Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada

cantada.ca

212 pointsmcrider118 comments

A lot of these issues can be resolved for $5/month and less than that if you're willing to setup your own private server.

http://www.unblock-us.com/ lets you access American Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, ESPN3, etc etc. I'm not affiliated with them, but been using the service the past couple of months and it works amazingly. In fact I'm using American Netflix on my Xbox 360 as we speak. $5/month is a heck of a lot cheaper than moving to the states and I get to keep the free health care.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

This is a great idea.

This goes beyond just which digital services you can't get in Canada, but also many other types of products which aren't offered here for whatever reason. Models of automobiles, consumer electronics (TVs in particular, with sparser ranges of models), etc.

Our currency routinely reaches or exceeds par with the US dollar, and yet many products are dramatically more expensive than you'd expect to be explained simply by currency differences alone (I guess there are a lot of other issues at play, but it doesn't help the widespread impression that we're getting screwed).

It would be awesome of your project also tracked how much more expensive products and/or services are in Canada than in the US.

I know it's not a big name consumer service, but cperciva's Tarsnap backup service is not available to Canadians because he doesn't want to deal with Canadian taxes.

Which is funny since he lives in Canada.

Canadian taxes can be a pain in the rear. I assume cperciva doesn't want to deal with collecting and remitting the HST for Canadian customers.

Tracking GST/HST isn't that big of a deal, and you are only required to do so once your annual revenues exceed $30K.

http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/E/pub/gp/rc4022/README.html

Similar story here in Australia. Not surprising given the similarity between the two countries (though I note there are also some significant differences as well). Probably the most notable is the relatively small population compared to say the US. You'd think Canada actually has the greater advantage though.

What annoys me the most, however, is that the US and Australian governments allegedly signed a free trade agreement. Copyright laws were altered here to be more compatible with the US, though it has certainly not altered the extortion sought by distributors. Many US e-commerce sites including Amazon for non-book/dvd products won't post to Australia. I'm pretty sure they'll post to US territories such as Guan which isn't far off the Australian coast. Close enough that some Australian company run fibre there, to take advantage of surplus capacity they had. So free trade agreements don't really change much for consumers it seems (however, it should in theory reduce barriers for Australian companies to sell in the US and vice versa).

I haven't been able to figure out why electronics can't be shipped internationally through Amazon either. The closest guess I can make has to do with FCC, and other countries' equivalent, requirements and interference. For example 802.11 uses different bands depending on what country it's licensed in. US is channels 1-12, but France for example goes 1-14.

I figure the OEM nor Amazon wants to indemnify the device from causing interference in countries it's not designed to work in. On the other hand I have no problem buying whatever the hell I want from some chinese stores.

There are also import/export tax issues, not to mention potential conflicts with prices set by local Amazon operations.

Zappos just shut down their service to Canada:

http://business.transworld.net/59733/news/zappos-discontinui...

You think that's bad? Try a third world country, like Brazil. Not only the services are not available, but the hardware itself costs 4x more.

I loved the initiative, but it could be much better if it weren't tied to just Canada.

I wouldn't call it a "service", per se, but you cannot buy a Kindle from Amazon.ca. You can, however (and this is more on-topic), buy books for it, but the selection is limited.

Edit: I should add that a lot of the things that are available on Amazon.com (the US site) won't ship to Canada. You don't even get the option to pay for extra shipping charges; it just won't ship, period.

Edit 2: An article about Amazon's efforts to deal with the "cultural protection rules" here, among other things (like foreign ownership issues): http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/amazon-given-g...

That's crazy, because the do ship the Kindle to Europe. There too aren't a lot of books available due to rights issues, but still. What's the problem with the Kindle?

You can buy the Kindle from Amazon.com, just not local in .ca. And yeah the book selection.

I just checked, and Amazon says it can (now) ship Kindle to Canada. Customs duties, etc, but they can ship. FYI.

My original comment was about Amazon.ca, not Amazon.com. If you try to buy the Kindle via Amazon.ca, you get sent to a .com site. The Canadian site itself won't sell it, as it still must be imported. For whatever reason, they don't want to stock it in their Canadian warehouses. Maybe the duties on it are more than they want to swallow? I figure they'd pass that cost along, and not worry about it, but perhaps I am wrong.

