So your at work and you really want to watch that YouTube video your buddy sent you. But you can’t cuz YouTube is blocked. Well I’m here to show you how. This builds on a previous post I did about listening to Pandora in Canada. Your using the socks proxy we setup before but you still can’t watch YouTube clips because their being blocked at the DNS level. Nothing we can do about that right? Wrong. Lets configure Firefox to send DNS requests over the socks proxy. There by circumventing the DNS blocks at work.

In Firefox type about:config into the address bar. Now type dns into the filter. Double-click on the network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to configure Firefox to send our DNS requests through the proxy. Voila! We can now laugh it up watching YouTube clips to our hearts content.

If your like me you absolutely love the Pandora music service. However due to greedy music labels pushing their agenda in Washinton (see SaveNetRadio.org) Pandora was forced to limit its service to the US. What’s a geek to do? Why… use an ssh tunnel to proxy the Pandora service through a US server. How? You may ask. 

First we’ll setup the ssh tunnel. For that we’re going to use an application called Putty. To setup the ssh tunnel you’ll need to have access to a server based in the US with ssh enabled (for example – a Dreamhost account). For the purpose of the tutorial we’ll call the server “example.com”. After launching Putty you need to enter the hostname into the field provided. Now comes the magic. Expand the SSH category and select Tunnels. Under source port enter 8080, select the “Dynamic” and then click the Add button.

Click on the Open button. After click on Open you’ll be prompted for your username and password for, in the case of this example, example.com. After successful establishing your ssh connection all you have left to do is setup Firefox to use this ssh tunnel as a proxy.

Open up Firefox and select “Options” from the Tool menu then click on “Advanced”. Next click on the “Network” tab, then the “Settings” button. Select “Manual proxy configuration”. Now comes the important settings.  Erase the HTTP Proxy, SSL Proxy, FTP Proxy, and Gopher Proxy fields. Enter 127.0.0.1 under SOCKS Host and 8080 under Port.

Click OK and click OK once more. We’re done! Browse to www.pandora.com and crank the tunes.