API for cross-site-scripting?

Question

Is there any way to send HTTP requests to non-cooperating websites with javascript? I'm aware that this is forbidden because of the same origin policy, but is there any way to do it, including experimental APIs, Java applets, Flash, browser extensions, hidden settings, special certificates etc.? It's fine if the user explicitly has to grant my page permissions to access the other site, in fact that would be very reasonable.

Background: I'm trying to do a kind of mash-up by scraping several site's html, and I would like to do it from the user's IP address and not from my server.

Answer 1

Just a thought - If any of those websites use JQuery - this tunneling mehod might work: http://benv.ca/2011/3/7/subdomain-tunneling-with-jquery-and-document-domain/

Create an iframe in a page on your site, load the page from the other website into it, replace your page's jquery ajax object with the one from the iframe - and you could be good to go!

Let me know if you try it :)