October 2018

Rude Websites

Most if not all second-hand car dealers in Slovenia work through www.avto.net (The letter V after a vowel becomes a W, similar to the English U. So awe-too.net). However, from South Africa, www.avto.net gives you a nice ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT.

Others are less subtle. www.offerup.com gives

The owner of this website (offerup.com) has banned the country
or region your IP address is in (ZA) from accessing this website.

So what is a geek to do? Assuming Windows (7, in my case), go to http://www.freeproxylists.net/eu.html , pick an IP / port combination that suits,  Start / Control Panel / Network and Sharing Center / Internet Options at the bottom left, Connections tab at the top, LAN settings button at the lower right, tick Proxy server and put the address and port in the relevant blocks.

185.26.226.241 / 36012 gives me access to www.avto.net but I had to go find a proxy in USA to make www.offerup.com work. And the first three or four I tried didn’t work (I ended up using 35.240.29.142 / 3128). These guys are paranoid lemme tellya.

(And for the record, paypal.me uses similar fuckery, don’t ask me why. All it does is redirect you to paypal.com anyway).