from Hacker News

12ft.io has been banned by Vercel

by bytebln on 10/29/23, 7:29 PM with 63 comments

  • by onion2k on 10/29/23, 7:34 PM

    It's understandable to ban the site given it does break Vercel's terms, but the allegation that Vercel hasn't let the owner transfer the domain away is a serious concern. Removing a customer is always hard but you have to do it in a way that ends in a clean break between your business and the customer. Keeping a domain fails to achieve that in a big way.

  • by jitl on 10/29/23, 10:37 PM

    Of course an account running a site based on violating copyright is eventually going to be suspended. Any service provider in US jurisdiction will do the same. It's not a matter of opinion or policy for Vercel, or unusual terms of service. It’s critical for Vercel’s business continuity.

    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...

  • by ForkMeOnTinder on 10/29/23, 8:23 PM

    > Worst yet, they took down all my projects and confiscated all my domains

    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.

  • by notfried on 10/29/23, 8:33 PM

    Tangential, but I quite like the error page. Informative, concise and avoids any confusion as to what is going on.

    > 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.

  • by Mandatum on 10/29/23, 8:15 PM

    Sounds like it’s resolved. Author just got angry after getting back from holiday, and seeing their access to every site they own is cut. Which is reasonable given it seems Vercel doesn’t have site level granularity of restricting access.

    Which is worrisome.

    What other level of granularity are they missing? Do I need to worry about security and access controls?

  • by raxi on 10/30/23, 9:05 PM

    It is online at 1ft.io

    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)

  • by ajkjk on 10/29/23, 8:20 PM

    The top reply is from Vercel:

    > 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

  • by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 10/29/23, 8:36 PM

    DEPLOYMENT_DISABLED

    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.

  • by hipadev23 on 10/29/23, 8:42 PM

    When are people gonna learn you need to keep domain ownership, DNS, and where you host your website fully separate.

  • by jonny_eh on 10/29/23, 8:05 PM

    What was the site? What’s the context?

  • by Mandatum on 10/29/23, 8:41 PM

    I wonder if this is the first time the author has heard from Vercel.

    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.

  • by stuckkeys on 10/29/23, 9:03 PM

    I was wondering where I had heard of that domain name. Then it finally clicked. First time I am hearing about vercel. What would constitute as breach of TOS? Is it because he is providing it as a service (free/paid not sure exactly)? I also thought it was based on cached content!? Also, did he not have any backups elsewhere? I could never solely rely on the cloud services. They can change their TOS anytime and screw you over.

  • by silenced_trope on 10/29/23, 9:37 PM

    12ft.io never worked well for me.

    But archive.is generally always works.

  • by bdcravens on 10/29/23, 8:44 PM

    > 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

    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.

  • by pinkman6 on 11/2/23, 8:10 PM

  • by aaomidi on 10/29/23, 11:50 PM

    Once a company does this, that company is basically fully done in my mind. The damage is done to their brand and is irreversible.

  • by KoftaBob on 10/30/23, 4:33 PM

    For an iOS/Mac alternative:

    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...

  • by schmijos on 11/3/23, 7:50 AM

    > confiscated all my domains

    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.

  • by Jorle on 10/30/23, 1:10 AM

  • by m-p-3 on 10/30/23, 12:57 PM

    Using a more lenient host, and publishing the un-paywalled content on IPFS could be a more sustainable option that would also be harder to take down.