Need a HideMyAss Alternative ? Try This Much Better Proxy

It’s many years since I used Hide My Ass proxy service for my online security. It was one of the first VPN/proxy services available but unfortunately it became very popular and got overloaded years ago. There’s no doubt that they were one of the first VPN provider companies to bring a decent VPN service to the ordinary internet surfer, however now there are so many other options. It’s just a matter of choosing the best hidemyass alternatives that are simply better value all round. The interface has improved but I still find it rather hard to navigate, yet the real issue for many of us is that they are automatically blocked by many of the biggest websites which use geo restrictions. They also no longer allow access to a free VPN but do have an unsecured free proxy, it’s easy to use but very slow though, particular when using the popular endpoints in the UK and USA.

So what are the options ? What’s the best hidemyass alternative out there? Well as mentioned there’s no shortage of other VPN providers in todays market. What used to be something of a niche requirement is now commonplace. In fact millions of internet users, will depend on their VPN service for all sorts of reasons. Whether it’s the security of bit encryption or simply a way of hiding their IP addresses there’s no doubt it’s one of the most useful internet tools available today.

Yet which of these products you should choose, depends largely on what’s your main focus. For example a large proportion of VPN users have little concern for the virtual private network component, instead they just use it to unlock sites and content normally blocked by geo restrictions. This means that the number of servers, their location and speed is arguably more important than the encryption level and the log management policies. After all if you’re using your VPN to mainly watch the BBC or stream movies from Hulu then speed is vital.

Obviously cost is an issue too for most us, which can be an issue as the cheaper prices are normally associated with slower connections. This is because most VPN services will lower their prices by loading more users on their VPN servers. This enables them to lower their costs (and prices) but the speeds will plummet too as there is more internet traffic being routed through each VPN server. There’s not much you can do about this, as the more simultaneous connections you route through each server the slower it will become.

The trick is to get the balance right, and unless you’re willing to pay more for a premium product then maximizing speed usually involves an efficient, large scale proxy network like NordVPN.

Which VPN Can Hide My Ass ?

Hide My Ass proxy was originally a FREE proxy server for surfing anonymously, it could hide your IP Address and country with a simple web Page. You can still access this free proxy setup on their site, although truth be told it’s of very limited use. Most of the more popular connections through US and UK servers tend to be rather slow in my experience. Also so many sites can now detect and block internet traffic routed though basic proxies. Without the encryption protocol and DNS leak protection it’s fairly simple to spot this traffic. For a few sites it may still work and you can route through some other countries though, if hiding your location is not important.

It’s definitely a slicker product now, and millions use to protect their connections on the Internet. As it’s a mature product that’s been around many years then you should have limited problems using it in diverse network environments. You’ll have issues though with locked down environments as with the majority of these products. It does have some specialist settings to route though routers and Firewalls, although there are better alternatives to Hidemyass in this situation (e.g. Identity Cloaker). There are of course lots of reasons why you would use a Proxy Server so it’s still a worthwhile application to invest in.

Unfortunately this isn’t free anymore and to be frank it’s a long time since HMA was anything like a leader in this industry. For those looking for privacy and a way to bypass the geoblocks on the internet’s best sites may I make a suggestion?

Click to Check Out NordVPNs’ Latest Discounts

For the geo-blocks on popular specific sites like the BBC iPlayer they constantly monitor specific servers. This involves rotating IP addresses and checking data transfer rates against specific sites which obviously requires large customer support teams. There’s no doubt that they’ve become s more focused on bypassing filters and watching TV stations although they still take security very seriously. So it probably depends on what your main concern is.

Hide My Ass Proxy for example is probably more concerned with genuine privacy but unfortunately is often rather slow which makes streaming video across the connection a tedious experience.

There is a Better HideMyAss Alternative

If security is your primary concern, then there are certainly more serious VPN programs available than HMA proxy. One such example is a program which is nearly as old as HMA – it’s called Identity Cloaker. Not only does the VPN have adjustable security levels so that you can upgrade or downgrade the encryption depending on what you’re doing. Hint – you don’t need high encryption if you’re just streaming Match of the Day on BBC iPlayer.

