Today I want to talk about the first two Ws in www and how the web is surprisingly not all that world wide.
First off, no I’m not talking about broadband penetration. Obviously there are many places in the world that there will be no internet connection (like Vermont, not that long ago…), but I’m talking about the filtered web.
See, here in America, the land of the free and the home of more porn sites than any other country, we have basically unlimited access to all things online. As is becoming internationally apparent with recent news, this online freedom is not even close to universal.
Take Facebook for example; the entire site has been banned in most of the Middle East, I guess you won’t be poking any of your Syrian friends anytime soon…
YouTube is blocked in these countries and Pakistan, a fact that became overwhelmingly apparent this past weekend, when an attempt to block YouTube in P-Stan took out the global site.
And look, I’m aware that this is a much larger issue than what I’m getting at. In the US we see the internet as this open realm of endless possibilities and inhibiting our right to be able to browse video montages from AFV is simply unconstitutional! But of course, other countries don’t have our constitution…
So I’m not going to get into the philosophical or political differences between us and our international friends, this post actually has a much more directly self-serving focus: how to get around international blocks while traveling abroad.
I’ll be heading off to Japan for the next week (yes, I’ll take pictures of fun electronics and cooky vending machines, don’t worry) and I’ve just learned that Hulu won’t work there. What’s an online video junkie to do?!
Enter: the HotSpot Shield.
In theory, the Hotspot Shield creates a private network on a public wifi connection, but what it also does- is hide your computer’s location- thus providing access to non-international sites, internationally (such as Hulu!).
I’ve installed it on my lappy and will give it a go this weekend (after the 32 hours of travel). If I can get it working- I’ll post something for you. If not- I’ll pretend this never happened..
Ok, enjoy- see you in a few weeks! Hopefully, with fun pictures and crazy stories about weird sushi.
