August 2009 - Posts

Howto: Hulu and Pandora from Europe (or Australia, China, or South America...) for 10 cents an hour, using EC2
29 August 09 12:01 AM | mrdecav | with no comments

As an honest consumer who purchases all his music, software, movies and anything else, it annoys me when a content provider goes out of there way to keep me from paying them for their content.

A perfect example is the HBO show Entourage.  A great show which you can find old episodes of on iTunes of -- want to pay them $5, $10 or even $100 for a new episode?  Good luck -- get HBO on cable or wait for the DVD -- stupid.

Traveling in Europe, I've found little to miss, other than Hulu and Pandora.  Life without Jon Stewart is just not worth living! Due to head-in-ass license restrictions, you can't get either of these great websites overseas.  Public proxy servers, which route internet traffic through a middle man, tend to be too slow to solve the problem.

But using EC2 you can create your own, very inexpensive, proxy very easily if you're running Apple OSX or Linux.  Here are the steps:

  1. Sign up for an Amazon Web Services EC2 account
  2. Install the command line utilities for Amazon Web Services found here.
  3. Create a new key for yourself (follow these instructions)
  4. Open a terminal window
    1. Type ec2-run-instances -k [your_key_name] ami-7cfd1a15
    2. Type ec2-describe-instances until the new instance is in the "running" state
    3. Type ssh -i [path_to_your_key_file] -L 3128:localhost:3128 root@[url_for_instance]  Note the "-L 3128:localhost:3128".  This will route all network traffic from your machine, port 3128 to the instance's 3128 port.
  5. This will open a connection to your virtual machine on EC2.  On the EC2 instance you're now connected to, follow these steps:
    1. Type aptitude update
    2. Type aptitude install squid (squid is an HTTP proxy, a server that will be a middle man for your browsing)
  6. Change your browser's HTTP proxy settings to use the proxy at address localhost, port 3128.
  7. Keep the SSH window open until you're finished browsing.
  8. When you're done:
    1. Type exit to exit the connection to your virtual machine
    2. type ec2-terminate-instances [your_instance_id] to stop your machine, and the $0.10/hour charge.
That's it!
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