A Smartass Education

So I’ve been living in Prauge for a month and a half now.  At a certain point when i settled in I decided to start watching my favorite tv shows again.  To do this I was downloading torrents.  However I was still not content.  It was faster to just watch the videos on hulu. 

I started messing with all sorts of proxies and things, and eventually I figured out how to get all of them to work.  So I thought I would share.

Last.fm:

They don’t technically lock you out, outside of America.  They just give you a “free trial” and then start charging you $3 a month or so.  Considering how often I use last.fm I would probably pay this, except I found it unfair that they were only charging me because I was abroad. 

Pandora:

They won’t even bother trying to pay for people outside of America to listen to music.  It’s not as good as last.fm, but a lot of people still use it and get shafted outside of US.

BBC:
I felt like watching some BBC news at news.bbc.co.uk and those bastards wouldn’t show it to me.  News!!! come on!?  It’s all agenda driven filtered nonsense anyways.  Come on, I know you have seen the movie Network.   There are no longer nations, only corporations.  The TV tells you what to do, how to dress, how to think, dress, eat etc…

Hulu:

Now I run a video site like Hulu myself, but as easy as my site makes it to find good avi movies, it still sucks for new TV Shows.  They just get deleted too quickly, everywhere except hulu.   Hulu is first “legal” TV streaming site to be successful because there aren’t that many ads at this point.  Well this was the hardest one to get working.

Ok, that’s all about the sites.  Now to the tutorial. 

Install IP-Hider.  You get that?  That was the entire tutorial.  Okay with more detail:  Install it, open it, click the country you want to be from and that’s it. 

One note:  Hulu’s website still wouldn’t load for me with this, it worked fine didn’t gripe about country but it timed out trying to load the video.  So along comes Hulu Desktop.  Which is much nicer looking and working than their website anyways.   Just download that and it will load just fine with IP-Hider running. 

Also note that Hulu is very persistent in trying to block outsiders.  If you just go on with anonymous proxy they will bitch at you for it.  So when you see the fancy options to make yourself anonymous and turn privacy on as well.   Don’t do it. 

For everything besides Hulu if you just can’t bring yourself to use IP-Hider or it stops working, the TOR network works wonderful.  I could make a writeup on that if anybody wants it.  Though their website explains it pretty well.

I will also mention that this method works today.  As of July 14th 2009.  Blog posts get outdated as people seem to not pay attention to when they find my old time sensitive tutorials.  This works great now, but might not work by the time you read this, but I’m sure somebody will make a comment to that effect.

Enjoy, being slightly less screwed over by American bureaucracy today than you were yesterday.