12ft.io has been banned by Vercel
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- The Services may only be used for lawful purposes.
- You shall not attempt to undermine the security or integrity of computing systems or networks of Vercel, its partners, or any other person, and must not attempt to gain unauthorized access.
- You may not use the services or Vercel's infrastructure for proxying, scraping, to create virtual private networks, or to create virtual private servers.
Reasonable people might disagree whether 12ft.io is being unlawful, undermining the integrity of a computing system, gaining unauthorized access, or proxying/scraping. So the TOS also says:
- The final decision of whether an account is in violation of any of these acceptable use terms is at the sole discretion of Vercel.
I think that's pretty clear cut then.
He might be the reason it now exists in the TOS. :)
It’s the weekend. He’ll talk to them on Monday.
I suppose, although lots of proxies make changes.
Either way, he should probably change the URL that it uses if he intends to argue it's not a proxy of any kind. ;) I still have a tab open with an article, and the URL is:
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww...Seems like it's not safe to host on Vercel, then. They're giving themselves absolute control with zero recourse.
Looks like you're opted into arbitration too. Classic hostile, anti-consumer behavior.
Don't they know who they exist to serve?
it's unfortunate that the only button for Vercel admins is "seize everything in this account", as that's a bit imprecise if one domain is hacked
but if it's a person willfully violating TOS, then it's not really a hacked box, it's an intentionally created thing - and maybe that means that person shouldn't be a customer of Vercel anymore.
Maybe i'm missing something, but why not do this using simple DNS? Nameservers at the registrar, or nameservers at some simple dns-only thing, and point hostnames to whatever you want at the moment.
Services are protected from copyright claims under the DMCA “safe harbor” laws as long as they pass along copyright notices to their users, and take down content if the user is unresponsive. Otherwise Vercel would become liable for the copyright violation in addition to the user.
If Vercel doesn’t honor the DMCA safe harbor requirements, then Vercel’s providers will shut down Vercel itself. AWS could suspend Vercel’s use of Lambda/EC2, Vercel’s DNS provider could stop answering DNS queries for hosted domains, etc.
I’ve worked twice at service providers protected by DMCA safe harbor (first at UC Berkeley’s ISP, now at Notion) and can tell you that for service providers the consequences of losing DMCA safe harbor are just as severe than the consequences for the user. Early in my days at Notion, we missed a DMCA takedown notice for a public page, the copyright holder escalated to Amazon, and Amazon threatened to terminate the EC2 instances running our service.
https://www.copyright.gov/512/#:~:text=Overview%20of%20Secti...
Never put all your eggs in one basket.
Keep your domains at one company. Your DNS with another. Hosting, a third.
If you have activist-type projects that might attract the attention of powerful people or companies, keep those segregated from your more banal projects in their own isolated accounts.
It sucks seeing people learn this the hard way.
This just means that there are three companies that can shut you down.
If you combine them on the same provider you risk loosing access to the former because you lost the latter, the providers that host all the services also tend to have blurred lines between disabling one service and disabling your whole account.
> This Deployment has been disabled.
> Your connection is working correctly.
> Vercel is working correctly.
> If you are a visitor, contact the website owner or try again later.
> If you are the owner, please contact support.
Compare to: https://muchwow.vercel.app/
That information isn't actually useful, especially the ID
Of course there are others, it would make for a good blog post. Maybe throw ChatGPT with plugins and https://publicsuffix.org/ on it.
Which is worrisome.
What other level of granularity are they missing? Do I need to worry about security and access controls?
I read that from recent magnolia commits, it falls back to {12,1}ft for some websites (apparently, some techniques cannot be done on client-side, perhaps, they require proxies in particular countries or google network to impersonate googlebot better)
> Hey Thomas. Your paywall-bypassing site broke our ToS and created hundreds of hours of support time spent on all the outreach from the impacted businesses. > Our support team reached out to you on Oct 14th to let you know this was unsustainable and to try to work with you.
The poster immediately misunderstood them and thought the hundreds of hours were for talking to him. But they also sounded reasonable afterwards.
> I’ve received 4 emails from vercel support in 2023, I don’t think that constitutes hundreds of hours of work > But tbf I get it if you want to be an opinionated hosting provider and not host 12ft. No worries here, just restore my other projects and give me my domains back and we chill
In 2008, GoDaddy let an associate transfer StrategyWiki.org and a bunch of other domains out of my account while I was on a college trip with no internet. I'd spent half a decade building up these projects, and they were stolen away without my knowledge. GoDaddy offered no recourse or apology. The guy that performed the heist was 15 years my senior and from a family of lawyers, which he absolutely threatened me with if I tried to fight him. Even though GoDaddy ownership has changed, I do not like them to this day.
Over the past few years, I maintained a personal Netlify account for hosting a bunch of personal websites. When I started building my startup on Netlify, they moved my personal websites out of their free tier (despite them being in a different account) and into a paid plan. They started charging my card (which I wasn't aware of), and when I changed my billing info they deleted my websites entirely. There was no option to restore them, and their support was incredibly rude. They kept telling me what I had to do to undo their mistake without offering to do it themselves.
Netlify is horrible. Rude and unhelpful.
I was just about to move over to Vercel, but if they're no better than Netlify, I may as well stay put.
We need little guys out there correcting the record of these "elusive content" publishers trying to claim exclusive access is all they offer when moments before it was available for free to anyone listening. He just proves they value bot access more than human audience. Maybe he does to, maybe he only wants bots to access his website. Vercel says no, only big business can get away with that freedom to choose one's audience makeup.
Saw this in the HTTP response yesterday. 12ft.io had not been working correctly for months anyway, e.g., for ft.com.
Now I just use on.ft.com URLs and find FT articles syndicated on other sites. Works fine.
Most people who go AWS for hosting, also use their domain/DNS services.
Likewise for the others.
I suspect Vercel never wanted to host this persons content given the amount of legal requests they likely had to deal with.
It probably would have been better business from Vercel to reach out and say, “Hey, it costs us too much money in legal fees dealing with your content. We’re not Amazon. Can you move somewhere else?”
Asking the question and not waiting until it’s too late to deal with it would have been the way to go.
Vercel has known about this site for a long time. Seems a weird way to deal with it, and tells me that their CS team don’t do much proactive support.
But archive.is generally always works.
Archive.is goes in captcha loops everytime I try to open it.
I've resorted to just using reader mode and bookmarklets that others have made.
To whitelist, on Firefox: Hamburger menu > settings > privacy and security > DNS over HTTPS > Manage exceptions > Add "archive.is", "archive.ph", and "archive.today"
If you don't want to do that, or it doesn't work, use Firefox's reader mode or the google cache bookmarklet I added below.
Google Cache Bookmarklet:
javascript:void(open("https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:" + document.location))
Why would you want to continue to do business with them? Unless of course you built your site in such a way that they are your only (practical) hosting option, which seems like a bad approach no matter apps you're building.
I made a shortcut called Trebuchet that pulls up the archived version of articles and opens up in reader mode.
https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/0df29c2c9aba44d48de1025fc8e...
Please always separate registrar from DNS provider!
The reason is this:
* Registrars are your legal contract partner regarding the domain name.
* DNS providers are you technical partner for making something available under the domain name.