8chan

Indeed, I knew for a while too, but I let it go so long as all posts were made by humans.

But selling an API at $20/GB (bandwidth you pay $0 for) to flood message boards and scrape search engines from random people's IPs without their consent is horribly unethical in my opinion.

Edited to add: I also see it as a breach of trust in the original agreement, even if you were fully informed that by installing Hola you become an exit node. Originally you were an exit node for other humans, and this was reasonably "secure" due to the fact that Hola hadn't been reverse engineered yet. But when Hola released the first party flood/scrape API Luminati they changed the agreement after the fact, even if they didn't have to change the EULA to permit this.

Hola's browser extension is proprietary. A friend of mine has been considering reverse engineering it but is not sure of the laws.

> It did say that it uses idle resources collaboratively

So does Folding@Home. So does tor onion routing (relay node). Nowhere did it say outside of the EULA that they are using all their users as exit nodes.

They failed to specify which "resources". It's indefensible, and people would have fallen for this cover up had Google not archived it.

Also, Luminati was falsely claiming that they were more anonymous than Tor before I did some digging. They changed that too: https://twitter.com/infinitechan/status/603512756331913216

Shady business all around.

Hello, Fredrick Brennan here (8chan owner).

They changed their FAQ IN RESPONSE to my breaking the story on this.

Proof:

Google cache of Hola FAQ as of 26 May: https://archive.is/tgujS

As you can see, there is no mention of Luminati, or the underlying mechanics at all.

I published hola.html and updated my global announcement just hours before the FAQ change: https://twitter.com/infinitechan/status/603178141650026498

There are millions of users who installed this and do not know how it works. Please do not downplay this issue.