Hola VPN

Phones, Internet, Computers and such.
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Digg3r
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Re: Hola VPN

Post by Digg3r »

phuketrichard wrote:what is an illegal search on google?

nothing illegal about searching for porn
how to make a b#@B,
arab
sex
pedos
Jihad

You might be tagged, BUT it is NOT illegal
Under Australian law, searching for child exploitation material IS a major crime. Also, presumably if someone is searching on Google they are also clicking on the search results, which are logged, which could give a charge of accessing child exploitation material. Also a major offense. These offenses are under Australian commonwealth law and are extra territorial. Therefore any Australian citizen or permanent resident anywhere in the world can be charged.

On forensic examination of the computer the person would be cleared but the stigma of being raided and charged would be permanent.

It would be more than annoying to lose your reputation and be labeled a paedophile just because you wanted to watch a breaking bad marathon on Netflix.

My point is, and call me paranoid, that before hola is installed the user should be warned of the consequences of hosting an exit node. The warning should be obvious and not hidden deep down in the EULA or privacy policy as no one reads them.
OrangeDragon
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Re: Hola VPN

Post by OrangeDragon »

Digg3r wrote: So therefore if that user makes an illegal search on Google it will be logged as coming from my ip address. Google is mandated to report certain searches to relevant authorities. Therefore there is a possibility that an innocent person may have their house raided, be arrested, have their children removed etc, just by using hola.

Of course that is a worse case scenario but it is absolutely possible. There have been many cases of this nature by innocent people hosting TOR exit nodes.
While it takes more than a google search (as it did for those TOR cases... those were from people actually accessing/moving illegal content) it's a good and valid question. How does Hola protect against (perhaps filter) various questionable/illegal data types from impacting the peer system whose IP is used as the exit point?

My initial thoughts on why it wouldn't be the same risk is in the difference in how TOR operates vs P2P swarm technology that torrents (and from what I can gather, this) use which provides multiple exit points on the same request/push. While TOR shows a single IP accessing a data point and retrieving/sending it, this would use multiple points at once, with no single point ever having all of the data of the request or publishing the full data of the file... just like a torrent. This would put Hola in the heat for providing the originating access point, however the individual peer users wouldn't be as a) they never had the complete data and b) it would be clear to forensics that it was a swarm based on how the data was accessed.

It's the same reason torrent peer systems aren't liable for distributing DMCA data until it reaches a certain percentage from a single peer, which almost never happens because of the volume of peers.

Another factor to consider is that this case is MUCH less likely with Hola than with TOR, as the users have no ground for an assumption that illegal activities can't/won't be tracked back to them.

[EDIT]
I do see one user complaining about getting blocked when they were using it to surf regular porn... so apparently there is some level of filtering going on.
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phuketrichard
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Re: Hola VPN

Post by phuketrichard »

wow,
did some looking and seems they are closing the doors even on being able to search for certain terms
LONDON (AP) — Google and Microsoft have introduced software that makes it harder for users to search for child abuse material online, the companies said in a joint announcement Monday.

Writing ahead of a British summit on Internet safety, Google's executive chairman Eric Schmidt said his company has fine-tuned Google Search to clean up results for over 100,000 search terms. When users type in queries that may be related to child sexual abuse, they will find no results that link to illegal content.

"We will soon roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will be truly global," Schmidt wrote in the Daily Mail newspaper.

The restrictions are being launched in Britain and other English-speaking countries first. Similar changes are being brought out on Microsoft's Bing search engine.

The two companies are sharing picture detection technology to identify child abuse photographs whenever they appear on their systems, and Google is also testing technology to identify and remove illegal videos.

Other measures include warnings shown at the top of Google search for more than 13,000 queries to make it clear that child abuse is illegal.
Campaigners welcomed the move but doubted how much impact the changes would bring. Pedophiles tend to share images away from the public search engines, they say.

"They don't go on to Google to search for images," said Jim Gamble, the former chief of Britain's Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center. "They go on to the dark corners of the Internet on peer-to-peer websites."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013 ... e/3628545/
back in 2013
In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: not necessarily to win, but mainly to keep from losing completely. HST
OrangeDragon
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Re: Hola VPN

Post by OrangeDragon »

makes sense really...
1) not content they even want to serve, especially since they cache images/vid thumbs on their own servers.
2) if they don't want to serve it, why spend the processing power to search their databases for it (even if they refused to index it and have 0 results, the search has to run)?
3) why spend the additional manpower in reporting people for it when they can just announce it won't work anyway and deter many of them?

[EDIT: Warning, nerd alert]
This got me wondering about the cost of Google searches... and so I did some.

Cost of a search in power: 0.0003 kWh of energy per search source.
Cost of an average kWh in America $0.12.
So one search = $0.000036...

Pretty small. Potentially until you multiply that by the number of people we're talking about... worldwide... annually. No idea on those numbers, but I could see it becoming a reasonable cost factor, though honestly I'm pretty impressed at how cheap their searches are.
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StroppyChops
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Re: Hola VPN

Post by StroppyChops »

OrangeDragon wrote:This got me wondering about the cost of Google searches... and so I did some.
Nerd. ;)
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Digg3r
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Re: Hola VPN

Post by Digg3r »

StroppyChops wrote:
OrangeDragon wrote:This got me wondering about the cost of Google searches... and so I did some.
Nerd. ;)
To be fair he did post a nerd alert first.
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StroppyChops
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Re: Hola VPN

Post by StroppyChops »

Digg3r wrote:
StroppyChops wrote:
OrangeDragon wrote:This got me wondering about the cost of Google searches... and so I did some.
Nerd. ;)
To be fair he did post a nerd alert first.
Suck. ;)
Bodge: This ain't Kansas, and the neighbours ate Toto!
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