How can I get around regional Internet content restrictions?

May 5, 2005 5:24 AM

I can't watch some Yahoo (ex-launch.com) music videos because I live in France. Is there a way to get around this?

When I click on some videos (but not all), I get a page saying "Cette vidéo n'est pas disponible pour votre pays [translation: This video not available in your country]. ... Please use the following error code when writing to Yahoo! Help. (Error Code: 21)."

I guess it's not such a big deal if I can no longer watch the Eels' Rags to Rags video, though I can still see Prodigy's Breathe (note: links to these videos only work in IE for me). Still, regional restrictions (like DVD zones or the Chinese Great Firewall) creep me out.

One of the coolest things about the Internet is being able to ignore geography. Any way to treat this as a defect and route around it, perhaps via some kind of proxy or anonymizer? In some cases I'd be willing to pay for this.

Any other international Mefites run into this kind of problem?

posted by Turtle to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Move to a country with a First Amendment. For all the shit that it gets, the US ain't half-bad sometimes.
posted by thedevildancedlightly at 8:16 AM on May 5, 2005

On a more productive note, HTTP tunnelling is a way to make it look like your computer is located outside of France.
posted by thedevildancedlightly at 8:17 AM on May 5, 2005

Thanks, thedevildancedlightly, for that HTTP tunneling link. Using their service, I appear as if I am located in the United States, for example when I go to WhatIsMyIP.com. The bandwidth is low for the free service, but you can pay for higher bandwidth.

However, Yahoo still detects that I'm in France, possibly because the tunneling software/server doesn't support all Internet protocols. Are there other companies besides HTTP-Tunnel that might provide this? Is it technically possible to completely masquerade as another computer, located elsewhere in the world? Some more searching turned up this previous thread, where someone in the UK wanted to pretend he was in the US to use Napster.

By the way, it's true that France and Europe don't have quite the free-speech protections the US does. But in this case I'm trying to get around a restriction imposed by Yahoo, not by France. The same might apply if you were in China: Yahoo Search apparently voluntarily restricts results to satisfy the Chinese government. And of course the slightly different case of DVD region codes was cooked up by US companies. I hate that stuff!
posted by Turtle at 9:28 AM on May 5, 2005

Another thing that creeps me out is if I'm visiting, say, an American site, yet the ads or even the entire content appear in French. It would be pretty annoying to me if I plugged in my laptop in Japan and everything appeared in Japanese, just because I had a Japanese IP, and if I suddenly wasn't allowed to access the content I'm accustomed to because I happen to be in a different geographical location. I think on the Internet nobody should know what nationality dog you are.
posted by Turtle at 9:45 AM on May 5, 2005

I had this problem today - for some reason Showcase (sho.com) thinks it's ever so important that Canadians not be allowed to find out about the Penn & Teller show (ironically, "Bullshit!"). I was able to get on before by googling for a web-based anonymous proxy server (maybe the Anonymizer? This was a while ago, when the show first aired)

Anyway, today I wanted to view the site again so tried to use the Google Accellerator, but no luck (maybe mine goes through a Canadian google server?) and also tried to use the SwitchProxy extension in Firefox, but no luck with either. But these approaches might work for someone in other areas/with a little more patience to figure out the best proxies to use.
posted by Gortuk at 12:42 PM on May 5, 2005

Mr. Turtle - you can try using a Proxy list such as listed on Stay Invisible to hide your IP. (Try Proxz)

Proxies listed as High anonymity based in the US should mask your IP. Unfortunately these Proxies are up and down and sometimes it is trial and error.

In your browser - change your Connection Settings>Manual Proxy address to that listed for US-High anonymity. You can then test to see if it is working .
posted by clarkie666 at 12:47 PM on May 5, 2005

Turtel: Google keeps switching its interface into spanish on me, and offering to find links in Chile. If I wanted to go to www.google.cl, I would, thank you very much.
posted by signal at 9:20 PM on May 5, 2005

Thanks clarkie666, that's a good list of proxies. But, same as for the HTTP-Tunnel solution above, though using a proxy changed my apparent IP, Yahoo can still tell I'm in France. Merde! I tried several proxies in the US, marked "anonymous", "highly anonymous", and "transparent". Still, Yahoo knows I'm a frog, so no more Eels for me. What eveur!

Here's a good discussion on the difficulty of hiding your IP address. When you use an anonymous proxy, sites can still use cookies, Javascript, Java, or ActiveX to figure out your real IP address. Apparently there's a solution if you set up a LAN or if you configure your firewall specially and use port mapping, but it gets a bit complicated.

Still looking for a solution... I'm not trying to commit any crimes, honest. I just don't want web sites to know where I am. It's not even a privacy issue, really (yet). Like signal, I just don't want my user experience to be messed up due to random extraneous information about how I'm connected to the Internet.
posted by Turtle at 3:48 AM on May 6, 2005