I’ve seen a program called hotspotshield.com that will apparently protect your laptop from external prying eyes when using a wifi hotspot.

Will it also, theoretically, allow someone in, for example, Spain, to, if they so desired, access BBC iPlayer which can’t, apparently, be accessed from outside the UK. 🙂

eck (in Spain)

HotSpotShield makes some fairly dubious claims: “even if you connect to a fee based open network. Your passwords, credit card numbers, and any data you send can be seen” – is not true as such sites use encryption when communicating with your browser.

Also it may hide your IP address, but the site would still see the IP address of the hotspot internet gateway, which presumably won’t be in the UK.

What you is want is a UK-based proxy server.

Thanks Graham, care to elaborate on how I would do that?

Try googling for TOR. It’s a US Navy developed product that routes your traffic all over the place and you can tweak them to make the exit point be more or less whereever you want.

You need to find an “open” proxy server, these are typically not offered as they have the liability on what you surf for etc. You can Google for “open or “anonymous” proxy servers to find them, be aware as they are acting as middlemen they will be able to see you traffic, ensure that you are sending confidential details via SSL only and if you browser in any way nags you that site certificates do not match the host you are connecting to DO NOT connect as it could be the proxy trying to do whats called a man in the middle attack.

If you’re going to go the open proxy route, i’d do as fu_manchu says, plus, i’d configure your proxy.pac so that only traffic for the sites you need to anonymise gets routed via that proxy. Other traffic will then continue to be routed via your normal proxies. (proxy.pac is assuming you’re using firefox. I don’t know what the equivalent for IE is, i assume it has something similar).

Another option would be to find someone willing to allow you to ssh tunnel from their server on a IP subnet.

I’d just not bother, sounds far too much trouble! 😆