Brice writes "Thanks for showing how to tether Droid with Ubuntu. I use them both quite often. I was wondering if tethering the Droid is against the TOS/Verizon contract."

Well Brice, technically it may be a violation of your carriers terms of service. I know at least with Verizon's Wireless business accounts there is an additional fee, around $30/mo I believe, for tethering with a smartphone like a blackberry.

I can also say from personal experience having tethered since 2001 on both Sprint and Verizon, that as long as you stay under the 5-gig cap you should be ok. Programs like June Fabrics PDAnet allow one to tether on most platforms and, from what I hear from my telco buddies, the carrier can't tell the difference between the traffic originating from the phone or your laptop. I haven't heard any horror stories of penalties for using such application however I'd be curious to hear from our audience if such a thing has happened in the past.

Kuroha write "I want to use Spotify, the new music service, but I keep getting this error: Unfortunately, due to licensing restrictions we are not yet available in your country. We understand that you are currently in United States. How do I spoof my IP so it looks like I'm in Finland?"

Kuroha, there is a misconception about IP Spoofing that's simply summed up by saying this. The source address of your computer is part of the IP packet header. There are plenty of programs out there that will let you spoof this source port, including our favorite tool nmap. However, like a return address on postage, unless you're in a position to listen to the replies to your spoofed packets (such as on a local network) you aren't going to get anything useful back from the server.

What you're more likely referrencing isn't IP Spoofing as much as it is simply bouncing your traffic off a server in another country -- typically done to anonymize Internet traffic or for secure tunneling on untrusted networks. The SSH tunneling with dynamic SOCKS proxies we've been talking about recently will do the trick. It's just a matter of finding a cheap shell, VPS or other server that allows tunneling in the country of your choosing.

Don't forget this month's LAN Party is Left 4 Dead 2. We'll be playing at game.hak5.org Saturday and Sunday, January 2nd and 3rd. Hope to see you there!