Anyone any idea how to make an IP appear to be in another country?

[Carol Haynes]

I want to watch some US TV shows that only allow access from US IPs (and I'd guess similarly some ex-UK people might like to watch some BBC/Channel 4 stuff which only responds to UK IPs).

Anyone know of an effective way of making your IP address appear to be in a different country?

I have tried 'Hid-IP-Browser' which is a paid service to do precisely this and it uses proxy servers all over the world so that you access services via a valid IP address in that country - unfortunately the proxies they use are all pretty slow and low bandwidth and consequently you can browse pages but they are too slow for broadband streaming content - and some actively block streaming content.

Anyone any other ideas or good services that offer this kind of facility?

[Darwin]

Ad-muncher has an IP scamble feature which works well but over which you have little control (as to the country of origin). I just keep hitting scamble until I get what I want...

[Darwin]

PS most effective way I ever tried was Tenebril's Ghostsurf 2005... There's also an opensource option that I've never tried. I'll try to rememer what it's called and post a link after work.

[Darwin]

It's TOR (The Onion Router)!

[f0dder]

The only thing you can do is using a proxy server of some kind, and you probably wont get around paying if you want decent reliability and speed.

TOR is nice and everything, but you don't really have control of which exit router to use, and thus it's pretty useless for this case

[tinjaw]

Anyone any other ideas or good services that offer this kind of facility?

I used The Proxy Connection for a few months and thought they offered great service. I talked to the owner for about 45 minutes on the phone and he was knowledgeable and very helpful. I will use their service again if the need arises.

[Carol Haynes]

Proxy Connection looks interesting but it makes expensive TV at $50 per month - that's twice as much as I pay for Digital Satellite!

It would be more interesting too if they had a try before you buy service because so far my experience of proxy servers is that access to streaming is pretty poor.

[jgpaiva]

TOR is nice and everything, but you don't really have control of which exit router to use, and thus it's pretty useless for this case

Actually, i think i recall reading that it's possible through some ini editing to set the entry point, the exit point and how many hops.

[urlwolf]

If you have a friend in the country you want to be 'be' in ip-wise, ask him to give you an account on a machine.

Alternatively, you can use VPN to any network in that country. Your IP would show up from that country as you want.

[app103]

There is instructions for doing it to access pandora.com from outside the US, with tor, here:
http://openpandora.blogspot.com/2007/06/complete-guide-for-using-openpandora.html

Probably will work for what you want, Carol...just replace the 'www.pandora.com'; in the tor.pac file with the site you want, instead.

[PhilB66]

Check out gHacks Howto watch ABC TV Streams outside the USA.