Ethan Rose – Apple fanatic, Blogger, Guru, Technologist.

07-15-10

How to get Pandora, Hulu in New Zealand

A lot of you reading this will probably have seen the ads around the web for completely anonymous, secure, proxy, VPN and whatever else they like to call it..

I wager your first reaction would have been, who would need that? Only kiddie-porn rings and undercover agents right?

There is a less publicised and far more legitimate reason that you might want to use one of these services – to obscure your location. Services like Pandora, Hulu, Spotify, Netflix, Veoh, ABC and many others employ IP checks on their users, to protect themselves from getting in trouble over their lisences, but where does that leave people like me, in New Zealand, who want to use these awesome services, who are willing to pay for them?

Out to dry.

There is an answer! Pay for (safer) or otherwise procure a free VPN service which will send all your traffic to the US or wherever it is you need to comply with the IP checks. Be aware – all your personal traffic is going trough someone else’s server. This means, should they have malicious intent, they are in a very good position to hijack your info.

As long as you are careful, choose and trustworthy provider and be sure to employ SSL on your email and web logins you should be more than safe.

There is an added bonus to this setup – should your ISP be trying to throttle your torrent downloads of all that open-source software, this will obscure the type of traffic and you’ll be home free!

Mac, Windows, Linux, iPhone and Android all support VPN so get to it!

Thanks to SuperVPN for giving me a free VPN account, you guys are awesome.