How to Watch Location Restricted Olympics Content on the Internet
August 19th, 2008 | by admin |Picked up this great tip from hackszine the other day. Apparently NBCOlympics.com has only made available the more popular, U.S. Olympic events to the internet, yet there are many folks out there who are interested in the many other events, but cannot view this material as it is location restricted. Not to worry. Hackszine has come up with a great solution to this by using a proxy that is located in a country which has not restricted the desired content. Read on for a brief explanation.
First, check out the CCTV Internet rights holders for Beijing 2008 Olympic Games site and find a country that you think may host the event you wish to see. This site contains a list of all rights holders to the 2008 Olympics and their respective URL addresses, however if you try to access one of the URLs, you will most likely get a message telling you something like your country is restricted to this content, or possibly nothing at all. To access these sites, we must trick these URLs into thinking we are accessing them from another non-restricted country. Do this by configuring a proxy server in Firefox from the specific country who’s URL we are trying to access. For example lets use Japan’s server at http://gorin.jp which does not even come up at all for me.
Note that not all proxies are free so the kind of proxy server we are looking for is typically referred to as an “Open Proxy”. You can do this by either doing some good old fashioned google searching for open proxy servers in “*desired country*”, or check out xroxy.com where they maintain a nice list of free proxies from all over the world.
Searching through xroxy, I find about 5 or so Japanese proxy servers. Lets use 58.80.207.41 on port 3128. Now select “Tools”, “Options” in your Firefox file menu.
Once the options window comes up, click the “advanced” icon in the upper right, then the “Network” tab just below to the left, and then the “settings” button to the right.
Now the “connections settings” window will pop up. First select “Manual Proxy Configuration”. Now we can begin entering in the proxy information. Take note that the proxy we will be using from xroxy is listed as an “SSL” server. Under “SSL Proxy” type in the address “58.80.207.41″ and for the port type in “3128″. Hit “ok” at the bottom of the connections settings windows and then “ok” on the options windows to exit and save.
Now lets give that URL another try.
BAM! There ya go, works like a champ!
Make sure you note that not all proxy servers will be SSL servers and those that are not will simply go under “http proxy server” in Firefox’s Proxy Configuration window.
Mad props to Hackszine for conjuring up this great little trick.
[via hackszine]
Tags: location restricted olympics events, locations restricted, olympics, restricted olympics events, watch olympics online, watch restricted olympics