It also allows you switch ports and piggy back other proxies. These functions are probably of no use to the ordinary user, but are essential if you want to encrypt from a corporate network or bypassing some firewall restrictions.

The market for these services are split to some extent, the simple hide my IP programs are becoming fairly pointless as they are easily detected. Many of the larger websites will actively block or filter traffic directly from proxy servers if detected. Indeed the best proxy server is probably more likely to be one of the VPN services which perform the same function but add a layer of encryption and are difficult to detect too.

One thing that is for sure, the usefulness of those free proxy servers has long gone Many of them are used by cyber criminals to steal personal data and accounts. The legitimate commercial ones finance their free service by turning you into the product, mainly by using your bandwidth and cpu while you’re connected. If you don’t want some complete stranger routing their web traffic through your internet connection, then stay away from the free VPNs like Hola.

The right service might depend on your primary objective, if you just want to watch American TV online then you’re going to need something with a fast US proxy to use. I am still using Identity Cloaker almost 12 years from my first subscription primarily because it’s has the most UK servers for the BBC and UK TV. It also is one of the best proxy sites for YouTube as there’s very limited contention.

BBC Iplayer Overseas – How it’s Done

Everywhere you look online there are ‘solutions’ to the problem of watching BBC iPlayer overseas. There are proxies, VPNs for sale on hundreds of web sites promising a solution to watching British TV online. However do they really solve that rather annoying block you get when you try and connect to iPlayer when outside the UK. Or indeed that disappointment when you try and watch ITV player abroad too! The solutions have changed over the years and unfortunately now none of the methods to watch UK tv abroad free work anymore. However there are still some options – so how do you choose which is the best one?

Well first the reason you can’t connect, which is basically due to your IP address. When you connect to BBC Iplayer – the application does a simple look up to see where your IP address is registered. If it’s in the UK it lets you in, anywhere else then you get redirected to a polite message saying that you can’t connect.

What Happens when you watch BBC Iplayer Overseas

So you’ll be informed that you can’t watch BBC Iplayer but you can listen to BBC Radio. It’s called geotargeting and it is happening more and more on the internet. Of course it’s great when Google uses it to make sure that you get local results for your search for a plumber, but on the whole it’s used to block access to stuff. You see websites like to control what they charge in different places – the market in USA might support one price but they can charge much more in the UK. It’s online price discrimination and personally I find it rather annoying.

How to Watch BBC iPlayer Overseas

So anyway all these firms supply proxies and VPNs based in various countries across the world. These are servers which you can use to relay your requests to any website you like, the advantage is that you ‘adopt’ the IP address of the server. So if the proxy is in the UK then you’ll have a British IP address and so you can watch UK TV or sites you need, including BBC iPlayer.

It’s not rocket science – so how should you choose between these companies – well here’s my little list of things to check.

What countries are available ?

Now you might only be interested in watching the latest Dr Who series on BBC Iplayer or maybe the BBC News Live online – so you just need a UK server. However I’d advise looking at the companies who supply you access to lots of servers in different countries. For instance if you have access to the US, France or Canada then you can access lots of websites with all the latest shows by using the right country server. Check that you get access to a few countries included in your subscription.

Prices of Subscription

Don’t pay a lot, the prices seem to have come down quite a bit with the increased competition. You should definitely not be paying more than 10 Euros/14 dollars a month for a UK proxy service and the very most and that would be for a large selection of different servers. There are a few floating around that charge much more particularly if you want a dedicated IP address which you don’t need to watch most online media. Be very careful of the free ones, they either don’t work and install nasty adware on your computer or are just so slow are unusable.

VPN or Proxy?

There are two type of service available one is a proxy server which you simply connect to via software or by configuring a manual connection or a VPN (Virtual private network). In practical terms for watching TV all you need to know is what works for which channels. The BBC used to work with either of these, but now will only work with few of the VPN services. A proxy is pretty much useless now because the majority of media companies block them automatically. Which is a shame as this removed the final possibility that you can watch BBC iPlayer abroad free using a simple proxy.

