World Service

July 21, 2006 6:38 AM

I am in Canada, but want a website to think I am in the UK. Can I do this?

Living in Toronto now, I really miss my favourite radio station BBC Radio 5, but most of the content is blocked because I am outside the UK.

I'd like to make the site think I am in the UK.

posted by Frasermoo to computers & internet (4 comments total)

It's not going to be fast, and it's not going to be very reliable, but if you google "free proxy" you'll find a ton of websites with listings of proxy servers by geographic region.

You can configure a web browser--or any internet tool for that matter-- to connect to the internet through a proxy server (routing traffic to and from you between a proxy, just as you would imagine given its name) and whatever is on the other end will think the requests are coming from the proxy, not from you. If your proxy is in the UK, problem solved.

The problems with this are that free proxies are notoriously slow and shoddy, often down by the time they are posted somewhere, and the legality of some of these is often unknown; essentially you're hitching a ride on someone else's bandwidth and whether they're aware of it is often unclear.
posted by cklennon at 6:45 AM on July 21, 2006

There are likely other solutions but this came to mind...

If you had access to a proxy in the UK, you could route whatever applications you're using through that.

Got any friends in the UK who could set up a proxy for you?
posted by utsutsu at 6:46 AM on July 21, 2006

Yeah, sort of the cklennon said.

It's early and I didn't preview. Want to fight about it?
posted by utsutsu at 6:47 AM on July 21, 2006

Check out this thread too.
posted by peacay at 9:47 AM on July 21, 2006