Hola is a
freemium
Freemium, a portmanteau of the words "free" and "premium," is a pricing strategy by which a basic product or service is provided free of charge, but money (a premium) is charged for additional features, services, or virtual (online) or physical (o ...
web and
mobile application
A mobile application or app is a computer program or software application designed to run on a mobile device such as a phone, tablet, or watch. Mobile applications often stand in contrast to desktop applications which are designed to run on de ...
which provides a form of
VPN service
A virtual private network (VPN) service provides a proxy server to help users bypass Internet censorship such as geoblocking and users who want to protect their communications against data profiling or MitM attacks on hostile networks.
A wide va ...
to its users through a
peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer n ...
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. Users of the free service share a portion of their idle upload bandwidth to be used for serving cached data to other users.
Paying users can choose to redirect all requests to peers but are themselves never used as peers.
History
In 1998, Ofer Vilenski and Derry Shribman founded
KRFTech, a software development tools company. With the profits from the company, they started
Jungo
Jungo Connectivity is an Israeli software company that specializes in driver monitoring system (DMS) software and device driver development.
History
Jungo Connectivity was founded in 2013 as an automotive software divestiture from Cisco Systems. ...
in 2000 to develop an operating system for
home gateway
A residential gateway is a small consumer-grade gateway which bridges network access between connected local area network (LAN) hosts to a wide area network (WAN) (such as the Internet) via a modem, or directly connects to a WAN (as in EttH), whi ...
s. In 2006,
NDS (Cisco) acquired Jungo for $107 million.
In 2008, Vilenski and Shribman started investigating the idea of re-inventing HTTP by building a peer-to-peer
overlay network
An overlay network is a computer network that is layered on top of another network.
Structure
Nodes in the overlay network can be thought of as being connected by virtual or logical links, each of which corresponds to a path, perhaps through ...
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
Skype () is a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for VoIP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, deb ...
,
Hotmail
Outlook.com is a webmail service that is part of the Microsoft 365 product family. It offers mail, Calendaring software, calendaring, Address book, contacts, and Task management, tasks services.
Founded in 1996 by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smit ...
),
Horizons Ventures
Sir Ka-shing Li (; born 13 June 1928) is a Hong Kong billionaire business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. As of June 2019, Li is the 31st richest person in the world, with an estimated net wealth of US$33.4 billion. He is the senior ad ...
(
Li Ka-shing
Sir Ka-shing Li (; born 13 June 1928) is a Hong Kong billionaire business magnate, investor, and philanthropist. As of June 2019, Li is the 31st richest person in the world, with an estimated net wealth of US$33.4 billion. He is the senior ad ...
's venture capital fund), Magma Venture Partners (
Waze
Waze (; he, ווייז, label=Hebrew), formerly FreeMap Israel, is a subsidiary company of Google that provides satellite navigation software on smartphones and other computers that support the Global Positioning System (GPS). In addition to ...
), Israel's Chief Scientist Fund, and others.
Hola Networks Limited launched its network in late 2012,
and it became popular in January 2013 when consumers started using Hola for
Internet privacy
Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storing, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and displaying of information pertaining to oneself via Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. Pr ...
and
anonymity
Anonymity describes situations where the acting person's identity is unknown. Some writers have argued that namelessness, though technically correct, does not capture what is more centrally at stake in contexts of anonymity. The important idea he ...
by utilizing the P2P routing for IP masking. "After being around for two months with 80 downloads a day, on January 23, 2013, at 5 PM Israel time, the product was good enough. That was the second it took off and went up overnight to 40,000 downloads a day", Vilenski told ''Startup Camel''.
In May 2015, Hola came under criticism from
8chan
8kun, previously called 8chan, Infinitechan or Infinitychan (stylized as ∞chan), is an imageboard website composed of user-created message boards. An owner moderates each board, with minimal interaction from site administration. The site ha ...
founder
Fredrick Brennan
Fredrick Robert Brennan (born February 21, 1994) is an American software developer and type designer who founded the imageboard website 8chan in 2013, before going on to repudiate it in 2019. Following 8chan's surge in popularity in 2014, larg ...
after the site was reportedly attacked by exploiting the Hola network.
In late 2014, Hola had begun selling access to its userbase as
exit node
Exit(s) may refer to:
Architecture and engineering
* Door
* Portal (architecture), an opening in the walls of a structure
* Emergency exit
* Overwing exit, a type of emergency exit on an airplane
* Exit ramp, a feature of a road interchange
...
s, under the name Luminati, charging $20 per gigabyte for bandwidth that was actually coming from their free VPN users.
This was confirmed by Hola founder Ofer Vilenski who argued that this has always been part of the agreement with Hola's free users when signing up for the service.
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.
Other criticism stemmed from vulnerabilities inherent to the software, which could allow an
attacker to deliver malware to Hola users. The Hola browser has also been used for
distributed denial of service
In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connect ...
attacks.
In response to the criticism, Vilenski told ''Business Insider'', "
e have beenlistening 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
o the websitein the past 24 hours". According to the security researchers who performed the audit, Hola updated its software but some of the vulnerabilities remained as of 1 June 2015.
In November 2016, Hola reached 100 million users. In August 2017, Hola sold a majority stake in Luminati to EMK Capital, a UK private equity investment firm. The deal was potentially valued at $200 million, with Hola founders retaining some stake in Luminati and Vilenski remaining as CEO of the Luminati. In 2019, the final purchase price was revealed to be $125 million in exchange for 75.6% of the company's shares with the company evaluated at $165 million.
Architecture
The Hola company website claimed in 2014 that the "Internet is slowed down by server response times, Internet
congestion,
round trip times, and poorly written communication stacks in
operating systems
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.
Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also inc ...
. Hola removes these bottlenecks by securely
caching content on
peers
Peers may refer to:
People
* Donald Peers
* Edgar Allison Peers, English academician
* Gavin Peers
* John Peers, Australian tennis player
* Kerry Peers
* Mark Peers
* Michael Peers
* Steve Peers
* Teddy Peers (1886–1935), Welsh international ...
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."
Platforms
Hola is distributed as a set of
browser extension
A browser extension is a small software module for customizing a web browser. Browsers typically allow a variety of extensions, including user interface modifications, cookie management, ad blocking, and the custom scripting and styling of web p ...
s for
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...
,
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge is a proprietary, cross-platform web browser created by Microsoft. It was first released in 2015 as part of Windows 10 and Xbox One and later ported to other platforms as a fork of Google's Chromium open-source project: Android ...
, and
Opera
Opera is a form of theatre in which music is a fundamental component and dramatic roles are taken by singers. Such a "work" (the literal translation of the Italian word "opera") is typically a collaboration between a composer and a librett ...
, as well as applications for
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
and
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
. Hola has also released an
Android application and an
iPhone and
iPad
The iPad is a brand of iOS and iPadOS-based tablet computers that are developed by Apple Inc. The iPad was conceived before the related iPhone but the iPhone was developed and released first. Speculation about the development, operating s ...
application, along with a dedicated browser.
See also
*
Comparison of virtual private network services
A virtual private network (VPN) service provides a proxy server to help users Internet censorship circumvention, bypass Internet censorship such as Geo-blocking, geoblocking and users who want to protect their communications against data profiling ...
References
External links
*
{{VPN
Virtual private network services
Web applications