It must be a VPN now, for example most of the US channels like Hulu require a VPN to connect with. Mainly this is due to a VPN being much harder to detect. It’s advisable all things being equal to choose either a service that provides both just in case unless you know that you definitely only want to access the BBC Iplayer. Make sure the service is adaptable, you don’t need complicated software. In fact, the facility to set up the VPN manually adds a lot of flexibility meaning you can use it on other devices and watch UK TV abroad on ipad, smartphones and media streamers.

A quality and secure VPN should work with pretty much any media service in the world as long as the server is based in the right country. You should be able to watch anything in the UK with a British server, you can watch Sky Go abroad if you have a valid subscription too.

Anyway I hope that helps clarify some points – there are lots of great services out there with fast, well run servers so by all means shop around. I actually use the Identity Cloaker as although it’s not advertised as a way of watching BBC iplayer or bypassing these blocks it works perfectly. It has both modes VPN and proxy and has servers in about a dozen countries including UK, US, Canada and Australia to name a few. It also has easy to use software so that you don’t have to set up the connection like you do with a lot of the other services. It’s also primarily a security software which keeps your connection safe but the added advantage is that it won’t get pursued by legal departments like all the other firms who advertise as TV VPN/proxy services. It’s also one of the cheapest!

Anyway you can try the trial version for 10 days to watch BBC iPlayer overseas for just a few bucks – ..

Chinese Internet Censorship

Censorship in the People’s Republic of China is defined by the suppressing or restrictions of publications. Chinese Internet Censorship is implemented and enforced through the People’s Republic of China’s ruling body, the Communist Party of China.

The censorship of the media is to prevent the masses viewing something that the Communist Party of China does not wish then to view. Their control expands over the television, radio, newspapers and the internet.

The Taiwanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs class the media situation that extends to the internet as being “very serious”. They have ranked the government of China among the worst.

The Communist Party of China censors the internet as a way of control. Censorships help to prevent any reformist or rebellions from taking place, or at least helps to minimise this risk.

In February 2009, Li Dongdong, General Administration of Press and Publication, introduced an array of regulations that would govern journalists. Any one who opposed or contravened these laws would be placed on a list and be unable to continue to work as a member of the press. These were designed, so Li Dongdong announced to “to a halt to fake news”. The editor of China Youth Daily criticised the new regulations and was later dismissed for opposing the censor.

Chinese Internet Censorship – some Stats

According to a study carried out by Harvard University, there are over 18,000 websites which are blocked and banned within the People’s Republic of China.

52 cyber dissidents have been imprisoned for their online communications. This is a worrying fact and one where it is clear to see the extent of which some countries will go to, to ensure total control through censorship.

In recent months, discussions and negotiations have taken place to reduce the number of barred websites; Yahoo, Wikipedia and YouTube to name a few, and restrictions on these have been relaxed, although with limitations.

In has been suggested that by banning and restricting the internet access to mainland China, it helps to ensure that their own e-commerce industry booms.

There is also an issue of self-censorship within the internet debate. As some companies from Hong Kong are opting to regulate themselves by the guidelines decreed from the Communist Part of China. This giving them an opportunity to expand in an unsaturated e-commerce industry, this obviously is advantageous for the company, but it does raise some moral questions as to whether regulating themselves in this manner advocated the Republic of China’s regime and the impact that this is having on the inhabitants ability of freedom of speech.

Why Can You Never find Working Anonymous Proxies

I get asked this quite a lot, but my answer is quite simply – it’s easy of course you can find working anonymous proxies they are everywhere ! But there is a single word missing here, a subtext to the question and that word is ‘free’

Free Working Anonymous Proxies

Now this is altogether a slightly different problem, the reason of course it’s so difficult is cost. Running a free anonymous proxy for everyone who wants, privacy, anonymity or simply to bypass restrictions based on their local firewalls and proxies – costs an awful lot of money. As anyone who has run a heavy bandwidth using web site knows it can get extremely expensive.

