Around the world, the US has men and women serving in the navy. These brave soldiers are defending our nation under what can be very harsh conditions. While it can be argued that they chose to serve in the military freely, we still owe them our thanks. It’s up to us to make sure they have everything they need to be safe when deployed. Safety however, is not only making sure they have the military equipment, it also demands that we provide a way to let off steam. The USO does a great job at this with shows right at the front line. Remember, a soldier’s best weapon is his or her mind. If they are well cared for, they will be better prepared. Years ago, all the military had was R & R, letters from home and the USO. Now soldiers on the front line also have access to other entertainment via the Internet.
So what would a soldier want to access on the Internet. Believe it or not, one of the things they do is watch TV online. They can catch their favorite shows or watch baseball. Most of the TV networks put their some of their newest episodes online. For others, they can access media sites that aggregate content. Another source for media is the online newspapers like the New York Times. Or maybe they want to read their home town paper online. Today most, if not all papers, have an interactive version. So between TV, sports, and newspapers, they can catch up on the latest US media and news.
There are also several social networking websites out there that they can use to keep in touch with friends and family. Sure e-mail works to an extent, but if you have ever used any form of social networking, you know exactly how much simpler it is. You can type a message on your homepage, and suddenly all of your friends and family will be able to see it. Soldiers are very pressed for time, and sometimes there just isn’t an opportunity to respond to every single person. This makes social networking extremely important. There is a problem however, a huge problem. Sometimes soldiers cannot get to the websites that they need. Why exactly? Well let’s talk about it.
The purpose of companies streaming their television shows onto the Internet is so that people will see them, and eventually decide to buy them on DVD. People outside the country however will not be able to buy these because they are simply unavailable. Companies decided that they were actually losing money because such people couldn’t get a hold of their products! They didn’t seem to consider all of the people IN the United States that were buying. After all, what could it hurt if a few foreigners watched an episode of The Office, or even Stargate Universe? Well you wouldn’t think that it could hurt at all, but the production companies didn’t quite see it that way. For this reason they started to block IP addresses outside of the United States. The same went for several social networking websites because they suffered from the same advertisement problem. This however did not stop the military personnel from viewing their favorite websites. They instead turned to proxies.
So what is a proxy, or anonymous proxy? A proxy is an Internet server that changes the IP address that the user has. It does this by establishing a connection to the surfer and then acting as the originating point for the Internet communications. In this way, the destination sites will see the IP address of the proxy and not that of the user. If the proxy has a US IP address, then the websites will think that the person is in the US and not overseas. This is how websites blocks can be bypassed. If the proxy also uses encryption, then banned websites can be accessed too. That’s because the encryption bypasses the censorship. So by using an anonymous proxy, our military personnel deployed abroad can still access the websites they used to enjoy at home.
For additional info on how to spoof your IP address so that you can avoid any type of website censorship or blocks, just visit our change IP website.