Certainly such a service could be even cheaper with official sponsorship and universal coverage.

Perhaps Canadians can lobby their MPs to institute a national system providing every Canadian with a United States IP address. The Single-Payer-Proxy-System – or in French, Proxy Système à Payeur Unique (SPPS-PSPU). There's really no reason for the nation to stand for this sort of Canadophobic discrimination. Indeed, where are the national and provincial Human Rights Commissions on this important issue?

I'd have to imagine that'd violate some sort of treaty. That's a huge part of the issues. These sort of regional restrictions are all wrapped up in a mess of various treaties and international agreements that Canada could not easily extricate themselves from.

The problem isn't treaties, but distribution rights. US firms don't distribute content in Canada, but have Canadian subsidiaries or partners which do so. This means agreements between service providers and rights owners signed in the states aren't generally valid in Canada.

I am Canadian myself and suspect that gp is just sarcastic.

Maybe it would be better to discover and address the reasons why these services are unavailable.

Yeah. The market is too small - let's get procreatin', Canadians.

Well, the market for rhode island is small too. but the barriers for treating it the same as connecticut are nil. Its those barriers that are the problem, even if its just the costs of being in a different country.

I'm not sure what those are or whether nafta was supposed to reduce them or what. Maybe its simply regulatory. Maybe everything has to be duplicated. Maybe Canadian companies like it the way it is.

I'd rather keep some of the barriers - the one about having no RIAA, for a start - hence my comment about increasing market size to make it more worthwhile to scale them.

For those that want a free service and don't mind ads, there's also http://hotspotshield.com and http://expatshield.com which will let you access US and UK services respectively.

The UK one doesn't support OSX, so I run them both from within a separate Windows VM if there's some restricted service I want to access. That way their VPN software doesn't get in the way of my other activities, and I only get ads injected within the VM.

Do they have some special arrangement with the companies in question?

My brother has a business DSL line, and that was enough for Hulu to decide that he's using a proxy and block him. They've repeatedly called support and support repeatedly told them to "stop using your proxy" (despite the fact that they are using no such thing.) So Hulu isn't at all afraid of false positives, and that kind of blanket ban should be effective unless unblock-us has a deal of some sort worked out.

I wonder how they're doing this by just changing the DNS servers? Do they return their own IPs and run a man-in-the-middle kind of thing?

UPDATE: Just signed up. They do actually seem to redirect the traffic from domains like hulu.com/pandora.com/... to IPs that run a squid proxy. My guess would be that they just redirect the queries for the geo-localization to their squid servers and allow you to pass those that way

I wonder how they handle the flash video streaming, and stuff secured via HTTPS (e.g. BBC iPlayer for iPad/iPhone). HTTP is easy to transparently proxy due to the "Host:" header, but HTTPS and many other protocols don't have anything equivalent. I suppose they could just have a lot of IP addresses and assign one for every host they proxy.

In general, I'm surprised such services stick around at all. You'd think the MPAA etc. would contractually require Hulu, etc. to routinely get accounts with such services, use them to sniff out the IPs and block them. I guess that means proxies aren't (perceived) a big enough threat. Yet.

I've been using StrongVPN, a similar service, with great success.

I run OpenVPN via Linode for $20/month. I've got about 5 friends on it so we just split the costs.

http://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/

I started out using OpenVPN as well. However, the speed and latency was always very bad even though my VPS connection is fast.

After spending too much time trying to figure it out, I decided to just spend just $55/year and use StrongVPN. Added bonus, I can use StrongVPN on my iPad/iPhone!

StrongVPN looks pretty good. Also easier to support other VPN connections out of the box (i.e. through Win standard VPN and not have to install OpenVPN, as well as via iPhone). Thanks for the suggestion.

It's a feasible workaround, but it's vital that content owners start to recognize the importance of a more rational licensing scheme. Different release dates for videogames depending on which hemisphere you live in, entirely different sets of content (Pandora, Netflix, etc) because you're a couple degrees north or south. It's such an antiquated model for a modern world in which the global cultures have shrunk the distances between each other.

On the other hand, things like this make me slightly amused. It's good to see the corporations run into self-imposed problems from the same institution they otherwise typically profit from and prop up.

Can we get a Google Voice number in Canada with this service?

The issue with Google Voice isn't the IP address but needing an American phone number, so no, this service won't fix that.

use twilio or one of the other voip API's and setup a temporary inbound US number to do the gvoice authorization.

A few ppl I know international did this to great success

There is a weekend project + app in that for someone if they want to automate it for tasks that require an inbound US #

Big thing about google voice is the redirection, and some of us want a local number in our country to be called at.

agilo, you can get a GVoice like account on TellFi (https://tellfi.ca)

disclaimer: I'm a founder there

Could you guys go for .03/minute? I could get .03/minute on my cell phone to call around a dozen countries in thailand (http://www.truemove.com/en/Inter-SIM-postpay.rails) and you can get 1500 for $30/month (0.03) minutes to call people anywhere in the US with t-mobile.

elai we're always trying to reduce cost, the reason for it being a bit higher is because we have the business features (it's like GVoice+) - maybe a 'dumbed down' version is in order?