As we already know Hola sells your internet but there’s a other issue I discovered at work. I went into work Friday morning a client brought in his personal laptop for me to fix. He told me youtube, and other video sites started acting up after he had installed Hola. After explaining the bad side of hola I began seeing if hola was indeed the reason for youtube braking. I tested it with a Virtual Machine I have just for things like this and confirmed that it was indeed Hola. both my VM and client’s laptop had up to date flash, java and everything. I ended having to uninstall Hola, Java, Flash, and Sliverlight. To get everything to work again. My guess is if you have Hola installed and you don’t unlock YouTube in Hola it will disable it forcing you to use Hola to watch videos on Youtube. I just thought I’d let you know since I know some people he use Hola to access videos on Sky’s website.
You should be avoiding Hola anyway, I stopped using this as soon as I saw this report: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Hola-VPN-Still-Under-Fire-As-Company-Tries-To-Defend-Itself-134046. It was on the front page of Reddit at the beginning of the summer.
Don’t use Hola. Period.
You don’t describe what the actual problem and solution was though, so how do we know it was genuinely a problem with Hola
Imagine this…
- PSA: Don’t buy Renault cars. I had a friend who had a problem with his Renault steering. He brought it to me and I looked at it and determined it was indeed a problem with his Renault steering. Don’t buy Renault cars because they have a problem with their steering
You would be left thinking “WTF is the problem with the Renault steering that I should avoid buy their cars though?”
I only use Hola when i want to watch something outside my region. Otherwise i disable the plugin. I think that might be enough?
Good time to remind that if something is for free, then you are the product
Thanks for this, do you know any free alternatives or is a paid VPN the only way?
Look, let me put this is a much better, no bullshit way… Don’t use hola, they sell you information to other companies… END, Look none of this youtube bullshit.
no issues for me, you tube and hola
I would repost on /r/pcmasterrace
The problem was Hola was blocking plugins youtube, and other video services require. I had to uninstall Hola, then uninstall the plug-ins, the reinstall all the plug-ins to get youtube to work properly.
When you have Hola active you can become the exit node for someone else. If this person does something fishy (identity theft, scams, spam, other crime) it will show your ip to the authorities.
Free VPNs can never be trusted because if you don’t pay, you are not the customer, you are the product. Exactly what you don’t want to happen if you are searching privacy or are circumnavigating stuff. Paid VPNs are not too expensive for their services. Private Internet Access gets a lot of praise, IPredator is also supposed to be good.
Torrentfreak does a yearly report of VPN providers if you want to look for other alternatives.
I tested it without Hola enabled and had the same issue.
At this point, you probably shouldn’t trust Hola at all, and every time you enable it, however briefly, you leave open the possibility that they will do something malicious with the fairly wide latitude that add-ons enjoy.
There are alternatives that are functionally identical – Zenmate, dotVPN, etc – and have yet to display the same bad faith activity that Hola has done repeatedly (let’s not forget that before the current botnet allegations, they’d earlier tried to inject their own ads into webpages).
edit: I’d still suggest that whichever VPN add-on you use, you disable it (fully, in the addons settings) when it’s not in use.
I really wish this seemingly-pithy but actually-glib “quote” would go away. It’s an oversimplification that gets repeated so much, it’s lost all meaning. Plus it just isn’t applicable in this case
When I was living outside the UK and F1 was on the BBC I used to use Tor to watch F1 on the BBC iPlayer.
You install it and add ExitNodes {gb} and StrictExitNodes 1 to the torrc file to force it to only use exit nodes in the UK. Then use 127.0.0.1 on port 9150 as a socks 5 proxy in your browser
Note that the exit node you come out of can see all the traffic going through it. Don’t use that particular browser for anything else while it has those proxy settings in it and tor is running, unless you’re OK with someone else being able to read what you’re browsing (technically they can only read unencrypted traffic - e.g. non https stuff, but be safe and just use another non-proxied browser if you want to do normal web browsing while connected to tor)
What is to sale? Hola is like tor. They use your connection to enhance the VPN just like you use theirs. Just like all the other vpns. And even paid vpns have been known to supliment their network to use the public exit nodes.
That you know of so far. Ditch Hola for your safety, mate.
Just get rid of Hola.
YouTube doesn’t require any plugins to play videos though
It uses HTML5/H264/WebM in preference to Flash these days which means current versions of Chrome and Firefox don’t need any plugins (i.e. the Flash plugin), to play YouTube videos. They use their native, built-in ability to play H264/WebM, rather than a plugin. You can see this by disabling everything in chrome://plugins and chrome://extensions (or Firefox plugins and extensions) and YouTube will still work fine - because it’s not using your browser’s plugins to play videos.
You can force YouTube to serve up Flash, in which case it will use a plugin (your browser’s Flash plugin), but you have to deliberately disable Chrome/Firefox’s ability to play the other formats first. You go to about:config in Firefox and disable the other video formats, or install one of the many extensions (like Baris Derin’s Firefox extension: YouTube Flash Video Player) that does it for you - in which case YouTube will default to serving up Flash (and hence your browser will use a plugin; the Flash one) because it sees your browser can’t play those other formats natively any more
The same is true for Internet Explorer 11 as well, I think. I don’t know if it is for previous versions of IE though