a centralized Proxy server doing this means the Paywall runners are just going to all block their hosting provider's IPs once they become aware of it.
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Fortunately there are plenty of alternatives in more sensible legal jurisdictions.
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Everyone signed the WIPO treaty. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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They don't have DMCA like laws though. Reverse engineering and breaking copy protection is still legal in the UK, for example.
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The words in that first paragraph are defined in the 2nd paragraph.
And what 12ft does: Changing a browser User-Agent does not circumvent a measure that effectively controls a work. See (3)(b)
(B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
The key words are that it has to be Meas
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None of which are defined with the authority of the copyright owner.
LOL no doubt that will hold up in court. The law doesn't say it has to be defined with the authority of the copyright owner.
The part about authority means that even if you manage to break the copy protection (which you have by switching your user agent), if you do that without authorization, then you've broken the law.
Again, this is one of the problems with the DMCA.
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Yeah I'm regularly doing that. use inspect to find the DIV or whatever thats sticking the stupid paywall crap over the page. And then look at the body(etc) tags to find something like overflow:none or possibly a class tag that freezes the page. Works about 50% of the time in my experience.
Information wants to be free.
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by having people offer to pay, out of being impressed
Words haven't been impressive enough for this for a long time. We live in a world where information is expected to be free. This is one of the reasons media companies are dying regardless of their perceived quality.
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Do that and search engines and AI's will not cite your articles and you get less traffic.
Yeah, if you have quality content people still link to your articles, but much paywalled stuff is clickbait trying to get users to sign up before being disappointed.
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The publishers and their owners already lost me and many like me but the sad fact of the matter is most of the content is so slanted, it's not worth reading. There's no investigative journalism going on anymore as the upper class now owns the media and they simply refuse to allow classism and corruption to be exposed. All the Big Media content is either advertising or manipulation or both. This is basically bread and circus time for this empire. Just saying.
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Maybe the bypassing is not illegal, but if a site (not a browser addon) acts as proxy, it distributes the contents. And it probably doesn't matter if you plainly copy the content or provide a reverse proxy with Google Useragent in the backend, in the end your site shows the content.
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Well, Instapaper has been doing a fine job reading CNN's articles for me, both desktop and mobile... an extra click or two, but worth the effort.
Information wants to be lobotomized for profit. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Taking down paywall bypassers is an essential part of ensuring we have a healthy and sustainable information ecosystem."
I feel like we've lost some fundamental understanding of what information is, if the profit is more important than the information. I get that people want to be paid, but there's a big disconnect when things are set up to be free to crawl, then these same companies bitch to high heaven when the AI companies crawl, and pitch a bitch if a user manages to access the content via the same methods the crawlers do.
Something is broken in this process, and I'm not convinced its the web or the underlying technology that's broken.
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Isn't it obvious?
The plebes must pay, that is all
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If it were about providing healthy and sustainable information, they would not have a paywall. It is about money. That's not bad per se, but they should be honest about it.
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If it were about providing healthy and sustainable information, they would not have a paywall. It is about money. That's not bad per se, but they should be honest about it.
Precisely. It's the sanctimony of their argument that hits wrong. It's coming off like they think they're providing humanity some great service, but they're prioritizing the payment rather than the information. I'd have more respect for them if they just flat out said, "Pay us, bitches." At least that cuts through the bullshit.
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And put up a paywall that also excludes Google. Let 'em show that they can live on a paywalled model. All these "But search engines" and "but 3 free articles per week" models are cowards who don't trust their own paywall model enough.
People buy newspapers. If you provide the same online, many should think it is more accessible (more devices, possibly screen readers, adjustable font size, etc.) and also buy it. If you can't sell the information you can sell on dead trees online, something must be wrong.
13ft (Score:5, Informative)
I'll just leave this here:
https://github.com/wasi-master... [github.com]
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I'll stop you at docker.
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Ignore this fool
Now it's running on your system. Lets all collectively throw our middle finger at the news alliance
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Don't know about you, I always just run code from the internet, no questions asked. What could go wrong?
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You could, you know, read the code and find out if theres any nasties there. Popular open source projects with malware tend to get caught out pretty quickly, in timeframes measured in minutes, not hours.
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The point is, that people verify the code on GitHub (sometimes, sometimes not. You're quite optimistic) but not if the docker image is really built using the Dockerfile from the repo. Docker is like shipping a VM image claiming it has the software in it and people blindly believe it.
Re:13ft (Score:4, Informative)
If you hadn't stopped at docker you'd see the non-docker install instructions directly underneath.
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Oh god it gets worse, a systemd service!
I just visit archive.ph or archive.is and it does the same thing.
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Oh god it gets worse, a systemd service!
Everything is a systemd service if you create a unit file for it. If this is too complex for you then systemd is perfect for you since you're clearly too stupid to run an init script. Quite the conundrum isn't it. By complaining it's systemd only you've proven you need systemd.
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And docker is bad... how? At least if something is malicious, it takes a CPU or kernel bug for it to escape its container.
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You're confusing docker with the underlying container. Containers are great. Docker is a method to ship black box images to unpack into a container. For many softwares they contain pre-built binaries, which are not verified to match the source. Most people also do not check if the image contains more than the software it should contain. There were enough cases with bitcoin miners. And there are probably many containers running with insecure software and maybe even backdoors that are more subtle than a CPU h
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For many softwares they contain pre-built binaries, which are not verified to match the source.
