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.
This is why you shouldn't combine your registrar with whatever services you have your domains pointed at. Domains should be delegated to services using a simple OAuth2 protocol. DomainConnect is technically close but very corporate and not good for self-hosted services.
> Domains should be delegated to services using a simple OAuth2 protocol
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.
They presumably shut down his account, and that indirectly resulted in shutting down everything. I'd put that on the customer - if you run a risky project that could get your account banned you should partition things better.
I absolute believe that Vercel does not like to host it and they have the freedom to restrict the service. But I _am_ curious which term of the TOS it violated.
- 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'd be OK with them taking up to 30 days to do this, but I too expect that they let the owner transfer their domain away. I am not currently concerned, because I think they will let the owner transfer it away probably in less than a week if the owner has a constructive dialogue with them.
so they seized the domain kinda like you do with malware?
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.
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.
> 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.
Domains and hosting are usually seen very differently. Your domain is a lot closer to property, while the hosting is commonly shut down anytime it is seen as inconvenient by the provider.
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.
If the person who is trying to get you shut down targets the DNS provider, and they decide "Yup, let's shut them down," if they also happen to be your registrar, you could end up with your domain name confiscated or locked up.
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?
It's probably not a technical issue with granularity. Vercel probably decided they don't want to do business with someone who broke their ToS and nuked the entire account.
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
A couple of platform providers have burned me so bad that I will absolutely move my business and tell others about my bad experiences.
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.
If Vercel is working for the "impacted businesses" so much then why aren't they charging them for the hours worked entrenching their market position and busting their business model critics? Why send the bill for that time to him if it's not in ultimate service of him? He rightly sees through their incorrect billing stance. Seems like Vercel takes sides in every industry so you better hope your business has no impact on any other if you go with them.
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.
Readit News
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.
- 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.
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.
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.