How to watch the Olympics, live, from the United States

There has been a lot of frustration about NBC’s questionable coverage of the Olympics.

John Gilmore once said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” If you’d like to watch the Olympics live from the United States, you can easily proxy through to a server in London and watch the games.

  1. Signup up for a Linode account. After you enter your credit card information and setup a Linode server, you’ll be asked where you’d like to boot the server. Its important that you select London, UK during this step so that you get an IP address from inside of London. You’ll need this to access the BBC streaming website, otherwise you’ll be blocked.

  2. Once the server is setup and running in Linode, you’ll create an SSH tunnel to the box. From Terminal on your local machine, run ssh -C -D 8080 root@<your-linode-ip-address>

  3. Finally, you’ll configure a SOCKS proxy on your browser to point to 127.0.0.1 8080, which is where the SSH tunnel that you just opened is listening.

    SOCKS configuration from the Mac Network Preferences dialog

    On a Mac, this menu is accessible if you click on “System Preferences”, “Network”, “Advanced”, “Proxy”

  4. Finally, head to BBC website and you should be able to watch a live stream of the games!

The stream is pretty reliable, smooth, and looks great when I stream in from my OS X 10.8 MacBook Air to my 720i Apple TV! Enjoy!