Comments on Jason Pollock's Controversial Originality: Cheaper Internet TV

Turns out you don't actually need a physical r...

2010-07-04T20:53:48.459-07:00

Turns out you don't actually need a physical router to watch Hulu, you just need to spoof the X-Forwarded-For header using the Modify Headers Firefox add-on. In conjunction with port 1935 blocking. Works for now. Your older posts were the inspiration for a blog post I just wrote on the subject.

Jason, I would like to ask you to come back and g...

2010-02-28T22:39:27.649-08:00

Jason,

I would like to ask you to come back and give hidemynet.com another try. Since you had been a customer.. we have revamped our billing system and now are offering PPTP, L2TP, and OpenVPN inclusive in our 5$ fee. Our OpenVPN service runs over port 443, so its usable from anywhere and typically moderately fast. If I remember correctly you were having problems from your CA ISP limiting PPTP connections? Well, this is an issue no longer with our service. We also fixed the issue you were having with nameservers.

as always, we provide a 7 day refund on new accounts. It appears you used this (IIRC) previously to get a refund when our PPTP service didn't work out for you. So, it won't hurt to try.

Agreed that posting the iptables address range wou...

2010-01-17T17:37:23.693-08:00

Agreed that posting the iptables address range would be useful but I'm wary of the maintenance nightmare in keeping it up to date. I actually don't use HULU that much so would likely let it slip out of date more often than not.

Ideally there would be a way to automate the setup rather than manually adding / removing addresses each time.

Hey on Twitter as well.

Nice idea with the router based access. I guess y...

2010-01-17T17:07:18.874-08:00

Nice idea with the router based access. I guess you're doing a transparent redirect to the squid proxy for those address ranges? Very nice idea. I hadn't thought of that... I've been limiting my network changes to just the set-top box (was Boxee, back to XBMC now).

The iptables file sounds like it is something that could easily be put into CVS and published for public use.

Hrm. Something to think about.

Hey. Thanks for your posts on this topic. Not a lo...

2010-01-17T16:23:51.932-08:00

Hey. Thanks for your posts on this topic. Not a lot of people providing such detailed info about their proxy setup.

I live in Canada and deal with many of the same limitations that you do. The latest setup I have works well but is fragile, expensive and tedious to tweak. (Good thing I'm not a salesman, eh?)

I have a server in the US I pay $15/month for and I have a squid proxy setup there to handle transparent proxy traffic. I lock it down to only allow proxying of traffic to/from my home network (and friends if they ask nicely).

I've updated the firmware on my home router (WRT54G) and installed DD-WRT which offers lots of great features. One feature is iptables support so I can do packet-level filtering/manipulation of traffic.

I have it configured to redirect all traffic destined for Pandora, Hulu, ABC, CBS and NetFlix OnDemand to be transparently proxied through my US proxy server and on to its destination. All of these services think I am in the US.

I opted for this router-based solution in the end because I didn't want to have to tweak all computers in the house (plus my set-top box running Boxee/Plex). Any computer on my network accessing, say, pandora.com (including my SONOS) is properly channeled through the US to avoid geo-checks. It's pretty awesome really.

The downside -- especially with HULU -- is they change their stream IPs all the time and so I occassionally need to hunt down the latest IP address set and reconfigure my router. I haven't figured out a way of doing this automatically yet. Most sites (eg Pandora) don't change their IP range that often if ever.

Good luck on your content hunt.