ABC Player - how does it know I'm not in the US?

[MoodyM]

I'm in the UK, but I've got my MacBook Pro and iPad set up with VyprVPN and I have a US IP address.

I can access Pandora, Hulu, etc, just fine and any IP checker web site definitely says I'm in the US.

But if I go to the ABC site and try play an episode, I get a message saying "sorry, you appear to be outside the US".

On the iPad I tried turning off Location Services, to no avail, and on the Mac I cleared out all cookies, etc, again to no avail.

I'm not actually that fussed about it, I just wondered out of curiousity more than anything else, how the ABC site knows I'm not in the US?

 

[simsaladimbamba]

Hotspot Shield can help (for Mac OS X).

 

[MoodyM]

Hotspot Shield can help (for Mac OS X).

Thanks, but I'm not sure that will help? I'm already using LT2P based VPN encryption, and I have a valid US IP address - like I said, Hulu & Pandora work fine.

 

[Animalk]

I'm not a web developer but rather an application developer so my ideas might be completely useless.

- Try with a completely cleaned out browser. No cookies and empty cache.
- Could it be getting your location by simply asking the operating system what time zone it is set to?

 

[Ramasjang]

I think it is flash that is the rat...

 

[romanholiday]

Old post I know, but just wanted to make another suggestion. Some Web sites keep track of the IP addresses of the servers for every VPN they can find and manually block them. It's undefeatable so far as I know.