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How do I make it appear that my IP address is coming from one country while I'm located in another?

I live in Germany and some websites (like Hulu or Youtube) don't work because my IP isn't in the US. How do I get around this? Do I have to use a proxy or something?

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Nice - I moved across country at the end of the last NFL season, and I want to watch my old team this year. The only way to do it without paying a ridiculous fee for nfl sunday ticket, which include a bunch of games I don't care about, is to convince nfl.com my IP comes from outside the US. – Joel Coehoorn Aug 23 '10 at 1:01
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9 Answers

up vote 22 down vote

You have to Google for "free http proxy", some of the lists you get as a result classify geographically the proxies, find one of those and then choose a US located proxy.

Afterwards set your browser to use as HTTP proxy your selected proxy (what are the steps to do this depends on the browser you use). Some proxies work better than others and some just don't plain work with some big traffic sites, so you might have to try a few (unless you get a trusted proxy from a friend or company.)

Beware that all your received and submitted data could be stored and even modified in transit by a malicious proxy, you cannot trust at all the data received, or that the other party has received the data as you have sent it.

For this reason I'm reluctant to recommend a particular server or list of servers, just use the search term in Google and see for yourself which one you'd trust.

For HULU, I don't think that trust would be much of a problem, but if you forget to disable the proxy and then navigate to your bank disaster might ensue... so be warned.

Aditionally, you will almost certainly be breaking the site terms and possibly some laws (I'm not a lawyer).

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By the way, the trust issue still stands for the other alternatives (anonymouse and ip hider), just because they look legit it doesn't mean they cannot be cracked and thus be doing wrongly without knowing or be evil in disguise. Always use these services for unimportant things. For important things where you want anonymity, use Tor. – Vinko Vrsalovic Sep 8 '09 at 14:30
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+1 -- Nice answer of the question plus good discussion of the consequences. – Chris Farmer Sep 10 '09 at 20:29
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Using a video service like Hulu via Tor would be quite painful, I'll wager. You could run your own proxy on a VM in the sates, but that is still quite tracable (the hosting provider will know who they gave the IP address(es) to). – David Spillett Sep 10 '09 at 21:16
@David I'm sure it would be painful as well, but I wouldn't consider using Hulu an important thing that'd demand using Tor, YMMV. – Vinko Vrsalovic Sep 11 '09 at 0:20
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up vote 7 down vote

You could also try Anonymouse.org. When you go to the website, you just click your language, (English or German), and then enter the URL of the website you want to visit. It works to get to Hulu, and this website is also a handy tool if you want to visit a website that a filter is blocking.

Edit: As Vinko said, you will be breaking the TOS, and probably some laws.

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Good link . – Vinko Vrsalovic Sep 8 '09 at 12:06
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up vote 4 down vote

the best thing to do is to get shell account somewhere in US and do

ssh -D 1080 IP.IP.IP.IP

then configure your browsers to go through 127.0.0.1:1080 (SOCKS4)

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up vote 3 down vote

Adding a proxy will definitely slow down the browsing, especially if the proxy you use is used a lot.

TOR is an option, but there are many others.

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up vote 2 down vote

This depends why you want to hide you IP address (as this will measure how untraceable you are wanting to be).

If you rent a virtual machine from one of the man VPS providers that are out there and run a web (HTTP/HTTPS) proxy (or any other sort of proxy fot that matter) any connections made through that proxy will appear to come from the VM (and therefore from the country it is hosted in). But you will not be completely untraceable as the sites you are looking at will see the IP address of the VM so if you are planning to do something risky (if, for instance, you live under an oppressive regime and are planning a political statement) this may not offer you the protection you require as someone tracking you down can track you as far as the VM and the provider hosting it who will know who+where you are from your payment records.

For proxying all traffic instead of specific protocols like HTTP and HTTPS you'll need to setup some sort of VPN arrangement rather than just a protocol proxy. In both cases (protocol proxy and VPN) you might find services out there that will mitigate the need to set one up yourself, but you would need to ensure that you trusted the service provider as they will be able to monitor your traffic.

If you are looking to be more untraceable then you will need to use an anonamising network like Tor - but these will never be "fast" because of their nature so will fail that stipulation in your question.

If you can be more specific about what you want to proxy (web traffic to/from some sites?, all web traffic?, all internet traffic?, ...), where you are and where you want to appear from we might be able to give you more specific recommendations or pointers to tutorials. Also, knowing why would be helpful. If you are looking to circumvent local restrictions of some kind then that may complicate things.

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If you have a VPS, you can just use SSH tunneling. No need for VPNs. – grawity Sep 7 '09 at 11:16
SSH tunnelling needs to be configured separately for each remote service though, and only supports TCP/IP connections (i.e. it doesn't forward UDP packets), where a VPN will route just about any traffic. Some SSH servers and clients (including OpenSSH) support fuller VPN operation (see perturb.org/display/entry/770 for an example) but this isn't the same as just tunneling. – David Spillett Sep 7 '09 at 12:49
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up vote 2 down vote

You might need to get a proxy in US for you.

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up vote 2 down vote

There is an article explaining exactly how to do this on lifehacker. Here

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IP Hider, which is the software lifehacker promotes, uses the same approach, but more automated. – Vinko Vrsalovic Sep 8 '09 at 12:10
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up vote 1 down vote

This also depends on the method the service defines the IP to location mapping.

Some services will use a strict IANA definition which is by network number. Others use an geo-locating service, which is a table that is periodically updated.

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up vote 1 down vote

I'm from Australia and like to use HULU too ;-) I just go to http://proxy.org and take my pick.

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