The ship times to canada are international too (3-4 weeks), as opposed to 1-2 days in US. And it actually does take that long (did in my case anyway).

A little design feedback: With my 15.4 inch screen I could only see the first service, so I initially assumed that you were for some reason having ads for amazon cloud drive, and I also noticed an empty site forum (which I now believe is the forum specific to that service). It took me a great while to understand that I should be scrolling down - the page looked sort of complete as it was.

You really need a more compact layout: If you want me to know what's not available in Canada, why can't I have the whole list at once? (I realize you might want the forum and news stuff - but perhaps cut a lot of the unnecessary whitespace (while still trying to keep the design spacious! :-) ).

Thanks! I'm no designer so any feedback there is much appreciated. I've compacted things a bit, but will continue to tweak it.

I'm thinking I'll also add a drop-down menu around the top to let users jump to a service quickly (I've already got lots of feedback for other services to add so the page will just be getting longer).

Also it doesn't render right in IE 8? Font progressively larger for each entry until its a huge blur

Granted, I'm not in Canada, but I'd be curious to see why a particular service isn't available.

Notice that many of these services offer copyrighted contents online. I think the primary issues they had with doing business outside the U.S. is that there are less copyrighted laws to adequately protect the material and that sort of business in those countries. It would also be notoriously hard to sue people who abuse them.

Other services such as telecom have to deal with Canadian collusion and protectionism towards the readily established telcorps. It's an uphill battle. One that Canadians have been paying the price for, with high wireless phone bills, high internet fees and the recent attempt at imposing Usage-Based Billing.

Protection is not the problem. The problem is that each jurisdiction is a different sales market for copyright holders. While selling into Canada, Australia etc the sellers may have given over a total copyright license, or there might be terms trying to prevent "leakage" from the home market and so on.

For example, as an Australian, I used to be able to watch whole episodes of Stewart & Colbert via the website. Then one of the local cable companies got the Australian rights to those shows and blam, no more easily-watched episodes for me.

And in a lot of cases it simply doesn't make sense to deal with a whole new regulatory system for a 10% bump in potential market size.

Not sure why you got downvotes for this. This is exactly my take, too. The regulatory hurdles for online producers are significant and Canada is a small market relative to the United States.

As my previous comment indicated I know the hurt of learning about a product and finding out it's unavailable here. However, I understand the economics at work and feel that–while they're frustrating–they're totally understandable.

One thing I just hate the most being in Canada: many interesting stuff on Amazon.com does not ship to Canada, and Amazon.ca gets like nothing.

This is a point that I made in my own post. Amazon has been quite restricted in what they can and cannot do in Canada.

Is Canada any worse off than Europe, Asia, Latin America, or Africa in this regard?

I'm sure it's about the same. However, since we Canadians get such a huge amount of our media from the US it's likely more of a disappointment.

However, since we Canadians get such a huge amount of our media from the US

a fact about which Canadians and other non-Americans never seem to tire of complaining, until the day they discover that the e-spigot has been shut-off for them, then it's whambulance time: "Where are my American TV shows and movies!"

Can you explain that differently? I've read your comment a few times and haven't been able to grasp it.

My comment, based on a possibly faulty interpretation of your comment:

I don't feel entitled to get US media as a Canadian. It's just extremely prevalent. Our country watches CSI at the same time yours does, and American Idol, and pretty much everything else. So we get used to feeling like members of the US media market. Sure we have our Rick Mercer Report, et al, but the dominant media is American.

I certainly didn't mean to complain. I understand that negotiating distributions rights for a country a tenth the size isn't high on the priority list of US distributors. What I was trying to say is that it catches us of guard (though less and less frequently) to find that for online services we are often excluded when for so much of our daily media lives we are full-fledged, practicing Americans.

Probably not, but in this case I imagine it was scratching a personal itch and no other country in the world starts with "can" - I imagine that bit really rubs it in the face of Canadians. I'm sure other copycats will emerge as people think up amusing domain options.

