I live in Australia. It’s that funny country “down under” known for having kangaroos in your backyard and deadly animals everywhere else. It’s really a great place to live, with modern technology, running water, and reruns of Seinfeld. Sometimes however, we run into problems because we don’t live in the United States. Windows 7 costs more than the exchange rate says it should, the iPad won’t be available here for at least another 12 months, and we can’t access online TV sites such as Hulu.

Now last time that I checked (which I did do about 2 minutes ago), there are a few people who live outside of the US. Check out this population graph from Google:

Yep, I was right! I’m not the only one who doesn’t live there. Phew!

Now here’s a tip for the other 6,387,970,276 of you. (Now before the perfectionists comment, I didn’t include myself in that number!) It can be convenient, for a number of technical reasons, to let websites think that you are in the United States. Luckily Hotspot Shield by AnchorFree can do it for you!

Once you download and install the free software, you can activate the “Privacy” mode. This will open a secure VPN tunnel connection to the Hotspot Shield servers, which luckily for us, are located in the aforementioned country. Once connected, all of your web requests are routed through their servers, appearing to the site as if you are a local.

Now I’ve tried a number of proxy or anonymizing services in the past, but most were expensive and flaky at best. Hotspot Shield is blazingly fast and seems only to be capped at the speed of my internet connection. Downloading large files or (cough) streaming flash videos is not a problem. Best of all, it’s free!

Readers should note that using this software should not be used for any illegal purposes. This software will not make you anonymous, no matter what they say. Please make sure you read the terms of service of the sites that you access to make sure you do not breach any laws.

This is the best service of its kind that I’ve come across. I love its simple interface, great performance, and especially the price tag. It meets my needs, but do you know of any better?