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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."

News Publishers Take Paywall-Blocker 12ft.io Offline

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  • Wait what?

  • by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Thursday July 17, 2025 @05:11PM (#65527832) Homepage
    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. If you really want to design a "paywall" we've had them for decades, just require a user to login, and until they do show nothing, and once you do, you'll destroy most of your user base.

    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.
    • 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.

      • by mysidia ( 191772 ) on Thursday July 17, 2025 @07:10PM (#65528022)

        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.

        • Read the first paragraph of this law: https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]
          • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Fortunately there are plenty of alternatives in more sensible legal jurisdictions.

          • by mysidia ( 191772 )

            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

            • 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.

        • by mjwx ( 966435 )
          The DCMA was never meant to be a real law that would be applied fairly and it's letter adhered to. It was intended as a cudgel to be wielded by the content industry to beat anyone they didn't like. Given that your government has stooped even the pretending to have a pretence of following the law, why do you think they'd obey the letter of a law that was expressly designed to be abused in this fashion?
    • I've found almost all "paywalls" are CSS based and not truly log-in driven/server side controls. There are a few exceptions but I've also seen those exceptions drop over time. Not sure if they are cost prohibitive because the vendors or the blocking of users just kills any long term growth. The latter is likely the bigger issue if my anecdotal experiences are similar to others. Once its a login wall, I will never return to that site again and find a different source for the material.
      • Yep, or if they do use JS, you can generally just tell the console to bypass it because most of the time, the console is active, and full out debugging information.
    • 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.

    • 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.

      • No, media companies are dying because instead of journalism they produce crap, it's all crap, that doesn't deserve money. Look at the CBC or CTV, it's all short content, empty of value, with either no point, no substance, or just a copy from someone else. If you want compensation for your content, make good content! Why do people fund Lunduke, for instance? His work is generally free, on YouTube and Twitter, but, people still pay because it's good.
    • by allo ( 1728082 )

      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.

      • Exactly, because the content is, generally, terrible, so they need a clickbait title so you start to read, before you close the windows or tab 2 minutes in and move on. Take a look at your typical news hour at 6pm, if you cut out the fluff and nonsense, what are you left with? Sure, the weather lady is cute, and honestly, I think that's why half of the people even watch. Even the tech segment, or customer issue segment, is, generally, comically stupid. "Do you know if you get loan, you owe it?".
    • by 2TecTom ( 311314 )

      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.

    • by allo ( 1728082 )

      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.

    • by zaren ( 204877 )

      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.

  • by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Thursday July 17, 2025 @05:13PM (#65527836)

    "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.

    • by haruchai ( 17472 )

      Isn't it obvious?
      The plebes must pay, that is all

    • by allo ( 1728082 )

      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.

      • 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.

        • by allo ( 1728082 )

          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)

    by Tracy Reed ( 3563 ) <treed@NosPAM.ultraviolet.org> on Thursday July 17, 2025 @05:13PM (#65527838) Homepage

    I'll just leave this here:

    https://github.com/wasi-master... [github.com]

    • I'll stop you at docker.

      • by dknj ( 441802 )

        Ignore this fool

        docker run --name 13ft -it -d -p 5000:5000 ghcr.io/wasi-master/13ft:latest

        Now it's running on your system. Lets all collectively throw our middle finger at the news alliance

        • Don't know about you, I always just run code from the internet, no questions asked. What could go wrong?

          • 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.

            • by allo ( 1728082 )

              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)

        by JThundley ( 631154 ) on Thursday July 17, 2025 @06:42PM (#65527984)

        If you hadn't stopped at docker you'd see the non-docker install instructions directly underneath.

        • Oh god it gets worse, a systemd service!

          I just visit archive.ph or archive.is and it does the same thing.

          • The code isn't complex. You could audit it in half an hour, and run it on the command line or whatever.
          • 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.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        And docker is bad... how? At least if something is malicious, it takes a CPU or kernel bug for it to escape its container.

        • by allo ( 1728082 )

          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

          • 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.

            • by allo ( 1728082 )

              I trust my distribution. I do not trust random people who push operation system images onto dockerhub.

    • Re:13ft (Score:4, Informative)

      by znrt ( 2424692 ) on Thursday July 17, 2025 @05:26PM (#65527860)

      cool. vive la résistance! though it's much simpler to just ignore paywalled sites. this is not a hill to die on.

    • by r1348 ( 2567295 )

      Or, you know, https://gitflic.ru/project/mag... [gitflic.ru]

  • Adware, malware, etc (Score:5, Interesting)

    by KiltedKnight ( 171132 ) on Thursday July 17, 2025 @05:18PM (#65527846) Homepage Journal
    The problem with all of this has much to do with the ad networks themselves. If the ads weren't intrusive and didn't screw up the page layout (meaning they obeyed the size restrictions and placement of the ad spaces by developers), it wouldn't be as much of a problem. Couple that with the ads sometimes containing some form of malware and the inability to dismiss popups easily, and you have a recipe for disaster: I visit example.com and it pops up an ad that I dismiss, but by sheer coincidence it's got scripting in it and it installs some kind of malware. I get the computer disinfected, and I go blame example.com because that's how I got it. The people who run example.com will come back and say that they buy their ads from GenericAdNetwork, so you need to talk to them. I then contact GenericAdNetwork, and they say that it's not their fault because they're just a distributor. It turns into a finger-pointing and red herring-chasing session, and you never learn who actually created the malicious ad. Someone needs to be responsible for these things... I don't care if it's example.com or GenericAdNetwork... one of them has to do some kind of filtering and/or vetting of the ads. Until then, browsers like Brave and a pi-Hole are my friends.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      Couple that with the ads sometimes containing some form of malware and the inability to dismiss popups easily, and you have a recipe for disaster

      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

    • by allo ( 1728082 )

      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.

  • by RUs1729 ( 10049396 ) on Thursday July 17, 2025 @05:19PM (#65527850)
    I did not even know that site existed. I'll probably find out about its replacement.
  • Then we should be able to have pay-walled sites taken down/offline.
  • by Sebby ( 238625 ) on Thursday July 17, 2025 @05:51PM (#65527904) Journal

    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!

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I run an ad blocker. If I see ads the site used illegal circumvention technology.

    • When the fuck did setting the User-Agent string on a browser become "illegal circumvention technology"?

      In 1998 when the DMCA passed.

      • 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

        • You are trying to talk about the law. Quoting Chrome documentation is the wrong place to look for that. Here:

          https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]

          If you want to talk about why things are illegal, you should read the law.
          • 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.

            • 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.

        • 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!"

          • 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.

      • False. There's nothing in the DMCA which says pretending to be something else is a crime.

    • 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.

  • by Fly Swatter ( 30498 ) on Thursday July 17, 2025 @07:11PM (#65528028) Homepage
    What killed printed paper wasn't online access, it was being 90 percent advertisements, some of which were starting to disguise themselves as article content.

    Those same advertisements are why no one wants to also participate in a paywall.
    • 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.

  • And your tears are fucking delicious.

  • 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.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      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.

  • If you come across a pay-walled link, ask an AI service to repeat or summarize the story for you. It often works.
    • by allo ( 1728082 )

      Same reason. Websites want that the AI links to them, but the AI won't link to sites that provide no useful information.

  • 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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