No, it's probably not because our country starts with "can"

The real itch is that some of these services are available as long as I drive an hour south and get past the border and find open wi-fi.

Pretend you're an avid soccer fan. It's as if the world cup was on TV, and your friends are all crowding around it. All you get is the commentary and cheering when the ball is scored, but you can't actually see the game, since they're blocking the TV. And then when your friends ask you "Wasn't that a great game?", and all you can say is "Uhh...I think so?"

It's so close, yet so far.

"can" bit was tongue in cheek - sorry!

Incidentally the most recent World Cup was available for free streaming in Canada from CBC.

It doesn't need to start with 'can':

Dominican't Republic, Vatican't City, and of course Can'tartica - a whole continent where most services are unavailable.

Having moved here from the UK I think Canada is worse off than the UK on balance.

The UK doesn't have Pandora but it does have Spotify, and Canada has neither. Last.fm is gimped in Canada, compared to the service in the UK. Lovefilm in the UK has a wider selection for online streaming than Netflix does in Canada. As pointed out, you can't buy the Kindle natively in Canada (you have to import it from Amazon.com) but you can in the UK.

Heres one: Last.fm's iphone app is not available in Canada.

But you can easily get it by setting up a US iTunes account which is slightly tricky but doable without a US credit or gift card.

Edit: http://www.simonblog.com/2009/04/14/how-to-register-an-itune...

This only gets you access to free apps, right?

Indeed.

Poor man's SSL VPN

  ssh -D 9050 yourbox.net

and set your system's SOCKS proxy to localhost:9050

sadly Flash will try a direct socket connection first and just ignore your system's proxy settings...

On OSX this will work for some Flash video implementations, but not others. (BBC iPlayer website: yes, Desktop: no; other UK TV channels: no) You can use https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle to transparently proxy all TCP connections (to whitelisted or non-blacklisted IPs) though. OSX and Linux only, though.

The BBC iPlayer website is pretty easy to fool. I just set up a squid proxy on a UK VPS and created a .pac file that redirects all bbc.co.uk requests. The final video stream won't be on that domain, so it will just go over the "normal" connection.

Curious. I didn't realise the stream itself wasn't IP-restricted. This could solve issues with flaky VPS bandwidth.

I didn't know that but it can't be that hard to fix -- all you would have to do would be to disallow outgoing port 80 connections with the firewall, right?

It works for me on some sites, on OS X in Canada. I watch Hulu and YouTube videos only available in the US with that method. YMMV.

there are more: Google checkout is not available for sellers, zappos (they just closed their canadian store), unlimited internet etc.

Unlimited internet is, but for enterprises only.

Teksavvy has unlimited plans for residential.

Yea, it is another matter altogether.

Great idea!

Minor note: the "Think something should be here? Contact us about it." link text was very hard to read (Chrome 10, OS X). Maybe it's too small for that font and weight.

Well, you Canadians may not have Hulu, Skypein numbers, or full Netflix, but your beer does have a higher alcohol content - this may be a fair trade.

Why are we upvoting this comment? It adds no value.

yes, but we do have to pay for that extra percent or two. Our beer costs twice the American price.

I got a startup idea, why not compare all the things americans have that canadians don't and vise versa (aside from tech)...haha

who can fund it? I see zero's all over the place

Here's a list of some sites that are not available in Belgium. I assume that a lot of these sites are not available in Canada (and most other parts of the world) either:

UK Services:

BBC Iplayer ITV 4OnDemand DemandFive Sky TVCatchup ZATTOO

US Services:

Hulu: www.hulu.com NBC: www.nbc.com ABC: www.abc.com Fox: www.fox.com The WB: www.thewb.com The CW: www.cwtv.com USA Network: www.usanetwork.com

France Services:

M6replay: www.M6replay.fr

Netherlands Services: RTL: Rtl.nl

I have a suggestion. mcrider, why don't you allow interested Canadian users to "vote" for support of these services. It would become an activism platform of sorts that way. If Zappos for example sees that 2 million canadians want to buy their shoes, they have an incentive to add support!

compared to !north_america, you're getting off lightly.

