The official Olympic channel at YouTube has been blocked at some countries due to some reasons, and does not allow users to watch Olympics coverage there.

A commenter, Stephen Sclafani, over at Valleywag has found a small hack by which everyone can access YouTube’s Beijing 2008 channel. All you have to do is replace a cookie that YouTube servers store in your browser and then you will be able to access all the clips at YouTube.

1. Open YouTube.com in your browser.

2. After the site loads, find the option in your browser for editing cookies. Here’s the instructions for Firefox 3.0:

• Click the Preferences menu option
• On the Preferences pane that appears, click the Privacy Tab.
• In the Privacy panel, Click on Show Cookies…
• In the Cookies panel that appears, search for “youtube” in the search box.
• Look for a cookie named “youtube.com GEO”
• Select the GEO cookie and click Remove Cookie

3. Set your own GEO cookie by trying to open the following javascript in your browser. Be sure to remove any line breaks that might creep in from cutting and pasting.
javascript:alert(document.cookie="GEO=bb84fb3cd7df0311bb5026df4d6b524fcxkAAABLUixubyByZWdpb24sc2VvdWwsLCwsLC0x;path=/;domain=.youtube.com")

You should get a dropdown dialog box that says “The page at http://valleywag.com says GEO=bb84fb3cd7df0 …” This is not an error message, it’s a notification that you’ve set the cookie successfully.

4. You should have a rigged GEO cookie for YouTube now. Try opening youtube.com/beijing2008. If you don’t get the splashy red Beijing 2008 page shown above, you may not have set the cookie correctly.

Follow me on Twitter or Subscribe via RSS for quick updates!