Bypassing US IP restrictions and/or Surfing anonymously

If you live in Europe you are bound to have experienced being rejected, when trying to watch your favorite TV show on a US web-site – something in the line of “We are sorry but your IP seem to come from a country outside the USA” bummer – this is annoying as some US TV stations have cool tv shows available for free viewing (but restricted to the US).

So, as I have mentioned before you can use the TOR network (http://www.torproject.org/) to proxy around this problem – but TOR is an install package that may not always be appropriate to install on a company/school pc etc, along comes UltraSurf (http://www.ultrareach.com/) a simple little portable application you can put on your USB stick.

UltraSurf will once it is started open a browser and you can browse the net with a US based IP (by proxying your traffic) thus giving you access to US based webservices.  Speed is not great but seemed acceptable and I managed to get an ok mediastream from ABC (note you may have to restart the browser when installing activex components).

A word of caution, I would not share creditcard or other confidential information on a proxyed connection, you never know who/what is inspecting your HTTP traffic, HTTPS/SSL/TSL traffic should be secure though (but still think about what you are doing).

Get it here (Free);
http://www.ultrareach.com/

Show your IP (you will notice this changes once UltraSurf is started);
http://showip.net/ or http://www.ipchicken.com/