Connected to London

March 30, 2025

I like baseball and sometimes download podcasts from a local sports radio station about my favorite team. I mention this because last year I visited the UK and despite the many things to see and do, I still downloaded some baseball podcasts.

For a while, I noticed nothing different, but there was a difference.

While in England I, naturally, connected to a VPN server in England. It turns out, that the service that downloads podcasts for the radio station, inserts ads in the podcasts. Not just at the beginning, but ads in the middle too. And, that was what had changed.

The podcast delivery service had no idea what to do with an American baseball fan in England. They had no commercials queued up for visiting Buckingham Palace. So . . . no commercials. Yippee!

But, that was not the end of the story.

Needless to say, when I got back home, I continued to connect to a VPN server in London. For a while, that meant no commercials. But eventually some techie must have looked at the error logs and updated the system to insert British commercials.

That was amusing, for a bit. I had, however, been spoiled by not having any commercials. That said, British commercials are not nearly as annoying as American commercials (no sports gambling ads for example).

Perhaps you can guess the next step.

I now connect to a VPN server in Italy or Sweden. By and large, this results in very few commercials in the middle of the podcasts. But, the inserted commercials are, almost allways, in Italian or Swedish. I don't speak either language, so rather than being annoying, the commercials are musical. Most of the time, I have no idea what the product is.

At my Defensive Computing Checklist site, there is tons of techie information on VPNs. Really, lots of info. But sometimes we need an amusing story.