Sunday, September 1, 2013

Needed to make Google think that i'm from US

Since i live in Ukraine right now, sometimes i want to use services that are working only for US citizens. For example Spotify will work for you only if you live in US or in some european countries. I used to user Tunnelbear on my macbook Air and it worked like a charm until some point where it stopped logging in for me:( Since that moment i forgot about this issue and found some alternatives for Spotify. However, yesterday one of my friends asked me about how she can buy Google Nexus 4. I found some articles for her, but before sending it, i decided to check myself how well they work and whether i can get access to Google play where i can order this Nexus 4 device. First solution was to use Firefox + anonymousX plugin, but it didn't worked for me even when i set timezone on my laptop to US and cleared all cookies and cache in Firefox. Second option was to register on one of the web tunnels which can become a VPN provider for you and mask you as a US citizen. I was too lazy for registering on one more web service, that will most likely spam me with e-mails afterwards, and i kept looking. My third and final option was to use Tor browser. I've heard about this project before and it was interesting for me to try it out. Here's what you gonna need  to do: 
  • Download it
  • Install:)
  • Launch at first time, so it will create all needed config files and will connect to Tor network at first time
  • Then you're gonna need to open Terminal ( i'm a Mac user) and run next command :
  • nano /Applications/TorBrowser_en-US.app/Contents/MacOS/Vidalia.app/Contents/MacOS/../../../../../Library/Vidalia/torrc
  • In the end of the file paste this 2 values :
  • ExitNodes {US}
    StrictExitNodes 1
  • Save it, stop Tor and then start it again
  • Now go to https://play.google.com/store and you'll see that devices section is available for you and you can actually select and purchase one of them:) 

You can actually specify any country you need and "simulate" situation when you're accessing your application from another country. I believe that for more simpler tasks you can use both Tor and Firefox + anonymousX plugin, but Tor can be considered as a backup when Firefox fails you. 

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