

Show HN: Teleport – see what the web looks like from elsewhere in the world - austerity
http://teleport.to/

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dewey
Neat, works great to unblock Youtube videos if you are living in a country
where 90% of the music videos are blocked (Germany) and it's rather fast too.
Thanks for sharing.

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p4bl0
Unblocking YouTube videos is the first thing I tried. It works but it is very
slow, so I still prefer to use Tor for that (I can usually download between
500 and 700 kbps using torsock + youtube-dl).

~~~
ForHackernews
Ugh, that's really kind of abusive of the Tor network. There's very limited
bandwidth, and it would be more polite for you to not use it just to watch
Youtube clips.

There are all sorts of inexpensive VPN services you can use (e.g.
[https://www.witopia.net/](https://www.witopia.net/)) to circumvent region
blocks. Tor should only be used in situations where strict anonymity is
crucial.

~~~
p4bl0
Just to reassure you, I very rarely do that (and I don't use Tor just for this
purpose). If it was something that I did regularly, I would of course pay for
a VPN or even a small VPS somewhere where videos blocked in France are most
often not.

FYI, I have two computers running Tor nodes with a close to 100% uptime, and I
regularly give to an association running big Tor exit nodes :-).

~~~
ForHackernews
Fair enough, sorry if that came off harsh. If you're actually contributing to
running exit nodes, then you're more justified in using Tor to watch videos.

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gtirloni
_For the rest of the countries we rely on publicly availably proxy servers
(marked non-truested)._

Which organization is running publicly available proxies servers wittingly?
Answer: none.

I wouldn't base an application on exploiting mis-configured proxies around the
globe.

~~~
austerity
Yes, this is openly addressed in "How it works".

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gtirloni
Not enough. Some countries are lifting new laws saying any kind of
unauthorized access is already a crime. This website is fooling users into
committing a crime by using resources that were not explicitly made available
to them and taking advantaged of poorly configured proxies.

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MarcScott
When I went to Facebook.com login page, using the UK proxy, I had a popup for
a VPN provider invade the screen. Is this injected by the untrusted server?

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austerity
No, those ads are mine. Although they were supposed to be disabled.

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rikkus
I clicked in the text box to enter a URL and my cursor appeared in the middle
of the example URL. Pressing left... nothing, right... nothing, delete...
nothing. Typing some more text - the example URL disappeared and I could enter
one from scratch!

Does this just happen from the UK? ;)

~~~
austerity
On it, thanks for the _input_ :)

Edit: fixed

~~~
palakchokshi
still seeing this behavior. Text should disappear as soon as textbox gets
focus.

Also I tried a URL from GB and from India and got the generic error message.
What does that mean? Is the URL not accessible from those countries?

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computerbob
Another small error. If you type in an incorrect url all the page does is says
"Error".

Example:
[http://new.google.com.prx.us.teleport.to/](http://new.google.com.prx.us.teleport.to/)

Otherwise it worked great for me. Awesome job

~~~
austerity
Thank you! HN front page with a buggy site feels like coming to school without
your homework. But as Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn founder) once said, "If you are
not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too
late"

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hngiszmo
I tried [https://fluxcards.de/home](https://fluxcards.de/home) from Iran and
got an error page. You should at least communicate if that error page is you
not finding a proxy in Iran (as I guess from looking at the list of
"available" proxies that are all offline) or if that is indeed a blocking of
my site for Iranian users.

My developer is in Iran and he would have told me if our project was blocked.
Also I know that Iran shows some funny Qur'an quotes when you try to surf ol
dirty facebook but your service claims something which I think it doesn't hold
at least for Iran.

~~~
austerity
Yup, on it, thanks for the heads up.

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davewasmer
The colors used for the map on the homepage are basically indistinguishable to
colorblind folks like myself (the trusted vs. untrusted colors, specifically),
just FYI.

~~~
austerity
Got it, will fix.

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coherentpony
If I enter www.google.com and "open from the Netherlands" I get sent to Google
Turkey.

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austerity
The servers used in this case are definitely in the Netherlands. However what
seems to be happening is they are used a lot by people from Turkey (they are
shared with another popular web proxy) and Google learned this somehow from
some implicit signals.

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izietto
Sorry for the tough question, but what make your servers _trusted_ by me? Why
should I trust you? With _trust_ I mean _I can safely browse without worries
about traffic data collecting, password stealing and so on_ , do you mean the
same too?

