If you are using the free VPN service from Hola you really need to find a different solution. Not only has it been plagued with security vulnerabilities, some of which they have addressed and some of which even they admit still exist, you will also unwittingly be providing exit nodes and bandwidth for anonymous surfers. To add insult to injury, those users pay $20/GB to Hola for use of your bandwidth and you will never see a penny of that. Hola's ILuminati service allows you to surf the net anonymously by directing their traffic over anyone using the free VPN, or as they refer to it an unblocking service, so not only is your bandwidth being used, you have no idea what traffic is actually exiting through your VPN.
That is pretty much the exact opposite of a private network and depending on what is being done and how well the traffic is monitored you could well find yourself embroiled in an investigation you had no idea you were opening yourself up to. Check out more on this story at The Register.
"Embattled "free" VPN provider Hola is facing criticism over its practice of turning its users into exit nodes in a paid-for anonymisation service which can easily be used for nefarious activities. Hola's software is also claimed to include "unpatchable" vulnerabilities allowing takeover of user machines."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Microsoft to Linux users: Explain yourself @ The Register
- A 16 Petaflop Cray: The key to fantastic summer barbecues @ The Register
- Mozilla to pay $10,000+ for 'novel' exploits in Firefox bug bounty overhaul @ The Inquirer
Would using a service like
Would using a service like opendns protect you as an exit node? I don’t know where the DNS action is taking place or where the other user is getting the DNS address from.
Someone is offering a service
Someone is offering a service for free but still wanting to be able to make money from it?
SHOCKING!
Correct me if I am wrong, but
Correct me if I am wrong, but this sounds like they are using their users machines as exit nodes. This means that some one could be running a torrent client or doing other illegal activity and it would appear to be comming from your machine. This is the exact opposite of what a VPN client is meant to do. All of the traffic should apear to be comming from Hola’s servers, but running a huge amount of torrent traffic or people streaming video from outside permissible geographic areas would by very expensive. You would need a huge number of servers and a lot of bandwidth.
There have been lawsuits against people using torrent clients because of the way they work. If you use them to download copyrighted material, you are guilty of sharing that copyrighted material also, not just downloading it. Once you have downloaded a chunk, other people then download it from you. Torrents themselves are not illegal because there are legitimate uses for them. ISPs don’t like them though since they use upload bandwidth which is often limited. They want you to pay higher prices for running a server if you are using a lot of upstream bandwidth.
It would be nice if the entire Internet worked like TOR routers, but that is too much to ask I guess. I don’t know if you can stream video through the TOR network with the added overhead. I haven’t bothered using TOR because I do not have anything to hide and I suspect the TOR network is compromised by government spy and law enforcement agencies anyway. TOR would have a chance to work if the whole Internet used it though.
An IP is not a
An IP is not a person.
http://techland.time.com/2012/05/07/you-are-not-an-ip-address-rules-judge/
Just because you could win a
Just because you could win a court case doesn’t mean that it is desirable to be involved in one. Anyway, they could be using a large amount of their customers bandwidth with out informing them. This is not the proper way to run a VPN business.
It’s not desirable to get
It’s not desirable to get into a car accident yet most people continue to get into a car every day.
It’s a great way to run a VPN. Even more anonymity as not only are you re-routing your traffic through another location but you can have every packet emerge from thousands of different locations at the same time.
People’s mistake is thinking that they’re the customer. If you’re not paying for a service you’re the product.
Ah, you do realize that the
Ah, you do realize that the ruling you linked to only applies to the USA, right?
Hola briefly explained here
Hola briefly explained here https://youtu.be/Xw1u8oggkpc
K, I’ll bite, I dont wana use
K, I’ll bite, I dont wana use hola anymore, is there another safer way to get american netflix?