Comment #10958

great news!! the 2nd one was a flop (movie anyways - the book was amazing), but they recovered fairly well with the 3rd - i\'m surprised it took so long to make another

- andrew on Jurassic Park 4 is being made!

Tags: Hola, VPN, bandwidth stealing, bandwidth selling

This is very interesting if you didn't know about it. Have you ever heard of Hola? It's a browser extension which acts as a simple VPN to fool websites into believing you are actually in a different country than where you are. It's free and works pretty darn seamlessly. But here's the thing, they don't have dedicated servers all over the world, they probably have just one which connects people to the computers in the country they want to connect to. So lets say you want to connect to a site from Germany, turn on Hola and choose Germany and it will do the work for you, the issue is, and this is something that most people don't realize, the computer you're connecting to is just some random users computer in Germany. So now, if you're in Canada and have Hola open and I want to surf a website from Canada, my mac with hola will connect to your computer and surf using your bandwidth.

Oh, it get's worse. The connection is not secure, can and more than likely is monitored and the worst part is Hola can even sell your bandwidth to paying corporations. Hola basically has the largest known and admitted to having the largest botnet in the fucking world.

Luckily I'm in St. Kitts where no one wants to surf from, so no one uses my bandwidth, but I keep hola turned off all the time if I'm not using it anyways.

This is all stated in their terms of use, they don't even deny it.

http://torrentfreak.com/hola-vpn-sells-users-bandwidth-150528