Unusual request, so let me be straight about what it is before I ask for anything.
The short version: I pay for MLB.tv, but the league geo-restricts games depending on the IP you watch from. The one setup that unlocks every game (no local blackouts, and none of the “this game is a Netflix/Roku/Peacock exclusive” carve-outs) is MLB.tv International, which needs a UK or EU IP. I’ve built a small Raspberry Pi that lets my stream appear to originate from a home internet connection over there, and I’m looking for someone willing to plug one into a spare ethernet port and forget it exists.
The honest part: this works around MLB’s geo-restrictions, which is against their terms of service. I’m doing it with a fully paid subscription to watch games I’ve already paid for, but if that’s not something you want on your connection, totally fair, no hard feelings, stop reading here. I’d rather you pass than feel misled.
Still with me? Here’s everything.
First, the thing you actually care about: it barely touches your connection
It is NOT a 24/7 relay, and it does NOT stream whole games through your line. MLB only checks your location at the moment a stream starts. So my usage is:
- I switch it on only at game time, for a game I’m actually blocked from.
- The stream starts, the check passes, and after under ~5 minutes I switch it back off
- The game then keeps playing over my own connection, not yours.
Net effect on you: a WireGuard handshake and a few minutes of video per game I watch. A few MB, not hours. I use a Home Assistant script to enable/disable the VPN Client in UniFi, so it’s guaranteed to shut off after a few minutes. No accidentally leaving it on forever and using your connection
Why a residential UK/EU IP, specifically
I’ve already done the homework, and residential is the only door left open:
- I already run this through a family member’s connection in the US, and it works flawlessly. But a US IP still leaves me blocked from national-broadcast games (the ESPN/Fox/Peacock/Apple/Netflix exclusives), because those are carved out of US MLB.tv at the product level no US IP fixes them. MLB.tv International has no such carve-outs, hence UK/EU.
- Commercial VPNs are blocked. I tried Mullvad, Proton, Nord and others… MLB blocks their IP ranges outright; streams fail to start.
- Datacenter/VPS IPs are blocked too. Hetzner, OVH, etc… same story, flagged as non-residential and refused.
A real residential connection is the only thing MLB treats as a legitimate viewer. That’s why I need a person with a spare port, not a server I can rent.
How it works (the technical bit)
- The Pi runs WireGuard, dialing outbound to a small cloud relay I rent (it never listens for inbound, so your router never needs to forward a port to it).
- It also runs Tailscale as an independent, outbound-only management door, so I can maintain it without ever asking you to touch it.
- The OS is a hardened Raspberry Pi: deny-all-inbound firewall, key-only SSH, no passwords over the wire, automatic security updates, and self-healing tunnel watchdogs.
[ my home, Starlink / CGNat ]
│ WireGuard (encrypted, outbound)
▼
[ small VPS I rent ] ◀─ only forwards encrypted frames; sees nothing
│ WireGuard (encrypted)
▼
[ My Pi in your home ] ── dials OUT only, never listens; firewall blocks your LAN entirely
│
▼
[ your home internet ] ──▶ MLB.tv (only ever sees your residential UK/EU IP)
( my paid stream flows back up the same path to my TV — I switch the tunnel
off after the first few minutes, so most of it never crosses your line )
What I’d send, and what you’d do
A Raspberry Pi in a small case. You give it power (~3–5 W, ~£0.50/month of electricity) and one ethernet port. That’s the entire job… no router config, no port forwarding, no software on your devices, no accounts.
What it can’t do on your network
The firewall denies all inbound, and for forwarded traffic it drops every private-network destination before allowing anything out. In plain terms: traffic from my tunnel physically cannot reach your LAN… not your PCs, NAS, printer, or router admin page. It can only reach the public internet.
Two things make trusting me cheap:
- Put it on a guest/IoT VLAN if you have one. Isolating it costs it nothing and then the guarantee above is enforced by your gear, not my word.
- Unplug it whenever. Nothing on your end depends on it.
Trust but verify
Send me your SSH public key and I’ll set you up a read-only account. One command, sudo host-verify, prints the live firewall rules, the tunnel status, and every connection the box currently has open — so you can confirm all of the above any time. That account can’t change anything or reach the rest of the box; it’s there purely so you don’t have to trust me blind. Happy to walk through the whole config with you too.
What’s in it for you
Mostly my genuine gratitude willingness to reciprocate in kind: host something for you, help on a homelab project, or whatever feels fair.
If you’re in the UK or EU and up for it (or just have questions) reply or DM. Cheers, and thanks for reading either way.
isn’t piracy easier?
This seems like the perfect scam for Lemmy for setting up a fresh IP for launching a cyber attack/scam with a real residential IP. Helping a community member while circumventing shitty corporations. (Not saying OP is, just that it would be a decent scam)
This requires either an insane amount of trust in a random person or gullibility. Plugging a random mailed device into your network, even behind a VLAN.
I definitely would never do this if I didn’t have absolute full and complete access to every part of the pi’s software, or preferably set it up myself (optionally in collaboration with the requester) and the requester only had read-only access to it.
What it basically comes down to is this: do I trust some random guy off the Internet to use my Internet connection which is tied to my legal government name and the legal reprocussions that comes with that to access the Internet as if they were me?
The only way I would do that is if I gave it its own vlan and only allow Internet traffic to specific whitelisted ips. Even then my legal protection insurance definitely won’t cover that.
