Summer is upon us and we all know it means that most of us are going to have a fair amount of free time on our hands. While I’m sure that I could recommend countless things to do like reading or studying Ukrainian and Russian, but this is a technology tip so I’ll stick with technology.

We all need some mindless watching from time to time but I don’t doubt that most of you have watched your entire store of movies and television already (I know I have). Too bad we can’t have access to Netflix and Hulu because we’re in Ukraine, then we could take the summer downtime to catch up on shows and movies back home. You’re in luck; this week’s tech tip will explain one method to work around Netflix and Hulu’s Ukrainian block.

To be able to watch movies and television on blocked sites, you’ll need to set up a proxy. A proxy is “A person authorized to act on behalf of another” and web proxies do just that. You tell them the information or website you want to access and they will retrieve it and send it back to you. We do this because we can get proxies which are located in the United States where Hulu and Netflix are not blocked. They trick the websites into thinking you are also located in the United States.

To set up our proxy, we have to install a small, free program. The program is free because it is supported by ads. Some of you might have heard of it already, it’s called http://hotspotshield.com/ and it works on both Windows and Macs. All you need to do is download and install this program, turn it on (by clicking the red shield near the clock and choosing “Connect/ON”) and then you’ll be able to watch Netflix and Hulu like you’re living in the States.

I highly recommend turning this off when you are not using it (click on the green shield near the clock and choose “Disconnect/OFF”). The reason to turn it off is that it will open webpage ads and put ads into your browser while it is on and these tend to be quite annoying (the ad blockers I use don’t manage to stop these ads).

IMPORTANT NOTE: Using a proxy is legal, but doing illegal things using a proxy is still illegal.