Ever tried to watch your favorite TV shows on Hulu or wanted to discover new music on Pandora? Odds are if you’re anyone but a Yankee you’ve been given the disappointing Not available in your country message that comes with most American based content provider sites.

It’s all possible to…

• Watch full TV episodes on Hulu.
• Listen to Last.fm, Spotify, or Pandora.
• Watch country-restricted YouTube clips.
• Buy Amazon.com MP3s.
• Google search as an American (why? I have no idea, but it’d be possible)

Whether you’re from the UK, Canada, Australia, Antarctica, or China, it’s easy to get access to the content. It’s as simple as tricking the site into thinking you’re an American. We do this by tunneling our connections though a server located in the States.

In the example above, even though I’m in Manitoba, Canada, HULU sees me as the SSH Server (from Texas) so they allow me to view their content.

To accomplish this their are a couple things we need:

1. PuTTY – to manage our connection to the SSH server
2. Proxifier – to tunnel all your PC’s outbound connections though PuTTY
3. Lastly, a server in the States.

With these 3 things we can tunnel all outbound Internet connections from our computer though our server in the States and out to the Internet.

Is this wrong? I don’t think so, and you shouldn’t care. If you’re smart enough to figure it out, you deserve to enjoy it.

Let’s start enjoying our favorite Yankee content!

1. Make sure your server supports SSH and resides in the States

Without this, the process I’m going to show you is useless. But don’t worry, I have a plan B; use a VPN service to tunnel your connections.

If you have a web host, odds are you likely have a SSH server available. If you’re not sure, contact your web hosting provider.

2. Download PuTTY

Download PuTTY here: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

You’ll need either the putty-0.62-installer.exe or putty.exe. PuTTY manages the connection between your computer and your SSH server.

Start PuTTY. Enter your SSH server. Don’t hit Open yet.

On the left, expand the SSH node under Connection and click Tunnels. This is where we’ll setup our PuTTY session to accept local connections for tunneling though the SSH server.

1. Set whatever Source port you want. I chose 8080 because it’s the common port for proxy servers.
2. For destination, choose Dynamic and Auto.
3. Click Add button to add it as a forwarded port.

You can now go back to the first screen and save this connection properties so you don’t have to reenter these settings again.

Now we’re ready to open our SSH connection, click the Open button. You then be taken to the terminal window where you’ll have to login with your SSH account details. This is provided by the administrator of your host.

You will now have a connection to your American SSH server. However we’re not ready yet. We need a way to capture all outbound connection and force them though the SSH server.

3. Download Proxifier

Though Proxifier is not free, it does have a 30-day free trial. It does an excellent job for what we need it for.

Download Proxifier and hop though the install process and run when finished.

4. Configure Proxifier

We need to tell Proxifier how to tunnel connection. Go to Proxy Servers under the Profile menu.

In the next window click Add… to add our local PuTTY server. For the server address, enter localhost and enter 8080 for the port number (or whatever number you chose above.)

Make sure you choose SOCKS v5 as your protocol. You’re done, click OK.

If you’re asked if you want to use this server profile as the default proxy, click Yes. You can close the Proxy Servers window.

We’re now completely done. If everything worked correctly all Internet connections will be tunneling though PuTTY to the Yankee server and out to the rest of the world. You should start to see connections in your Proxifier window similar to this:

Bring up IPChicken.com (because whatsmyip.com is boring) to see what your new IP is and where you’re located.

Enjoy the web as a Yankee does! No more country restriction!

The Alternative: VPN

If you don’t have access to an American based SSH server, you can always subscribe to a VPN service. These services are easier to setup, but cost money.

I suggest Googling cheap vpn or similar to find a suitable VPN service.