Hola (VPN)

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Hola
VPN
Industry Internet
Founded 2008
Founder Ofer Vilenski
Derry Shribman
Headquarters Israel
Number of locations
 Worldwide
Services Unrestricted Internet Access
Website www.hola.org

Hola is a freemium web and mobile application which claims to provide a faster, private and more secure Internet. It provides a form of virtual private network services to its users through a peer-to-peer network. It also uses peer-to-peer caching. When a user accesses certain domains that are known to use geo-blocking, the Hola application redirects the request to go through the computers and internet connections of other users in non-blocked areas, thereby circumventing the blocking. This also means that other users might access the internet through one's own computer, and that part of one's upload bandwidth might be used for serving cached data to other users.[1][2][3][4] Paying users can choose to redirect all requests to peers but are themselves never used as peers.[5] Free users are also limited in how much they can use Hola per day, whereas paying users are not.[5]

History[edit]

In 1998, Ofer Vilenski and Derry Shribman founded KRFTech, a software development tools company.[6] With the profits from the company, they started Jungo in 2000 to develop an operating system for home gateways. In 2006 NDS (Cisco) acquired Jungo for $107 million.[7][8]

In 2008, Vilenski and Shribman started investigating the idea of re-inventing HTTP by building a peer-to-peer overlay network that would employ peer-to-peer caching to accelerate content distribution and peer-to-peer routing to make the effective bandwidth to target sites much faster. This would make the Internet faster for users and cheaper to operate for content distributors. They started up Hola with $18 million from investors such as DFJ (Skype, Hotmail), Horizons Ventures (Mr. Li Ka-Shing's fund),[9] Magma Venture Partners (Waze), Israel's Chief Scientist Fund, and others.[10][11]

Hola Networks Limited launched their network in late 2012,[4] and it became viral[citation needed] in January 2013 when consumers started using Hola for Internet privacy and anonymity by utilizing the P2P routing for IP masking.[citation needed]

In late 2014, Hola Networks began selling access to its huge userbase as exit nodes, under the name Luminati. They charge $20 per gigabyte for bandwidth that is actually coming from their VPN users—they do not pay for the bandwidth at all. Every Hola user is actually functioning as an exit node in a huge botnet.[12][13]

Architecture[edit]

The Hola company claims the following: "The Internet is slowed down by server response times, Internet congestion, round trip times, and poorly written communication stacks in operating systems. Hola removes these bottlenecks by securely caching content on peers as they view it, and later serving it up to other nearby peers as they need it. Hola also compresses communication between peers to further speed the net."[14]

Platforms[edit]

Hola is distributed as a client side browser based application.[15] It is available for all major browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera as browser add-on, extension, or application, and it works on PC based operating systems as well as Mac OS X.[16][17] Hola has also released an Android application[18] and most recently an iPhone and iPad application.[19][20] New downloads of the Android application were disabled on the Google Play Store on February 25, 2015.[21]

"Botnet" criticism[edit]

In May 2015, Hola came under criticism from 8chan founder Frederick Brennan after the site was reportedly attacked by exploiting the Hola network, as confirmed by Hola founder Ofer Vilenski. After Brennan emailed the company, Hola modified its FAQ to include a notice that its users are acting as exit nodes for paid users of Hola's sister service Luminati. "Adios, Hola!", a website created by nine security researchers and promoted across 8chan, states: "Hola is harmful to the internet as a whole, and to its users in particular. You might know it as a free VPN or "unblocker", but in reality it operates like a poorly secured botnet - with serious consequences."[22]

In response to the criticism, Vilenski told Business Insider, "[we have been] listening to the conversations about Hola and while we think we've been clear about what we are doing, we have decided to provide more details about how this works, and thus the changes [to the website] in the past 24 hours.".[23]

As of May 29, 2015, Hola has been pulled from Google's Chrome Web Store.[24] It remains in the Google Play Store as an Android app, however.[25]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Sweet: Hola lets you use Hulu, Pandora, Netflix, CBS, Fox, BBC iPlayer TV, and iTV from any country". The Next Web. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  2. ^ "REINVENTING THE WEB: A New App Lets You Watch Whatever TV Program You Want, Including The Olympics, Anywhere In The World". Business Insider. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  3. ^ "Hola Unblocker Gives You Access to iPlayer, Netflix, Pandora, Hulu, and More Regardless of Region". Lifehacker. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  4. ^ a b "Unlock Hulu and BBC iPlayer in a click with Hola". The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 29 September 2014. 
  5. ^ a b "FAQ – Hola – Is Hola Free?". Hola. Hola. Retrieved 2014-10-06. 
  6. ^ "Jungo Ltd. - Company Profile". BusinessWeek. 
  7. ^ "NDS to buy Israel's Jungo for up to $107.5 mln". Reuters. 4 Dec 2006. 
  8. ^ Ben-Artzi, Amir. "NDS to pay $107 million for Jungo". Electronic Engineering Times. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  9. ^ "The story behind a HK billionaire's $130 million donation to the Technion". Haaretz. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  10. ^ "Faster Internet co Hola raises $10m". Globes. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  11. ^ "Ofer Vilenski Co-Founder, Hola!". BusinessWeek. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  12. ^ "Beware: Hola VPN turns your PC into an exit node and sells your traffic". 28 May 2015. 
  13. ^ http://www.quora.com/I-need-to-do-some-massive-web-data-collection-does-anyone-know-how-Luminati-is-different-from-Tor-or-a-proxy-network
  14. ^ "FAQ – Hola". Hola. Hola. Retrieved 2014-10-06. 
  15. ^ "How to Unblock Websites: 8 Tricks That Do It". Udemy. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  16. ^ "The Easiest Method for Desktop: Hola Better Internet". Lifehacker. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  17. ^ "Running Hola on Mac OS X – Hola". Hola. Hola. Retrieved 2014-10-06. 
  18. ^ "Hola Lets You Watch Region-Blocked Videos From Any Country For Free". Lifehacker. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  19. ^ "Can I get Hola for my iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch?". Official Website. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  20. ^ "Hola Unblocker – Easily Access Region-Blocked Content". MakeUseOf. Retrieved 28 September 2014. 
  21. ^ "Hola Free VPN". Play Store. Retrieved 25 February 2015. 
  22. ^ "Adios, Hola! Popular privacy-minded browser plug-in has backdoor for hackers - report". RT. Retrieved 30 May 2015. 
  23. ^ Price, Rob. "A wildly popular Google Chrome extension was being used as a giant botnet". Business Insider. Retrieved 30 May 2015. 
  24. ^ "Hola Better Internet". Google Chrome Web Store. Retrieved 30 May 2015. 
  25. ^ "Hola Free VPN". Google Play. Retrieved 30 May 2015. 

External links[edit]

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