Getting around country restrictions - Hola Unblocker

Today I figured I'd make a post about getting around content filtering.

If you've ever wanted to view a video on Youtube or any other video hosting website and received a "Video is unavailable" or "This video is not available in your country" message then this post is for you.

I personally don't understand why these kind of restrictions even exist but I suppose they are yet another symptom of an overly controlled internet.
The error messages that you get might differ from one page to another but this little Chrome/Firefox Addon should be able to help alleviate some of the annoyance.

In short how it works is simple, you install the addon, you open the video you want to see and click the button to select which country you want it to think you are in and after a quick refresh the video should be playing like a charm.
The way it does this is by making configurable VPN's available.
As the site itself says:

"The Hola Unblocker is a free, configurable VPN service, similar to many such services that exist on the Internet.
It is useful for seeing how a web site looks like from a certain geography, for overcoming government censorship (e.g. seeing Facebook from a country that blocks it), for overcoming your corporation's Internet site blocking, for seeing a site in its native language (e.g. seeing the Spanish news site as it appears to Spanish users), etc."

Privacy is a growing concern for a lot of people, including myself so I made sure to read their FAQ and as far as I can tell they do nothing funky that I don't want.
Some notable Questions from the FAQ:


Does Hola share any of my personal information with the rest of the Hola community?

No. Hola handles your HTTP requests exactly like HTTP web proxies do according to the HTTP RFC standards, and in a similar way to how ISPs do it in the normal course of your browsing. That also covers 'Cache:' public/private HTTP headers and the correct handling of them.

How can content owners make sure that a piece of content doesn't get cached by Hola?

Easy: They can use HTTP's standard 'Cache-Control: private,no-store' in requests/responses, and Hola will not cache this information.

If you are interested in learning more about the service and it's privacy policies I suggest you read on their website at Hola - Privacy

Now for a quick guide on the setup.

For Chrome, browse to the Chrome Web store and download it or simply press this link: 

Hola Unblocker For Chrome.

For Firefox use the corresponding Addon repository. 

Hola Unblocker For Firefox.

After the installation you will be presented with a configuration page with a few services preloaded.

You can find other scripts on the net (https://www.facebook.com/HolaUnblockerScripts) but typically you can just press the button that Chrome/Firefox has added on any page and pick a country.

I've tested the service myself and I can say that I feel no delays and it bypasses both bbc and youtube content blocks with no problem.

I hope this will help other people with overcoming another a rather stupid problem.

(This Addon also allows for bypassing for certain corporate filters, use on your own volition at work!)

How I'm reducing the info google has on me.

With all the news of PRISM and Googles involvement, I've decided to reduce the amount of information Google gets on me.

For those of you who don't know exactly how much Google actually tracks, here is a quick list:

(List assumes a smartphone is also used)

• Search history
• Social Media sites used
• Videos watched/Uploaded to youtube
• Android devices owned (includes IMEI, register dates etc..)
• Blogs (yes even this one)
• Contacts
• Emails
• Play Store purchases
• And the list goes on

Needless to say, the list is substantial and if you are like me, that is quite a bit of information to just hand over to any one company especially knowing where they send it.

Now since I, just like many other people have learned to become very dependent on the internet giant that is Google, I need ways to be able to continue to use their services while minimizing the amount of data they get.

This is not easy of course but with some tweaking it's possible to reduce it at least a bit.

First thing I did was to make the switch over from Chrome to Chromium.

Chromium is the Open Source origin of Chrome, so all your addons and account data will still be usable without any problem.

Because Chromium is Open Source, anyone can look at the code that makes up the browser, making it much harder to hide tracking services and backdoors in the browser without anyone knowing about it.

This step reduces the information the information Google tracks at least a little bit.

Second step I did was moving away from using google.com for my searches.

Since Google is still the worlds leading search engine tho, I can't afford to not use the service at all so I use a site like Startpage or Duckduckgo. These are sites that search google for you, cutting out any log for them that YOU did the searching. Extra added goodness is that both sites work purely over HTTPS meaning that any sniffing of what data you are sending to google is also (nearly) impossible.

As an added step to make life easier for my self, I also changed the behavior of Chromium's main address and search bar (Omnibox) to automatically use startpage.com.

A third step that I don't use that much but I have put in place is that I no longer send personal correspondence in plain text. I use a software like GPG4Win or similar to encrypt my data using a public/private key system. ( Check the about section of my website for my public key )

While this only works with people who actually know how to use it, my personal correspondence is so few that it isn't a huge problem. If I could get companies to use my key for encrypting my mails I would be a happy paranoid man.

While none of the above guarantee a data-less Google, they help at least reduce SOME of the stuff they get on a daily basis. The fight against systems like PRISM is something we must all pick up, in whatever way we can. That is why I decided to make this post and I hope that anyone at all finds it useful.

A New Website!

So I've finally gotten to making a new website and I have to say I am LOVING the way it's looking.
I tried to go with a soft look and I think I got that down pretty well.

I've been inspecting a lot of other pages with the "Inspect Element" feature of Chromium and it's quickly become indispensable to me. The function made it very easy to pinpoint a particular part of the website and what CSS rules were used to make it look the way it did.


Later I will write a post concerning some of the resources I have used in order to make this spiffy new page!


EDIT: I just realized that I had not actually linked it here.. http://www.kaizokuden.org