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)[https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en] 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 - Add next lines to the end of the file :
ExitNodes {US} StrictExitNodes 1 - Save it, stop Tor and then start it again
- Now go to
https://play.google.com/storeand 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.