beautifullybroken.net

Most people who’ve spent any time online will have heard of Pandora. It’s a wonderful online radio station with a difference, you can build it round your musical taste. For those of us with slightly varied tastes in music this is a fantastic service. It’s been developed around Music Genome project, if you’re in the US just go and see.

 For the rest of use accessing Pandora is not that simple ,unfortunately due to music licensing or stuff like that – you’ll get blocked anywhere outside the USA . This has been the case for years, you used to have to verify this by inputting your ZIP code – if it was in America you were allowed in. Obviously this wasn’t hard to do, pick a US Zip code and you were in, I used a random one from a hotel.

Unfortunately this doesn’t work anymore and now your IP address is checked. When you try to access the site, the Pandora server looks up the location of your IP address if it’s non-US you get a little sorry message . It’s rather depressing when this happens and it’s becoming more and more common on the net.

The good news is that it’s quite easy to bypass this check, just mask your real IP address and use one from the US. You just have to use some sort of proxy – search online you’ll find lots of information on these. This blocks the site from checking your real location and allows you into Pandora. You have to do this every time you access which is why using a free proxy can be annoying as it sometimes takes hours to find a good one working.

There are tools to help you find them though , have a look at foxy proxy for firefox, or if you just want instant access try one of the commercial programs which are relatively inexpensive. Make sure you don’t get blocked from one of the best sites on the net, it’s not that hard to beat, you can just by using a US proxy.   Learning to beat internet filtering and restrictions really opens up the internet.

I know these companies have licensing agreements to honour but it the internet is being increasingly blocked, filtered and censored depending on where you are . I’m too keen on to this to be honest. Better blocked from Pandora without using a workaround is nothing like the poor Chinese who are rapidly heading for a tiny State controlled Intranet.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 at 10:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.