I am getting pretty peeved with Google recently. I have a huge amount of music on my Google Music library, so much in fact, that I hit Google’s track limit for uploads. Now, I’m trying to download my purchased music back to my machine, but their MusicManager is winding me up no end. It downloads for a while, then stops, thinking it has finished, with several tracks not downloaded. I restart the download, and it goes on a bit more then stop again.

Google suggested a few things, eventually ending up blaming my ISP. But there isn’t much alternative for me. Other than my current ISP, I can only use my corporate connection, but that requires a proxy - something Google do not support on MusicManager, or using Tor, which also doesn’t work properly. They suggested using the Google Music app, but that only works (if it ever does) on a single album.

I even tried using AWS and Google Cloud, but the app ties to MAC and refuses to identify my machine (which is a virtual machine). I also tried using an LXC contain, and that worked for a bit longer, but also died. So now, I’m trying using a Docker image. Slightly different concept, but lets see if it works.

If that doesn’t work, I’m going to try using TAILS.

EDIT: Docker image didn’t work. So anything with a “true” virtual environment such as AWS, GC, and Docker don’t seem to work (VirtualBox will probably be in this list too), anything else (LXC, e.g.) will work, but fail later.

In case you haven’t seen this, Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is a live incognito DVD/USB which you can use to boot off any machine that supports USB boot (and for those which don’t boot of USB, you can use PLOP).

All connections go through Tor and since its a live disk, nothing is left on the hard disk (unless you choose to save something off the Internet, I guess).

I’ve been tinkering with Tor and managed to get my DNS routed through Tor, with my normal DNS as a backup, although routing traffic is a bit tricker, since not applications like to play with the Tor network properly. Some applications such as Vuze provide SOCKS capability, which allows routing of traffic through the Tor network via proxy. Others, like Chrome/Chromium don’t offer this as well, and you have to fudge it.