Proxy Servers Give Real Time Olympics

There's been a lot of talk about the proxy servers protecting the enterprise organization during the onslaught of video that's going to be available during the Olympics. We've already covered some of it here on this blog.

There's another angle to proxy servers and the Olympics though, and it's one that you may not have thought of. Your workers may be going through a proxy server on the Internet, not to avoid your existing proxy server, but to pick up a foreign IP address space in order to pick up live video streams of the Olympics. NBC has an embargo on live video on the Internet, unless it is being shown live on broadcast television in the U.S. So if there's a delayed showing on TV, you can't pick up video of on the event on the Internet from U.S. IP address. But if you have a foreign IP, you can visit a number of foreign sites that are showing the same video live.

The solution some people have found is discussed in the linked article above, which is to find a proxy server with a foreign IP address to submit your request for video to. Anonymous proxy servers tend to do this already, as many of them are located outside the U.S. We've discussed how to prevent end-users from accessing proxy servers outside the organization, and if you haven't already looked into it, it may be a good time to revisit this topic for your organization.