For those of us who grew up with the internet or should I say grew with the internet then the increasing amount of filtering and censorship is somewhat worrying. A memory comes to mind of about 1997 firing up my 486 computer, clicking on that connect button and listening to my 14.4 k modem beep and click as it made my internet connection.
I was actually looking for information about ailments on elephants for one of my college students in my world wide web class. They worked in a local zoo and were actually worried about one of their elderly elephants. The world was nowhere near as connected as it is today and it was thought that the internet may help. We first logged in using a telnet session to the University of Wales online data base, no real restrictions or passwords as I remember. Merely complimentary open access to an useful info portal. After that we found email addresses and even a newsgroups patronized by veterinarians, biologists and various Zoo type people. In all we discovered the help he required, and boy did it feel good.
Now it’s arguably easier to find your way around the internet, it’s also becoming increasingly frustrating. In the last few years it seems I’m always getting rerouted or messages telling me that something’s not actually available due to my location. In the Internet I recall, location didn’t matter– this was an online, electronic world where everyone is identical.
Anywhere you go online you seem to be faced with barriers now– take this particular screen which you are given if you try and visit the Hotstar site, a fantastic Indian media broadcaster.
I proceeded there mainly for the sport, there is actually a huge cricket session incorporating the IPL coverage. If you want to watch Premiership football without being conned into a massive Sky or BT package, the Hotstar has rights at least it did last season. Nevertheless again I was frustrated as the entire site is only obtainable if you have an Indian IP address,
Now I ‘d normally use Identity Cloaker to circumvent these blocks however they do not actually have any Indian VPN servers so it would not work. There are other options and I thought I ‘d try out a Smart DNS solution instead, to be more specific the 14 day free trial from Smart DNS Proxy. It functioned perfectly as you can see in the following video about watching Hotstar in Europe which is actually hosted currently on YouTube.
As you can see it’s pretty much transparent after you set it up, certainly more so than using a VPN which needs to be connected while you’re accessing the Hotstar site. The other big advantage is that because you don’t stream the entire connection through the VPN server you don’t have that extra hop to slow you down.
Certainly there’s a different post concerning accessing the site here– Watching Hotstar in the UK. As anyone can view it operates perfectly and perfectly in the background. I am beginning to see the advantages of using these Smart DNS systems too as I was definitely able to quickly configure my NVidia Shield with the same DNS configurations so I could watch using that.
Performs a treat, and Hotstar is brilliant fun– it’s additionally worth checking out the different documentaries and news programmes a lot of them are in English. Gives you a complete new perspective of the world to be honest.
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