I'm interested in a bit more about your choices with respect to the implementation of project. Is it a CMS? Wordpress? Did you code it yourself? Flat HTML? Is there anything dynamic about it or did you just put a bunch of stuff up on a page and a domain?

Incidentally, "suggest a link" is broken unless you submit a fully qualified domain name. (I just sent http://example.com to you)

I used a html pack from http://sickdesigner.com/resources/HTML5-starter-pack/index.h... then added in my own PHP. I wanted to automate as much as possible any future upkeep of this site, so its very much dynamically generated, with a bunch of forms to add data to the back end. I also use BBPress as forum software, which is turning out to be pretty nice so far.

Surprised to see Netflix on there. I'm assuming you're referring to the streaming version. Considering Canada received it first, and the streaming version's only problem has to do with issues beyond Netflix's control. Basically, if you are going to include Netflix, you have to include every retailer who deals with digital distribution of copyrighted goods like Apple and Amazon as well.

Are copyright laws more strict in Canada? Or are royalties a lot higher? There seem to be primarily music/video content services on the list.

As far as I can tell, it's a combination of the licensing being different (as in the terms of your license probably only cover the United States to start), and the CRTC's content laws and other regulations being annoying enough not to bother with considering our relatively smaller market size.

(I think it's considerably easier to go from Canada to the US than in the opposite direction.)

CRTC Canadian content regulations don't apply to the internet.

Good call, I had no idea.

Looking into it, apparently the CRTC believes that internet audio and video broadcasting services are under its jurisdiction, but it has exempted all such services from regulation. The notice is at http://www.crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/1999/PB99-197.htm.

The classic version of this is:

http://availableincanada.com/

Away for Canadians (based on geo IP) to be able to log that they want access to this service would be great. I don't expect that this kind of petition is going to be effective, but the relative number of votes between each service would be nice.

For Germany it's similar, but add almost all music videos from major labels on youtube.

Great idea! Are you expecting the forum to be used for references to the next best alternatives that are available in Canada? That's what immediately comes to mind. But then I wonder if those topics would quickly scroll off the list.

tarsnap is not available to canadians :(

(info: developer of tarsnap is canadian, he has his reasons)

For the curious: http://www.tarsnap.com/legal-why.html#NOCANADIANS

Those are just a few of services unavailable not only in Canada but also in most of the world, which sucks big time and which is one of the main reasons why I want to move to the States, especially Silicon Valley.

A proxy wouldn't fix the issue?

and would probably be cheaper.

how do you fix the issue of getting Google Voice on your phone with a proxy?

Find a generic voip provider with incoming numbers, priority call forwarding, voicemail saved as mp3 files and emailed to you? All you'd be missing is the texting and voicemail transcription, but your not missing much from that.

You should clone the site and swap Canada with Australia, would be about right.

There are a few differences - you can get Australian Sype-In numbers, and I don't think you can get any Netflix access at all.

How about real nationwide coverage. Stupid Rogers monopoly

That's great, but there was already http://availableincanada.com/.

What a terrible interface.

It would be cool to note if you can get around a service with a proxy or US billing address.

This is the most depressing weekend project I've ever seen here.

Keep up the good work, though. :)

Can add woot.com to the list of online retailers who won't ship to Canada.

To be fair, Skype is available in Canada. Only Skype-in numbers aren't.

Thanks for clarifying that. That was the only one which really surprised me to see on that list.

Thanks -- I couldn't find a SkypeIn logo, so I should've clarified the text. I've just updated it.

No Skypein numbers? How? I swear it's available in a lot of obscure countries? And Canada is far from that, you'd expect it to have this.

No one knows, and neither Skype nor Industry Canada nor the CRTC are saying anything.

To be even more precise, Canadian SkypeIn numbers are not available in Canada. I've certainly had a US number that worked in Canada (makes sense for receiving calls from America).

How about alternatives to services that are in Canada.

Wow. After reading this, I actually feel bad for Canadians. We Americans definitely take so much for granted.

Looks like Jacan't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com