Way to fool websites to not know where you are?
 

I've had a few instances where certain sites/uses are blocked depending on what country you are perceived to be in (nothing illegal), such as when I was overseas and wanted to watch a program on the ABC website (restricted viewing from outside the US), or when going to an airline's website and using a different country's site, and then getting kicked out, and being told to pick a different country (where the content is different).

Thanks!

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry9000/4.6.0.167 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/102)

First if your company had a VPN... That can mask your info and reflect your server's location... There also may be services for purchase that do this too (or perhaps set up a VPN on a desktop PC that's always on)

For a less "all encompassing solution" is there IIRC are websites that emulate this... But not sure how well it works...

Just a couple ideas...

I second the VPN idea. Whenever I need to do something that is blocked, I VPN into my company's network and try it there.

This came in handy when I used PayPal from a hotel in Singapore. PayPal suspected fraud and blocked my account. After I got that mess cleaned up, I logged into my company's network using a US-based VPN port, and the PayPal payment went through without a hitch.

There are free VPN tools you can install on your network at home (if you have one), but I don't have any personal experience with those.

No VPN.

If you just want to fool websites to not know where you are then you can try http://www.torproject.org/ or websites like anonymouse.org. If you need to fool websites into thinking that you are somewhere, then I think the best option is VPN.

You can also buy VPN service from companies like hotspotvpn for around $10 / month. Jiwire used to offer a good VPN service that has apparently been discontinued.

http://foxyproxy.mozdev.org/
is a Firefox add-on which allows you to define proxy server(s) and associate them with particular sites so that you do not use the proxy server for normal surfing but for some specific site that wants you to be browsing from a certain country, you can specify a proxy server for instance I use it to watch video from sites that are country restricted.

Public proxy servers from various countries can be found here:
http://www.publicproxyservers.com/
but you have to find one that is fast enough to stream video.

Proxies are easiest if you can find an open one. They tend to be a bit shady though if they're free I've found.

AceVPN is $5 a month and more reliable for me than Hotspot.

Yeah, free proxies are scary. They're watching everything you do and forwarding your traffic. But they're a part of every HTTP & HTTPS session, so slip a little Bluecoat action in there and the proxy has your private info.

And since open proxies are also used by bad guys, they're more likely to be the target of government interest.

The commercial services (whether proxy or VPN) are staking their reputation on your privacy, so they're more likely to purge their logs, adequately protect their machines, etc. And the bad guys are less likely to be interested in sites that require registration / payment.

I recommend Witopia personal VPN - US$60 p/a. Seems perfectly fine for your purposes and you can install on your own pc. BTW - your corporate vpn has internal scrutiny logs to monitor staff usage.

Yes, your corporation knows where you surfed, but this guy wanted ABC News, not jailbait.com

TOR is a fairly easy solution to use. The nice feature of TOR is that if your endpoint is in a country that does not work for the site you are trying to reach, simply reconnect until you get the one you want. Though, I have noticed that depending on how the traffic is routed, it can be very slow.

TOR and JonDo are two possibilities besides the VPN method.

https://www.jondos.de/en/ for the latter, http://www.torproject.org/ for the former.

Hotspot shield has been used quite extensively as part of trying to use hulu.com and the like.

using windows remote desktop works well for browsing web sites as I can access my "home" desktop computer and use bank or other sites that save cookies, or other tokens allowing me easier access without all their challenge questions. This however only works for browsing the web and not video.

some companies might let you do something similar w/ citrix or windows terminal services.

I tried that based on recommendations here but stopped using it when I found there was no way to kill the process from Windows Task Manager even when the program was not in use.

For what it's worth, there are some interesting comments about HSS here.