Anyone who has spent any time online will probably have heard of Pandora. It’s a wonderful online radio station with a difference, you can build it round your musical taste. For those of us with slightly unusual tastes in their music, it is a fantastic service. It’s been developed around something called the music Genome project, it’s difficult to explain but if you’re in the US just go and try it.
For the rest of use accessing Pandora is not that simple ,unfortunately due to music licensing or stuff like that – if you’re not inside the US you’ll get denied access . This has been the case for years, you used to have to verify this by inputting your ZIP code – if it was in America you were allowed in. Obviously this wasn’t hard to bypass for anyone, pick Zip code in the US and you were in, I used a random one from a hotel.
Unfortunately this doesn’t work anymore and now your IP address is checked. So when you try to visit the site, Pandora looks up the location of your IP and if it’s not in the US then you get an apology . Makes me sad that this is happening more and more on the net.
The good news is that it’s quite easy to bypass this check, just mask your real IP address and use one from the US. To do this you’ll have to use some sort of proxy if you search online you’ll find lots of information on these. This stops Pandora from determining your location and thus allows you into the web site. You have to do this every time you access which is why using a free proxy can be annoying as it sometimes takes hours to find a good one working.
If you look around you’ll find tools , have a look at foxy proxy for firefox, or if you just want instant access try one of the commercial programs which are relatively inexpensive. Don’t get stopped from visiting one of the best sites on the internet, it’s not that hard to access, you can just by using a US proxy. Learning to beat internet filtering and restrictions really opens up the internet.
I know these companies have licensing agreements to honour but it the internet is being increasingly blocked, filtered and censored depending on where you are . I’m too keen on to this to be honest. Still being blocked from Pandora is nothing like the poor Chinese who are rapidly heading for a tiny State controlled Intranet.