I know I’m supposed to have dedicated this blog to all things creative, which is the very reason for the blog title in the first place – but as most of you might now I’m pretty excited about finally being able to listen to Pandora™ radio while not being in the States!! For those who aren’t really aware of what Pandora™ is, it’s this online radio service that lets you create stations based on either a group or a song and then they go and play you all songs that match your initial criteria! Genius I tell you.. It’s part of the Music Genome project – look it up.
So how does one do this.. It’s pretty simple really – all you need to do is ask your web browser to open whatever webpage through a proxy. But how? I did a bit of research on this on Independence Day in Sri Lanka and here’s what I found. There’s this software called Tor [http://www.torproject.org/] and what it does is it creates a server on your local machine that logs on to this entire network of other computers around the world. All you need to do is ask your browser to send all web traffic to this server [through the proxy settings] and then use the Tor UI to ask it to only look up US based servers – ingenious! 
So here’s what you do:
- Go to http://www.torproject.org/download.html.en and download the Tor browser bundle for whatever your O/S is. This is a self-extracting ZIP file, so extract it into some place convenient.
- Go to the folder that the files were extracted to and go to the Data folder.
- Go to the Tor folder inside the Data folder.
- Open the Torrc file in notepad and enter the following text at the end of the file:
StrictExitNodes 1
exitnodes desync, 0xL37N1Tor, agrippator, whistlersmother, lefkada, bettyboop, croeso, TorLuwakOrg, nixnix, inap1, redpineapple, cronic, sasquatch, slowturtle2 - Save the file and exit notepad.
- Once that’s done, go back to the folder to which you initially extracted the files and run the ‘Start Tor Browser’ program. This will open up a window that gives you the connection status information. Once it says ‘Connected to the Tor network!’ you are in! Firefox will open up and congratulate you for using Tor. The only catch is that Pandora doesn’t work too well with Firefox [I personally don’t think anything works too well with Firefox anymore. They’ve just lost the plot to me. I much prefer Google Chrome now and so will tell you how to configure Chrome ].
- Before getting to Chrome, you need to know what port your server is running on. Here’s the easy way to do that:
- Go to the Firefox window that Tor opened for you.
- At the bottom of the screen, there’ll either be a green onion icon or text that reads ‘Tor Enabled’ – both in green. Right click on that and open up the Preferences.
- Click on the Proxy Settings tab and take a look at the values in the HTTP Proxy field. It should generally say 127.0.0.1 and then Port: #### [where #### are replaced by 4 numbers.]
- Note that down. You’ll need to put those same numbers in Chrome.
- Open Chrome and click on the spanner icon on right of the toolbar.
- Go to the Options screen and click on the ‘Under The Hood’ tab.
- Click on the ‘Change Proxy Settings’ button.
- Click on the ‘LAN Settings’ button.
- Under the Proxy Server section, check the ‘Use a proxy server for your LAN…’ and enter the values that you noted down from Firefox.
- Click on all the Ok buttons to get back to Chrome.
- Enter http://www.pandora.com in your address bar and voila! It won’t redirect to the page telling you the site’s restricted because of your IP!!
Now here’s the catch – you don’t want whatever internet traffic you generate to go through the proxy because that’ll be slow plus it could possibly mean that other people would have access to the information that you send or receive. So when you’re done listening to Pandora, exit Tor [this’ll close Firefox]. Now if you try opening a web page in Chrome, it’ll say that the page can’t be found. In order to undo this you’d need to follow steps 8 through 14 but uncheck the check box and you are back to normal.
Hope you guys enjoy this!
Taariq Maruzook
