How to watch the BBC outside of the UK (Updated version)

This is an update to an older post. The main difference is the UK exit nodes have been updated to ones that are currently working and are faster. This is a step by step instructions done on Ubuntu so any Debian flavor system shall work as well.

Step 1:

If you don't know which codename of Ubuntu that you are using type:
lsb_release -c

Then add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://deb.torproject.org/torproject.org distribution main

Replace the word distribution with the codename (i.e. lucid,maverick)

Then add the gpg key used to sign the packages by running the following commands as root at your command prompt:

gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv 886DDD89
gpg --export A3C4F0F979CAA22CDBA8F512EE8CBC9E886DDD89 | sudo apt-key add -

Now refresh your sources and install Tor by running the following commands at your command prompt:

apt-get update
apt-get install tor tor-geoipdb

Step 2:

Polipo gets installed with the command above at the time of this writing. Polipo is a caching web proxy that does http pipelining well, so it's well-suited for Tor's latencies.


After polipo is installed you will need to change the script to work with tor.

Backup the original polipo config

cp /etc/polipo/config /etc/polipo/config.backup

Then edit the config file

nano /etc/polipo/config

Delete the script that is in there and replace with This

Step 3:

For this to work with tor you need an exit that has an UK ip address. To do this:

nano /etc/tor/torrc

And add the following at the top and save.

ExitNodes $B3C940F41C692FEBE7838D608BFF6114F936C3C6, $83F62F50DB1E5E4B6A6B58D9F970E40F26689911, $38B6A42E84BC86A0D217D3CF30EFFEC2678DBA17
StrictExitNodes 1

Finally Step:

Install the Tor Button for Firefox and restart.

FYI You have to restart Polipo and Tor by doing ie. /etc/init.d/polipo restart or service polipo restart To allow flash to play you need to go into Firefox's preference -> security settings and uncheck disable plugins during Tor's usage.

Thanks to the Tor Project and John Lewis for the UK exit node information.