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News Publishers Take Paywall-Blocker 12ft.io Offline (theverge.com) 42

Posted by BeauHD from the cease-and-desist dept.
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 More | Reply

News Publishers Take Paywall-Blocker 12ft.io Offline

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  • Wait what?

  • What legal action can you take? (Score:5, Insightful)

    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.

      • Re:What legal action can you take? (Score:4, Interesting)

        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.

    • 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.

    • 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.

  • Information wants to be lobotomized for profit. (Score:4, Insightful)

    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.

  • 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]

  • Adware, malware, etc (Score:4, 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      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

  • 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.

  • "illegal circumvention technology" ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    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!

    • 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.

      • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      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.

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