Us in foreign now face a paywall at the Telegraph.
Peeps in the UK do not. So, how do I make the Telegraph think that my computer in Portugal is actually one in the UK? I\’ve heard mutterings about something called a \”proxy\”…..
Us in foreign now face a paywall at the Telegraph.
Peeps in the UK do not. So, how do I make the Telegraph think that my computer in Portugal is actually one in the UK? I\’ve heard mutterings about something called a \”proxy\”…..
I’d suggest just paying the £1.99 a month. At that price it’s not worth the hassle of trying to circumvent the paywall.
The technical answer is that you need to find a proxy computer in the UK. Your computer connects to the proxy, then the proxy connects to the Telegraph (or to e.g. BBC iPlayer) which is thus fooled into thinking you’re in the UK. Many years ago, in the internet’s hippy era, there were plenty of free open proxies. When the BBC iPlayer was launched, expats in Spain overloaded the proxies (which were often just in people’s homes) and their hippie owners had to shut them down. It was a classic tragedy of the commons.
Today you can still find a handful of free open proxies, but their speeds are tightly throttled and they are very unreliable. It’s only worth the hassle if you’re a Chinese dissident trying to get news from outside.
The long-term solution is to pay for access to a proxy server in the UK. This will set you back £5 a month or so, but it will be a professional and reliable service allowing you to watch BBC, ITV, and Channel 4; and read the Telegraph.
Basically what Andrew M said but substitute proxy for VPN as websites seem to be very good at detecting proxy use these days when there’s money involved.
I use
*VPN for proxy I mean, I’ve not had my coffee yet
pre-coffee, Lee, do you mean “substitute” as used by football commentators or as in English?
Yes, Lee is right – my terminology is out of date! A quick online search for “expat VPN” will give you dozens of results. Ask other expats for specific recommendations. Or just pay the £1.99 a month….
You’ll have to take the same high-minded stance that you took when The Times **stands to attention and salutes smartly** went behind its pay wall and stop reading The Telegraph. Hah!
PS, you can borrow my Times password if you like.
Ermmmm, European Union competition policy ensures that competition is not distorted in the internal market by ensuring that similar rules apply to all the companies operating within in it.
I love to here the fizz of a petard in the morning.
Depending on how they’re doing the blocking, just setting the X-Forwarded-For http header to point to a UK IP address may well work. I have an extension for Chrome called ‘modheader’ which seems to work just fine.
I use Tunnelbear as my VPN solution. It’s very simple … just open the programme and flick a switch to look like you are in the UK or the US. It’s free up to a certain download limit (fine for browsing) with paid options the more you download (really only the case if you want to use NetFlicks or iPlayer).
I’d recommend a US VPN, witopia. It costs 15USD for 3 months for the basicservice. They have hosts in cities allover the world so you can get all kinds of discounts on services by appearing to be in a poor country
Doesn’t it allow you a small number of free looks each month?
I’m told that the way they check how many free looks you’ve had is by putting a cookie on your computer to count them.
So all you need to do is delete the cookie after you’ve had your free looks, then start again.
The easiest way to do that is ccleaner, which will wipe all your cookies (remember to tell it to leave any that you actually want) .
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner
Not sure if that does work, or for how long before they get wise to it, but I’m told it does the trick for the moment.
P.S. ccleaner is free, and if you’re using an older computer it seems to help generally to give it a good regular spring-clean.
Paywall? What paywall? Unless there’s some sort of allocation of ‘free looks’ as mentioned above I haven’t had the slightest trouble in reading a dozen or more pages this morning.
Maybe it’s the connection method? I use a mobile connection via a SIM card. Maybe it thinks I’m using a phone. Or the browser; Firefox with Adblock blocking everything I can block. Have to, because with a 1Gb month high speed allocation & the lousy speeds even that gives in practice, I have to severely limit what I download.
Does it irk you that Brit IPs get it for free whilst you have to pay — or do you think the Telegraph is overpriced, but valuable enough to (erm) liberate this way?
Thems true hippy values, check your entitlement *g*
I hear Expatshield does the job.
well this sucks, is this Tor able?
Yeah it is
You can circumnavigate this using a software called Tor
There’s a complete guide how to do this here, showing an example of how to appear in the USA if you’re in India
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22pE_auMm3w
Don’t use expat shield – utter [email protected] – your machine will never run the same again. As someone else said – paywall sites that give you x number free per month are laughably easy to circumvent and they use cookies to count the times you’ve hit them. Telegraph is 20 (not all pages count towards this – they tend to editorial rather than just football results etc.). If you’re on firefox you can just wipe individual cookies via the options/privacy/remove individual cookies/search telegraph and reset the 20 (unless you’re a heavy reader – you’re looking at once per day). I wrote a script to save me the trouble for other sites and i’m sure it will tweak for this, but not a biggie doing it manually if you’re not a nerd. Alternative (same goes for ft.com) is copy the link into google search and click on the cached or image to the right when you hover over the hit and avoid the paywall that way. Tor is great for privacy – but super slow – leave their precious resources to oppressed people in the arab world/china etc. rather than trivial stuff like this. anyway good luck from granada, spain….. Personally i think 1.99 is reasonable so will probably subscribe myself, as tgraph and guardian are the only msm sites i still read…. Nice to have a choice though.
I wouldn’t mind subscribing if, as an expat, I weren’t being discriminated against.
For 1.99/mth if the paywall goes up irrespective of the global location I would pay.
Until that happens, I will clear my cookies and/or read more of the Guardian.
The paywall is now affecting within Britain too. The simple way to stop it is to set in your browser to not allow cookies from the Telegraph. I have just tested it and it works.
Thanks Stephen, works great.