It looks like over the weekend, Hulu.com has begun blocking the PS3 browser from viewing their site. As I’m someone without regular cable TV, this stinks. You’ve hurt my feelings, Hulu.

Luckily, I found a fix on ypass.net. It seems that Hulu is using the User-Agent string in the browser’s HTTP request to determine whether you’re visiting their site from a Playstation 3 or from a computer. It seems that if you’ve got some basic network-fu, you can install a proxy server at home and thereby pass a different User-Agent string.

The proxy server recommended by ypass is squid. After installing, you should edit squid’s config file as follows.

Search for “acl localnet src” and set it to your internal network. You can remove the other localnet definitions if you’re not using them as shown here:

#acl localnet src 10.0.0.0/8

#acl localnet src 172.16.0.0/12

acl localnet src 192.168.0.0/16

Search for “http_access allow localhost” and add “http_access allow localnet” as such:

http_access allow localnet

http_access allow localhost

Add the following two lines pretty much anywhere in the file (the end of the file works just fine):

header_access User-Agent deny all

header_replace User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Then, after starting up squid, you go out to your PS3 and tell it to use squid as its proxy server. To do this, choose manual network configuration, and when you get to “proxy server”, set it to your PC’s IP address (which can be found by typing “ipconfig” at your PC’s command line prompt) and tell it to use port 3128.

I haven’t yet tried this, as I’ve had spotty luck watching Hulu from the PS3 in the past, but I’ve only recently hardwired the PS3 into the home network, so I may go back and give this a go. If any readers set this up successfully, please leave me a comment and tell me how it went.