This.
However, there are plenty of residential proxy services to purchase. People are willing to sell their liability for perks, and others are willing to buy. I’m sure there’s a whole dark economy around this. It’s what OP is asking for without the extra steps.
Yeah, I think it’s a bit sad it has to be like this… But it is what it is… I once moved and asked my neighbours if I could use their Wifi for a month, and that was basically their answer. Just that I wasn’t some internet stranger, but a regular stranger living nextdoors.
Just use a pirate streaming site. There are tons that stream live sports
Any tips? Seriously asking for a friend. I don’t Carr about these things.
The r/piracy megathread is all you could ever want.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/
Scroll down and click on the “sports” category
Just do it the easy way and get a $20 a year iptv subscription.
That doesn’t unlock the long tail of MLB games. IPTV groups really only unlock 2-3 MLB network channels that don’t cover all games
I do this for the NHL for the same reasons you’re struggling with. IPTV let’s me watch any game for any team full stop.
Suggestions?
“MLB only checks your location at the moment a stream starts.”
This is/was what Pandora.com did, and the solution was to run a small proxy that directed the exact login url through Tor with a Merican endpoint while stream was normal, but you can just select an EU/UK endpoint instead.
I used a Tor proxy - privoxy, I think - from the openwrt package repo, but others exist, and for other platforms…
Why not use the VPS?
Ovh has UK VPS hosting
The content host blocks IPs based on reputation (VPN exits are well-known) but so many people have done the exit through a VPS that those IP blocks are poisoned and could go at any moment. A true residential IP can’t be blocked because those are legitimate customers
They usually block these IPs.
I can’t help, but commenting for visibility because I think this is clever. Cheers and good luck!
Whole post is AI generated
Huh, what gives it away? I missed it on this one
The ASCII tree is very Claude code.
Gemini does the same style, I think mistral as well.
The give aways: starting paragraphs with a punchy sentence in bold with a colon.
Plus they used the “it’s not X it’s Y” thing.
Some people write that way, especially when they’re trying to talk about a complex topic. In fact that’s exactly the reason why some ai has that style, because it was trained on billions of pieces of human writing and that’s the style some people write in.
Well now its “really” obvious when you spell it out lol.
The overall voice and style.
Could just be autism. They overlap in style a lot, especially when making a request like this. A real possibility in this community
Autism doesn’t make you sound like a sales pitch.
It totally can through.
When making a request, and generally expecting to be misunderstood, autism can lead to over explaining and very logical detailed expression like this.
I was moderately effective as a salesman with this approach, with some limitations and caveats.
Also the bold text and headers (h1, h2 in HTML). No one does this on purpose, even more if it’s for pirating TV.
I do when I effortpost, or when I write docs for colleagues I like.
Worth a read if you haven’t: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
but hasnep covered it well. also emoji use, overly wordy and that graph/tree is a common style of llms.
That’s the probably most unhelpful and stupid thing I saw in quite some time. The AI or Not Quiz right at the beginning in particular regularly links the exact same things to human or to AI (404 links are a sign or AI hallucination or just natural link decay that show it’s from a human; wonky grammar is a sign for AI unless the text is human-written where it’s just bad english that LLMs would not produce intentionally…).
Yes, spotting AI by clear attributes isn’t easy. If it was those points would be changed first in training of AI. But lengthily discussing tell–tale signs then interpreting them in contrary ways depending on source is absolute bullshit.
Thanks!
emdashes everywhere
I don’t see a reason to assume that, but even if it was there’s certainly no reason to think that it was used as anything other than a writing aid for what OP was trying to communicate.
Yes but it definitely detracts from it being clever, and puts it more into the category of potential scam.
TorGuard offers residential dedicated IPs. And there are proxy services that have that as there business model for circumventing chaptas when scraping the web. I would look there https://brightdata.com/proxy-types/residential-proxies https://oxylabs.io/location-proxy/uk https://torguard.net/residential-ip-vpn/
TorGuard’s exit nodes are only in the US, so doesn’t solve the problem OxyLabs seems to block Streaming in their TOS BrightData doesn’t block streaming, so I’ll dig into that one. Thanks for the suggestion!
Have you tried Tor?
If they block VPNs exit ips which aren’t necessarily public they most certainly will block all the Tor exit nodes which are public by design.
IMO, Tor should be reserved for escaping repressive regimes and avoiding nation-state level content blocks. Plugging up the network with baseball streaming doesn’t seem like a fair or reasonable use of public resources
But… but… and I quote:
A few MB, not hours.
Also, part of the point of Tor is to let various types of traffic reside in the noise.
It’s like…say the only encrypted emails being sent contained stuff that one’s government didn’t like. It’d kind of stand out.
I don’t think you can pick your exit node, can you?
I believe, from long-ago reading, that you can pick a region. I don’t use it myself, though.
EDIT: Sounds like it.
https://forum.torproject.org/t/how-to-select-certain-country-for-exit-node/14080
How to select certain country for exit node?
You need to modify your torrc and use ExitNodes.
It allows the use of fingerprints (if you want to use a specific exit relay) or country codes, which is what you are looking for.
Note the following warning from the man page:
Note that if you list too few nodes here, or if you exclude too many exit nodes with ExcludeExitNodes, you can degrade functionality. For example, if none of the exits you list allows traffic on port 80 or 443, you won’t be able to browse the web.
Ahh 10-4. Humm didn’t know that existed.
