Many years ago it was very difficult to keep up with the news when you were travelling or on holiday. I remember vividly being so desperate to find out what was going on in the UK one year that I spent about £8 for a newspaper that was 4 days late and worth less than a tenth of that, worst still it was the Daily Mirror.
Nowadays of course we don’t have these problems, the internet has pretty much changed all this. Unless you’re travelling seriously off the beaten track you’ll never be far from a Wi-fi connection so all you need is a tablet, phone or laptop and you’ll be completely connected. It’s the same with running a digital business, there’s really no desperate requirement to be based anywhere – invest in decent laptop and you can work from anywhere you like.
There are still some caveats and the growing trend of region locking is one of them. This is the practice where a web site will restrict access based on your location – this practice is extremely common and growing all the time unfortunately. It is why if you connect to the BBC website from the UK you will be able to watch virtually all TV shows live and older programmes through the BBC iPlayer. If you connect from another country then you’ll not be able to see any of this content at all. There is a method however that you can watch BBC News live online from anywhere – just watch this video.
Here we can see that you can actually bypass these various region blocks by hiding your location from the websites you visit. I consider this fair game after all I pay my not unsubstantial UK TV license so why should the website be unavailable to me just because I decide to have a few days in the sun on my holidays.
The video above shows you how to use what’s called a VPN (Virtual Private Network) to hide your real location enabling you to access whatever site you wish. The program demonstrated also allows you to switch to other locations for example any website normally restricted to the US or Canada you just switch to another server in that location. Many people ask if it’s illegal however it’s certainly not after all a VPNs are used across the world to provide security and encrypted connections and if I wish to use the bonus of being able to watch BBC World News streaming then that’s entirely my affair.
The only consequences are potentially if you use these services to access content on sites like Netflix who clearly state in their terms of services that you should use proxies or VPNs. However millions of people do despite Netflix being one of the most aggressive in blocking the use of IP switching programs – I’ll post again about this.