How To Watch American Television in Canada
The other night I was asked by a friend how he could watch his favourite ABC show on line (think it was called “Fringe”). I also recently had to configuring about ten phones behind a NAT so I had to find a quick way into the internal network.
This works on any platform and is a very powerful tool - I will explain the *nix method of accomplishing this - Windows users will have to Google “SOCKS Putty How To” or something like that.
Basically what we are doing is tunneling all of the traffic from a remote server (American in this case) through an encrypted pipe to a local port. It is easier than it sounds, here’s how.
On a Mac open Terminal app (in Linux you can use xterm, gnome-terminal etc.. whichever you prefer) and type :
ssh -D 9090 <username>@<server ip / hostname>
If you select a port < 1024 you will require root privileges.
We can then set Safari or Firefox to use a SOCKS proxy on local port 9090 (Safari) by clicking Safari -> Preferences -> Advanced -> Change Settings
Check off SOCKS proxy and enter localhost for the server and 9090 for the port.
To check if it worked you can visit http://ipchicken.com to see if you are sending requests from the remote servers IP.
Firefox has a similar configuration - just look under the advanced tab for Proxies and set it up the same as you would for Safari.
This does require a server running SSH and it will have to be in the united states however it works a charm and can be used for MANY other applications.
Have fun with it though make sure it does not go against the terms of service of your host (which it very well could be) - also remember with great power come great responsibility.
Interesting article. But yeah, unfortuanately it’s probably against the terms of many shared hosts.
That said, if you have a virtual served or dedicated server somewhere you can probably get away with it.