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Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada

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Re: Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada

#101

Post by notahacker »

yardie wrote: post #95
jeza wrote: post #94

Similar story here in Australia. Not surprising given the similarity between the two countries (though I note there are also some significant differences as well). Probably the most notable is the relatively small population compared to say the US. You'd think Canada actually has the greater advantage though. What annoys me the most, however, is that the US and Australian governments allegedly signed a free trade agr…

I haven't been able to figure out why electronics can't be shipped internationally through Amazon either. The closest guess I can make has to do with FCC, and other countries' equivalent, requirements and interference. For example 802.11 uses different bands depending on what country it's licensed in. US is channels 1-12, but France for example goes 1-14. I figure the OEM nor Amazon wants to indemnify the device from…

There are also import/export tax issues, not to mention potential conflicts with prices set by local Amazon operations.

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada

#102

Post by jarek »

stretchwithme wrote: post #54
jarek wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The market is too small - let's get procreatin', Canadians.

Well, the market for rhode island is small too. but the barriers for treating it the same as connecticut are nil. Its those barriers that are the problem, even if its just the costs of being in a different country. I'm not sure what those are or whether nafta was supposed to reduce them or what. Maybe its simply regulatory. Maybe everything has to be duplicated. Maybe Canadian companies like it the way it is.

I'd rather keep some of the barriers - the one about having no RIAA, for a start - hence my comment about increasing market size to make it more worthwhile to scale them.

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada

#103

Post by jarek »

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #89
noarchy wrote: post #47

I wouldn't call it a "service", per se, but you cannot buy a Kindle from Amazon.ca. You can, however (and this is more on-topic), buy books for it, but the selection is limited. Edit: I should add that a lot of the things that are available on Amazon.com (the US site) won't ship to Canada. You don't even get the option to pay for extra shipping charges; it just won't ship, period. Edit 2: An article about Amazon's ef…

That's crazy, because the do ship the Kindle to Europe. There too aren't a lot of books available due to rights issues, but still. What's the problem with the Kindle?

You can buy the Kindle from Amazon.com, just not local in .ca. And yeah the book selection.

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada

#104

Post by tomjen3 »

rb2k_ wrote: post #74
sjs wrote: post #72

Poor man's SSL VPN ssh -D 9050 yourbox.net and set your system's SOCKS proxy to localhost:9050

sadly Flash will try a direct socket connection first and just ignore your system's proxy settings...

I didn't know that but it can't be that hard to fix -- all you would have to do would be to disallow outgoing port 80 connections with the firewall, right?

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada

#105

Post by jarek »

hardy263 wrote: post #59
prawn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not, but in this case I imagine it was scratching a personal itch and no other country in the world starts with "can" - I imagine that bit really rubs it in the face of Canadians. I'm sure other copycats will emerge as people think up amusing domain options.

No, it's probably not because our country starts with "can" The real itch is that some of these services are available as long as I drive an hour south and get past the border and find open wi-fi. Pretend you're an avid soccer fan. It's as if the world cup was on TV, and your friends are all crowding around it. All you get is the commentary and cheering when the ball is scored, but you can't actually see the game, si…

Incidentally the most recent World Cup was available for free streaming in Canada from CBC.

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada

#106

Post by rb2k_ »

pmjordan wrote: post #91
rb2k_ wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sadly Flash will try a direct socket connection first and just ignore your system's proxy settings...

On OSX this will work for some Flash video implementations, but not others. (BBC iPlayer website: yes, Desktop: no; other UK TV channels: no) You can use https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle to transparently proxy all TCP connections (to whitelisted or non-blacklisted IPs) though. OSX and Linux only, though.

The BBC iPlayer website is pretty easy to fool. I just set up a squid proxy on a UK VPS and created a .pac file that redirects all bbc.co.uk requests. The final video stream won't be on that domain, so it will just go over the "normal" connection.

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada

#108

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mcrider wrote: post #49
Skalman wrote: post #5

A little design feedback: With my 15.4 inch screen I could only see the first service, so I initially assumed that you were for some reason having ads for amazon cloud drive, and I also noticed an empty site forum (which I now believe is the forum specific to that service). It took me a great while to understand that I should be scrolling down - the page looked sort of complete as it was. You really need a more compa…

Thanks! I'm no designer so any feedback there is much appreciated. I've compacted things a bit, but will continue to tweak it. I'm thinking I'll also add a drop-down menu around the top to let users jump to a service quickly (I've already got lots of feedback for other services to add so the page will just be getting longer).

Also it doesn't render right in IE 8? Font progressively larger for each entry until its a huge blur

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada

#109

Post by AlexC04 »

I'm interested in a bit more about your choices with respect to the implementation of project. Is it a CMS? Wordpress? Did you code it yourself? Flat HTML? Is there anything dynamic about it or did you just put a bunch of stuff up on a page and a domain?

Incidentally, "suggest a link" is broken unless you submit a fully qualified domain name. (I just sent http://example.com to you)

Re: Show HN: My weekend project, tracking the services you can't have in Canada

#110

Post by mbesto »

cmer wrote: post #30
OmarIsmail wrote: post #17

A lot of these issues can be resolved for $5/month and less than that if you're willing to setup your own private server. http://www.unblock-us.com/ lets you access American Netflix, Hulu, Pandora, ESPN3, etc etc. I'm not affiliated with them, but been using the service the past couple of months and it works amazingly. In fact I'm using American Netflix on my Xbox 360 as we speak. $5/month is a heck of a lot cheaper…

I've been using StrongVPN, a similar service, with great success.

I run OpenVPN via Linode for $20/month. I've got about 5 friends on it so we just split the costs.

http://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/

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