Bypassing MU country slots limitation

Update: Apparently this method doesnt seem to work anymore starting from v1.0.8.3 :-\ I'll edit this entry if I can figure out what MU is up to ;-)

Picked this up from devilsadvocate and I wanted to try for myself but didnt work for me. Maybe MU changed the UserAgent string and that's what we'll find out ;-)

Downloaded the toolbar (CRC32: 10FD2986) but installed through Sandboxie so I wont actually install it but be contained in a sandbox. Now we fire regedit to see any registry settings made by the toolbar and we see this which modifies IE's (I'm using 6.0) UserAgent string. Cool, now go to this key (I'm on XP):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent\Post Platform

Make sure you close any instances of IE, create a new string value and name it MEGAUPLOAD 2.0. You could check what you did and make sure that it shows that string somewhere in the HTTP_USER_AGENT field. So now it works.

But what about Firefox? Now we go back to our sandbox and we see a java archive (.JAR) being copied onto the Firefox profile dir. We must open/extract to see its contents and WinRAR would do just fine. We see 3 dirs but we're only interested in the content dir. What we must do when we see this upon opening installer.js will be apparent if you understand a bit of javascript and that is to append the string ;MEGAUPLOAD 1.0 (notice the semi-colon at start). So open Firefox (I'm using 2.0.0.4) and type in the address bar:

about:config

You'll see a bunch of settings but we're only interested in one. Search for general.useragent.extra.firefox, modify it (you could also do some basic browser spoofing here) and append the string we found above making mine:

Firefox/2.0.0.4;MEGAUPLOAD 1.0

Now it works.

For Opera (I'm using 9.21), type in the address bar:

opera:config

Now in the Quick Find input box, type:

isp

Now in the results list, click on ISP and enter MEGAUPLOAD 1.0. Click Save and you're done.

So if you're ridden w/ country slots limitation, either you do the above or install the toolbar. But unless you want your statistics being submitted to MU, ads(?) from Yahoo, then the above methods would be better. But how about other browsers and OSes? Not sure. What you could do is spoof the UserAgent by installing tools like Privoxy (free) or Ad Muncher (shareware), etc. And be aware that MU might change this again in the future.