12ft
12ft.io was a website that allowed for online paywalls to be bypassed. It was created by Thomas Millar. Function 

The website's 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 crawler when requesting a webpage. Websites with paywalls often allow access to search engine crawlers to ensure their pages appear in search engines. Blocking 

Some websites block 12ft, such as Bloomberg, The New York Times and The Athletic. Outage history and ban 
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". On 30 July 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 3 August. As of 31 October 2023, the site shows only an error 402 with a message "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 and confiscated all of his registered domains. Alternatives to 12ft 

Alternatives to 12ft include:
 Private browsing for some websites, though often with access limits
 Through a virtual private network, the Tor network or a proxy server
 Several browser extensions
 Several archive sites, including Internet Archive and archive.today
 Several web content converters, including txtify.it and PrintFriendly

References

External links 
 Official website

Open access projects
Websites