black.box

TL;DR to unblock Netflix find a Pi and follow this

You must have heard about VPNs by now. Thanks to some very arbitrary content licensing laws, availability of content on the Internet, such movies, music, books and even games, varies a great deal between geographical regions.

You may have heard about this great new TV show or a new release film from your USA or Canada based friends on social media, but you can't seem to be able to find it in your local Netflix catalogue or Amazon Video account. What do you do?

Well, you can turn to BitTorrent downloads, then spend weeks installing various for video player and codec combinations to try and watch what you've downloaded, which may actually turn out to be not what you thought it was. Good luck!

Alternatively, you can plug in a small box into you network, which will let you access content not previously available to you. Just like that.

This is where black.box comes in. It is a small plug-and-play VPN router, which runs on a Raspberry Pi 2 model B or RPi 3 hardware and un-blocks popular Internet content on all devices, including tablets, smartphones, desktops, laptops and TVs. Includes optional obfuscation/cloaking mode, to enable functioning in hostile deep packet inspection environments, such as China.

To get started, obtain a Raspberry Pi starter kit from Amazon and follow the instructions.

This device won't slow down your normal browsing, because it uses policy-based routing to send your normal local traffic, such as Google and Facebook, out via your normal Internet interface.

Multiple black.box(es) can be used not only to un-block content, but to also establish private links. Leave one at home/office and dial back in when travelling or on holidays.

You can connect your devices either to the default black.box Wi-Fi network, or for high performance mode, change your default gateway to the LAN IP of the device.

A simple dashboard allows you to see the status of the device, as well customise some settings:

The service is offered on a subscription basis using PayPal, priced €9.95 per month with one month free trial period. You can cancel your subscription at anytime. You can even pay using Bitcoin for as much time up-front as you like, even a few hours, although the free trial period doesn't apply using this payment method.