12ft.io is a website that allows online

paywall A paywall is a method of restricting access to content, with a purchase or a paid subscription, especially news. Beginning in the mid-2010s, newspapers started implementing paywalls on their websites as a way to increase revenue after years of ...

s to be bypassed. It was created by Thomas Millar and Seron. The 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 designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...

crawler when requesting a webpage. Websites with paywalls often allow access to search engine crawlers to ensure their pages appear in search engines. Still, some websites block 12ft, such as Bloomberg and

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

Outage history

On 31 August 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 1 September, but was disabled again on 10 September. The site was available again as of 11 September, but was no longer showing cached versions of pages for NYTimes.com, instead displaying a message of "12ft has been disabled for this site".

References

External links

Official website
Websites Open access projects {{website-stub