Congrats. You've just described 99.99% of all software run on PCs including most software run on Linux since very close to zero people give enough of a shit to do source verification or compile software from source themselves.
Even using distro verified PPAs you're 100% trusting someone else to have done this for you. A person whom I guarantee you've never met or talked to.
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I trust my distribution. I do not trust random people who push operation system images onto dockerhub.
Re:13ft (Score:4, Informative)
cool. vive la résistance! though it's much simpler to just ignore paywalled sites. this is not a hill to die on.
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Or, you know, https://gitflic.ru/project/mag... [gitflic.ru]
Adware, malware, etc (Score:5, Interesting)
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That's the design goal of dark patterns. The option that the scumbag company wants you to click is big, bright and front-and-center, while the option that is most likely in the user's best interest is tiny and pushed off to a random corner in low contrast colors that almost blend into the page background. They do just enough to satisfy legal obligations (the best
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I don't know about that. I use lynx and all the options look the same.
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In many cases a script blocker is enough to see no ads anymore. Now think about if the problems are people not wanting to see ads or maybe people not wanting to run possibly malicious code just to read an article.
The Streisand effect plus the Whack-A-Mole game (Score:5, Interesting)
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You posted 6 minutes after the replacement was posted to Slashdot. ;-)
Fair is fair (Score:2)
anti-malware site taken offline by cartel (Score:2)
That's the story.
"illegal circumvention technology" ? (Score:4, Insightful)
News/Media Alliance says 12ft.io "offered illegal circumvention technology"
When the fuck did setting the User-Agent string on a browser become "illegal circumvention technology"?
These fuckers at this "News/Media Alliance" better be careful how they label their "news" in the future, as anything not actual news from them "infiltrating" into my browser will have serious consequences for them!
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I run an ad blocker. If I see ads the site used illegal circumvention technology.
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is setting javascript.enabled = false also illegal software?
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When the fuck did setting the User-Agent string on a browser become "illegal circumvention technology"?
In 1998 when the DMCA passed.
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That's odd, Google says changing my user agent is a feature of the browser. Is there a list of illegal features in Chrome?
https://developer.chrome.com/d... [chrome.com]
"Overriding the user agent string changes how the browser identifies itself to web servers. This means the browser can simulate earlier versions or different browsers entirely, which is useful for testing responsive design, compatibility, and feature detection.
Note that overriding the user agent string does not change how Chrome browser functions internal
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https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]
If you want to talk about why things are illegal, you should read the law.
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Let's dig deeper:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/de... [cornell.edu]
The copyright holders are voluntarily releasing the information to connections presenting a particular user agent. The browser freely allows me to change the user agent. Turns out that the "technological measure" that was employed by the copyright holders was insufficient to protect the IP, they failed to protect the IP and made it freely available.
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Turns out that the "technological measure" that was employed by the copyright holders was insufficient to protect the IP
Ok now you're just admitting to a crime here.
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Stabbing people is a feature of a knife. That doesn't mean you won't get in trouble for doing it...
"Sorry, officer. It's a well-documented feature of knives that they are good for stabbing people. It's Bob's fault for not having stab-proof skin! His skin failed to protect his insides from becoming his outsides. It's really his fault if you think about it!"
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Its more like you charge me to stab you in the front. But you allow Google to stab you in the back for free. So I put on my Google suit and stab you in the back for free. You might actually have a hard time telling me and Google apart. The point is that you allow free stabbing, and if you didn't allow free stabbing then you wouldn't have this problem of getting stabbed.
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False. There's nothing in the DMCA which says pretending to be something else is a crime.
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When the fuck did setting the User-Agent string on a browser become "illegal circumvention technology"?
While I agree with your point it is worth noting that 12ft did far more than simply change a user-agent. None of it was illegal though. It's not a crime for a piece of computer software to look like a different piece of computer software over a network.
Go back to print :) (Score:3)
Those same advertisements are why no one wants to also participate in a paywall.
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Horseshit. There were countless papers which didn't suffer from what you were talking about which had been absolutely decimated in distribution thanks to online access. You're passing judgement on an industry based on a few bad actors... ignorantly, and it has led you to a wildly incorrect conclusion.
Aww, the poor news media.My heart bleeds for you. (Score:2)
And your tears are fucking delicious.
Cry Me A River (Score:2)
You lock everything behind a paywall...then tell me I need to pay $15 to subscribe because I used my free articles for the month.
I'VE NEVER BEEN TO YOUR GODDAMN WEBSITE BEFORE!
At some point people will literally be too poor to pay attention because everything will demand a dollar.
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I'VE NEVER BEEN TO YOUR GODDAMN WEBSITE BEFORE!
CGNAT (Carrier Grade Network Address Translation). Five people on your ISP have read articles and the website can't tell them apart.
Ask AI to read the paywalled link (Score:1)
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Same reason. Websites want that the AI links to them, but the AI won't link to sites that provide no useful information.
13ft.io when? (Score:2)
Only the webhost took it down? Wow ... so it just takes them to find a new webhost and maybe a new domain and the party goes on.
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Evidently 17 minutes after you posted. https://news.slashdot.org/comm... [slashdot.org]