~~~
austerity
More like trusted by Teleport. Whether you trust Teleport is up to you. While
I promise I won't steal your passwords it's really the best I (or anyone
serving as a proxy) can do. If you want a "trustless" channel, the only
options are SSL over VPN or SSL over Tor, but you still have trust the CA and
browser vendor.

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mallin
It looks like all URLs in plain text on the page are being rewritten (eg. from
Amazon.com to Amazon.com.prx.uk.teleport.to). URLs in <a href="..."> fields
are not, but only if they point off the domain you're visiting.

~~~
austerity
It's certainly not the intended behavior, but it's not a surprising bug
either. The rewrite was surprisingly tough to make work even most of the time.
But if you could share the specific site this happened on, I will likely be
able to fix it.

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captn3m0
Inception:
[http://teleport.to.prx.us.teleport.to.prx.us.teleport.to/](http://teleport.to.prx.us.teleport.to.prx.us.teleport.to/)

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ritonlajoie
[http://www.hulu.com.prx.us.teleport.to/](http://www.hulu.com.prx.us.teleport.to/)
fails, I have a blank page.

~~~
austerity
Might be a bug on my end, but Hulu is generally very good at detecting proxies
and VPNs. Will look into it though.

~~~
dewey
I see a lot of syntax errors and "XMLHttpRequest No 'Access-Control-Allow-
Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin
'[http://www.hulu.com.prx.us.teleport.to'](http://www.hulu.com.prx.us.teleport.to')
is therefore not allowed access." in the JavaScript console.

I guess the latter error is to be expected in this case.

------
sspiff
* Is it OK to use this for moderate/high volume stuff?

* Does it use any kind caching?

* Any plans on adding a way to use HTTPS?

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austerity
> Is it OK to use this for moderate/high volume stuff?

At the moment I am not incredibly confident about the countries where it
relies on third-party proxies. Although as the database of proxy IPs grows
I'll implement load balancing of sorts to address this. For US, NL, SG and UK
it shares the infrastructure with another proxy that used to serve 200K
visitors/day without a hitch.

> Does it use any kind caching?

Nope, not yet.

> Any plans on adding a way to use HTTPS?

Absolutely. It's not done yet because it'll make proxy implementation notably
more complex and fragile (you can't use proxy domains like
youtube.com.prx.us.teleport.to with SSL because you can't buy a cert for _._.X
domains, only for *.X)

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suvelx
Why does the non-Somaliland area of Somalia have a slightly different colour?

And why are they separate?

~~~
austerity
Truth be told, I have no idea. Maybe the author of the map had an agenda :)

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vkatluri
As a color blind person, I could not tell any difference between trusted
proxies and un-trusted proxies.

~~~
austerity
Thanks, duly noted.

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Sandman
Ok... so - this is a web proxy service. Am I missing something here or is this
all there is to it?

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austerity
It is indeed a web proxy service with country selection - something that is
not addressed by other web proxies AFAIK.

Also, web proxies aren't as trivial as you are implying.

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Sandman
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that web proxies are trivial, simply that this is
nothing new - there are hundreds of proxy sites from all over the world on
[http://proxy.org/cgi_proxies.shtml](http://proxy.org/cgi_proxies.shtml).
Still, if you made this, good job!

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piratebroadcast
There should be clickable examples so users dont have to think of an example.
Youtube, etc.

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aioprisan
Add https to the beginning and you should be able to see most ecommerce sites,
like Amazon.

~~~
aioprisan
note: this isn't actually supported officially, but you can have the browser
ignore the SSL cert mismatch

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austerity
Unfortunately it's not as simple as that. You can instruct the browser to
ignore an invalid cert for the site in address bar, but all background
requests (images, scripts, ajax, etc.) to different domains made via https
will still be silently blocked.

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djmollusk
Puerto Rico is one of those weird places where I think content gets blocked on
accident.

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MarkS12
China would be very useful. Seem to be getting 500's though

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austerity
Yeah, I should make China the default in my testing I think - it's certainly
the most interesting.

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malvim
Heh, when you hover over Uruguay it says Uganda! :)

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austerity
Ooops, the map had a messed up ISO code. Fixed.

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jonashickisch
Perfect for browsing google play top charts!

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Jxnathan
Imgur direct links do not work

~~~
austerity
Which country were you trying?

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sdsk8
my first try gave me a HTTP status 500! and so on..

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austerity
Damn last minute changes! Fixed.

Edit: although for some countries you still need to manually try a few
different proxies before it works. I have a solution to this in the works, but
couldn't wait to show off.

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username42
excellent proxy

