So, for those of you that don't know, the World Cup is currently taking place. Today France will play Switzerland (in about half an hour, in fact). Since I generally follow the world cup on the BBC World Cup website, I knew that the BBC was streaming all the matches, both audio and video. So today I decided to see if I could listen to the France-Switzerland match.

Now, streaming television and radio has become very contentious. In the old days (a decade ago, I guess) it was easy to find your favourite radio station online and listen. Now the record companies have stopped all that, their money-grasping execs putting an end to one of the most obvious applications of the internet. The BBC has to follow those rules, so it has software which determines, via your IP, whether you are in the UK or not. If you are, you can listen. If you're not, you can't. Simple.

Except nothing is really simple on the internet. Using something called a proxy server, you can pretend to be anywhere. The concept is fairly simple. I tell my computer to use a proxy - a computer (based in the UK). That computer will then take any request I send it, make the request for me, and send me whatever the response is (e.g. the france/switzerland match).

Obviously, this is not legal. Which was why I was so amused when I found BBC Proxy - a proxy service which charges for their services, and explicitly states they exist to route World Cup matches out of the country. I assume someone will be visiting them shortly, but on the other hand, maybe nobody is checking, which I'm sure is what they are betting on!

France were not very good today, and neither were Brazil for that matter. Have you been able to listen to the BBC when you changed your proxy. If you did what is the IP address you used? I was trying to get it to work the other day in college, but had no luck adrian

No, I wasn't actually able to find a working proxy. I didn't try very hard - I find it tough to work and listen to stuff at the same time. So I just put up the little BBC scorecard in a corner of my monitor and waited for France to do something. I'm pleased Korea did well. It sounded like the France/Switzerland game was a real waste of time. I didn't see anything about the Brazil match.

I'm surpised you think that using a proxy server or setting it up is illegal. There is nothing illegal with it. It's just an online service that don't brake any rules i.e. don't promote hate or terrorism. You can then say that creating a search engine is illegal because you need to set up your index bot to visit millions of pages on the Internet without asking website owners.