Say Hola! to the newest route around web censorship
The ongoing copyright arms race between content owners and internet users has taken a new turn. Israeli firm Hola! has recently launched a suite of products that are variously designed to bypass geoblocking and accelerate internet-access speeds.
Hola! is the brainchild of entrepreneurs Derry Shribman and Ofer Vilenski.
They have set out to fundamentally change the way the world wide web
operates by creating software which makes the web more efficient and
harder to censor.
Hola! is comprised of several products:
Browser extensions which work on Windows and Mac with Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox. These plugins only bypass geoblocking.
Client software for Windows which functions as web accelerator, geoblock bypass, and censorship bypass service.
Hola! bypasses restrictions on sites which are usually geoblocked. http://www.Hola.org
BBC iPlayer, Hulu, Netflix … and VPNs
Catchup TV and online movie services such as BBC iPlayer, Hulu, Netflix and many others use geoblocking – and so are not available from within Australia.
But circumvention of these geoblocks is commonplace with the use of a Virtual Private Network (VPN) or proxy server. During the London Olympics the media was awash with stories of people using these methods to access the BBC’s online coverage of the Games.
These VPNs and proxy systems are either subscription services, or they operate on a freemium model
where a limited or ad-supported version of the product or service is
given away in the hope of selling consumers a “full” version of the
product.
VPNs were designed as a way of securely connecting a remote computer
to a corporate network, and using a VPN is a rather clumsy method to
access multimedia content. All traffic is routed through the VPN which
may limit access to other services, and the VPN needs to be connected
and disconnected to various servers to access content in different
countries.
Hola! is different
Not only is Hola! free, but it’s different to other services because it utilises peer-to-peer technology, where traffic is not re-routed through central servers but via other computers which have the Hola! Windows client installed.
This peer-to-peer nature will make it difficult for Hola! to be blocked in the same way Hulu has blocked some VPN and proxy services.
The Hola! browser extension is also by far the simplest and most
elegant method to bypass geoblocks. The inflexibility and complications
which come with setting up a VPN or altering rarely-changed DNS settings can limit the function of a computer for everyday use.
Once Hola! is installed, its function can be toggled from an icon in the browser.
Is Hola! legal?
Most people are familiar with technological protection measures (TPM) in the form of region coding on DVDs.
Those TPMs try to prevent the disc being copied and try to prevent
playback in a place other than the market in which the disc was sold.
Region coding allows Hollywood to segment global markets, releasing
movies to one market at a time, maximising the effect of promotional
campaigns, for instance.
Geoblocking is used by the entertainment industry to perpetuate this same market segmentation online – which includes Australians paying higher prices. For example, the American service Netflix at $US7.99/month compares poorly with local Quickflix at $A14.99/month.
Geoblocking is a technological protection measure but due to a special exemption
in the definition of TPMs in the Copyright Act, it is not illegal to
break TPMs that prevent the playback in Australia of a film obtained
from outside Australia – so long as it is a non-infringing copy.
While using a region-free DVD player clearly falls within this exemption, bypassing geoblocks remains an untested grey area.
In August 2012, consumer advocacy group Choice highlighted this grey area in a submission to the Attorney General’s Review of Technical Protection Measure exceptions.
The grey area centres on whether video streaming can be considered a
“non-infringing copy”. When users sign up to a service – let’s take
Netflix as our example – they agree to Terms and Conditions that include a clause on geographic limitations:
Geographic Limitation: You may instantly watch a movie or
TV show through the Netflix service only in geographic locations where
we offer our service and have licensed such movie or TV show …
The interpretation of this clause of the Terms and Conditions, and
the weight given to respecting these must be weighed against the intent
of the exemptions in the Copyright Act.
This is critical in deciding whether or not accessing movie content from Australia will be defined as a “non-infringing copy”.
Facebook in China, Twitter in Tehran, YouTube in Pakistan … or Gmail at the office
Social media services are censored or completely blocked in many
countries, and most large workplaces limit access to various websites
for security and productivity reasons.
The tools used to bypass these blocks to date include the US Navy-developed high security router software TOR, VPNs and other security software.
Hola! explained.
While these might be appropriate for some uses, they are complicated
to use and are overkill for an individual who just wants the freedom to
talk to their friends on Facebook.
The Hola! client software makes bypassing these blocks trivial. When a
user wants to visit a blocked site, the Hola! client takes that
request, encrypts it and sends it to another computer with Hola!
installed.
That second computer works as a proxy by then decrypting the request
and then accessing the relevant service. The resulting content is again
encrypted by the second computer and forwarded to the original user.
For speed and efficiency, the Hola! client will use several proxies – with each handling a small part of the traffic.
The lack of a central server in a peer-to-peer model such as this
means that Hola! is difficult to block – a successful blocklist would
need to be constantly updated and could run to thousands of internet
addresses as it would need to block every user of the Hola! client.
Bypassing government censorship is widely accepted as a good thing – at least in western democracies.
Hola! is yet another example supporting American innovator John Gilmore’s famous quote: “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”
from https://theconversation.edu.au/say-hola-to-the-newest-route-around-web-censorship-11845