So the question is why would anyone supply anonymous proxies for free to total strangers? The answer may surprise you but it is that they don’t, I mean they don’t on purpose. Makes sense when you think about it, most people have other more fun ways to spend their money than supplying free anonymous proxies.

So where do these working proxies come from, well they’re either left open accidentally, or hacked and made into proxies and used and abused by the internet freeloaders society. The reason it’s difficult to find working proxies like this is that they usually fall over fairly soon or their owner realise what’s happen and pull the plug before they get even bigger bills from people surfing.

Ironically when they do pull the plug they actually have one of the most extensive logs of web searching about. Yes these servers have huge logs of everyone who has surfed through them, their IP addresses and every web site they visit. Enough to easily send bills out to each person although I don’t know of anyone doing it. It would make those people thing about their working anonymous proxies though if the surfers got a bandwidth bill from a systems administrator of a hacked server somewhere!

Internet Filtering Increases Across the World

There have been lots of surveys and research into the growing menace of internet filtering. I say menace because although there are obviously web sites that nobody should encourage or even allow – filtering does very little to tackle the real issues behind these web sites.

Casually blocking and pretending these sites don’t exist is not the way problems are solved, and the huge irony is that the people who do wish to access criminal sites will almost certainly be able to use the various work arounds that are available. In effect Internet filtering usually ends up filtering people who have no intention of visiting these sites in the first place – in essence an exercise of futility. Whilst the filtered site grow and flourish away from the eyes of governments and states who are best placed to make more direct action against them.

What has also somewhat lagged behind the increases of filtering our internet access is awareness of the practices. The internet is increasingly part of all our lives and the idea that what we are allowed to access is being decided on by our governments is not very popular.

At the very core of this change, is what is specifically monitored, our internet identity if you like – the IP address of our connection. This is linked specifically to our location, and is what is used to track, monitor and filter what we see, and who keeps a record. Obviously it’s not unique to an individual, but it is linked to the person who pays the ISP or cable bill – if you pay the bills then it’s linked to you. Which is why all across the world, people are being incorrectly sued, jailed or monitored because someone else is using their IP address either legitimately or via other means.

Your IP address is your identity online and if you value your privacy it’s essential that you take steps from it being recorded and logged by every site you visit and by which ever intelligence agency wants access to it – that’s most of them. Here’s one way to hide your IP address from all these people.

This can effectively change the way you use the internet. Not only will you stop an entire list of everything you do online being created at your ISP (yes everything!), but you will also be able to bypass the various commercial based filtering that blocks you from accessing sites based on your location. So you can then watch the BBC from outside the UK, Hulu from outside the US and lots of other fun sites that your location might stop you viewing.

Watching Media Sites like Hulu on the Internet

It’s actually quite frustrating, all the incredible media sites that are available online like Hulu, Pandora, BBC and NBC to name but a few but most people can only access a fraction of them. The culprit is a technology called geotargeting which controls what we have access to online.

Geotargeting works in quite a simple way, when we connect to the internet our IP address is readily available to every web site we visit. This IP address can be used to locate our exact geographical position and that’s what many web sites do. When we connect to a site they look up in a database where the IP address is registered to and this determines what content we see.

In many instances this is quite beneficial, for instance the search engines use this technology to give us relevant results to our queries. When we type in a search query, the results are tailored to our actual position – meaning if we search for an electrician we will get local results rather than ones in a different continent.

The other effects of geotargeting are not so useful, American users get blocked from online casino sites due to their laws on gambling, media sites restrict access to local audiences due to licensing issues. You’ll not get blocked when accessing web sites based in the same country, but you will if you accessing from a different one. People who emigrate or spend a lot of time outside their own country are especially affected, I travel a lot and when I’m away from home I can’t access the BBC Iplayer abroad for example.

This video may help –

The only way to access these sites is to disguise your IP address, you can do this in two main ways. The first is to use a proxy server – this is a server that sits between you and the website you visit forwarding requests as required. The benefit of this is the web servers only registers the proxy server address not yours. Many of the media sites like Hulu and NBC though will block this access and you will need to connect through a VPN (virtual provate network) . There’s loads of information online about these workarounds, so just check online for a solution.

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