Don’t be alarmed that when I use the term RESTRICTED. This does not refer to XXX or pornographic videos. When I say RESTRICTED, this refers to sites that are inaccessible from your country. For example, I have always been a fan of a TV program created in the UK called “The Prisoner”.  Released in 1967, The Prisoner was a follow up to another TV program called the  “Secret Agent” or some of you may remember this as “Danger Man” which was being canceled. The original main actor of the “Secret Agent” Patrick McGoohan came up with a story that takes the character John Drake and places him in a whole new scenario and story line. The two TV shows are drastically different in plot and atmosphere. Star Trek Deep Space Nine and Star Trek Voyager are still Star Trek Shows in the end. The Prisoner is very unique and has aspects of design and technology that was far beyond its 1967 era. Patrick McGoohan produced 17 episodes of The Prisoner which was recently made available on www.AMCTV.com for On Demand viewing. Since access to AMCTV and its online streaming content is available only to US residents, I was not able to watch this program from Canada.

There are a number of other sites in the US, UK and other countries that Canadian’s do not have access to. Last week I had the pleasure of installing a FREE Internet Explorer browser plugin called “Hotspot Shield“. This program makes you anonymous to all websites and the site itself is not able to determine your country of origin. The FREE plugin comes from a company called AnchorFree. Now that I have this plugin installed, I can access the TV show The Prisoner plus all the other RESTRICTED video content on www.AMCTV.com. The beauty of Hotspot Shield is this software plugin uses 1005 secure VPN (Virtual Private Network). This allows you to access all websites that are normally RESTRICTED based on country, IP address or other factors and allows you complete access.

Since there is no limit to what websites I have access to now, I can also go to other websites which are normally inaccessible to Canadian’s. If you are located outside of the United States and wish to access sites that ae RESTRICTED to you due to the country from which you are accessing the site from, you have to download the FREE plugin from AnchorFree called Hotspot Shield. Those that are also a fan of the original show “The Prisoner”, a remake will be airing this fall. Really sweet.

NOTE: Unfortunately I was not able to take advantage of the plugin on www.hulu.com. This site still detects I am located outside of the United States. Too bad. The plugin is available for Windows Vista, XP, 2000 and Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5.