Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudonim | Hacker News Reader

Not sure why others downvoted you. I just tried unblock-us.com and it works... basically by changing your DNS servers. I added it to the article as another option.

I'm confused because I thought that geo-restrictions were handled by IP address, so I'm not sure how this gets around that.

View on HN

It's still based on proxy servers, but their DNS server returns the address of their proxy server instead of the real IP address.

As with any DNS provider they can presumably spoof any site they wish too; so I'd be pretty cautious about using them for all DNS calls.

On Mac OS X, you can use them just for specific domains. For example, create:

  /etc/resolver/bbc.co.uk

with the contents:

  nameserver 208.122.23.22
  nameserver 208.122.23.23

And now you'll be using unblock-us's name servers for just bbc.co.uk and its subdomains. You could do something similar for your entire network with dnsmasq.

Unfortunately, this tip doesn't seem to be working for the Olympics replays on the BBC's site (they all have a "try again later" every time I try to watch one).

Thanks for the tip, though, and kudos to Unblock-Us for being one of a VERY few sites that let you trial their service without giving them payment details.

It appears some items are being served from player.bbchdsodsecure-f.akamaihd.net -- but even when I redirect that to unblock's DNS servers I still can't watch those videos.

edit: using unotelly.com's DNS for co.uk and bbchdsodsecure-f.akamaihd.net works for me.

Does anyone know how to do this on a router running dd-wrt with dnsmasq?

Have not reset to test that it rewrites the change, but enter the below in the Additional DNSMasq box of services tab, and it should work as intended.

server=/bbc.co.uk/###.###.###.###,

ip would be for the alternate nameserver

Nice feature.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com