February 06, 2009

Curious I'm-not-a-hacker George. Help me access sites that don't want me to access them... In an non-creepy kind of way. [more inside]

I'm living abroad and struggling with some silly websites that just don't seem to understand who I am. It started with ABC.com, I just wanted to watch my primetime trash online but since my ISP is registered in the Netherland Antilles I'm locked out. Seems only Americans can watch crappy TV online. So that has its work-arounds, but now I'm trying to access my "free annual credit report" and running into the same problem. I know once saw a way to "mask" your ISP - I think it was something like browsing through another website? - years ago but I don't remember what its called to properly google it. Or maybe I made it up. Can anyone help me trick websites into thinking I'm really in the US?

posted by danapiper 15 years ago
  • I believe what you want is a proxy.
  • Stay away from free proxy servers. They're slow, completely insecure, and end up blacklisted by these sites sooner than later. If you know someone stateside with an always-online computer they could set it up as a proxy for you to use. The tricky part is most residential connections have a dynamic IP address, so if that's the case you'll need a way to find out when it changes. A short windows script could take care of this by emailing you updates.
  • Proxies don't always work, from what I understand, but the lowdown is this -- you'll need to pay for webhosting with a company that keeps its servers in the US, or else you'll need to have a very trusting American friend who runs a server and is willing to give you SSH access to the box. If you get either one set up, then you can connect to that remote server with SSH software and configure your browser to route all traffic through that SSH connection. This is a really good tutorial for how to do that. On preview, traffic through a friend's home PC will probably be slow compared to a professionally run server, especially if we're talking about streaming video. You'd be better off using a good server connection. But if you use a friend's PC, you can get around the dynamic IP problem using DynDNS and having your friend install their IP updating software on his box. This is a really good tutorial for how to do that. Your easier but totally illegal method is to use bittorrent. The Pirate Bay and Demonoid usually have TV shows up mere hours after broadcast, or at least that's what this one dude told me one time. I wouldn't know. With that option, though, you need to be careful -- I know that some non-US ISPs have monthly bandwidth caps, and once you go over them they throttle your speed down to 56K and suddenly it's 1995 again.
  • >> Your easier but totally illegal method is to use bittorrent [to download primetime TV] Have there been any legal cases to set this precedence? I believe in the past, it was found legal in the US to record broadcast TV for sharing, so long as it was not for public rebroadcast. I could therefore copy a TV show, and loan it to a friend. One twist with the bittorrent versions is that typically the commercials are edited out. Or so one dude told me.
  • For the telly shows, a U.S. credit card will get you legal copies of a lot of shows online at $1.99 a pop from various outlets.
  • All the people I know who aren't in the USA but want to watch USA shows on websites use hotspot shield http://hotspotshield.com/ (Actually the other day an acquaintance was mentioning something that she said was better but I don't remember what it was)