NZ Herald
  • Home
  • Latest news
  • Video
  • New Zealand
  • Sport
  • World
  • Business
  • Entertainment
  • Podcasts
  • Quizzes
  • Opinion
  • Lifestyle
  • Travel
  • Viva
  • Weather forecasts

Subscriptions

  • Herald Premium
  • Viva Premium
  • The Listener
  • BusinessDesk

Sections

  • Latest news
  • New Zealand
    • All New Zealand
    • Crime
    • Politics
    • Education
    • Open Justice
    • Scam Update
    • The Great NZ Road Trip
  • On The Up
  • World
    • All World
    • Australia
    • Asia
    • UK
    • United States
    • Middle East
    • Europe
    • Pacific
  • Business
    • All Business
    • MarketsSharesCurrencyCommoditiesStock TakesCrypto
    • Markets with Madison
    • Media Insider
    • Business analysis
    • Personal financeKiwiSaverInterest ratesTaxInvestment
    • EconomyInflationGDPOfficial cash rateEmployment
    • Small business
    • Business reportsMood of the BoardroomProject AucklandSustainable business and financeCapital markets reportAgribusiness reportInfrastructure reportDynamic business
    • Deloitte Top 200 Awards
    • CompaniesAged CareAgribusinessAirlinesBanking and financeConstructionEnergyFreight and logisticsHealthcareManufacturingMedia and MarketingRetailTelecommunicationsTourism
  • Opinion
    • All Opinion
    • Analysis
    • Editorials
    • Business analysis
    • Premium opinion
    • Letters to the editor
  • Sport
    • All Sport
    • OlympicsParalympics
    • RugbySuper RugbyNPCAll BlacksBlack FernsRugby sevensSchool rugby
    • CricketBlack CapsWhite Ferns
    • Racing
    • NetballSilver Ferns
    • LeagueWarriorsNRL
    • FootballWellington PhoenixAuckland FCAll WhitesFootball FernsEnglish Premier League
    • GolfNZ Open
    • MotorsportFormula 1
    • Boxing
    • UFC
    • BasketballNBABreakersTall BlacksTall Ferns
    • Tennis
    • Cycling
    • Athletics
    • SailingAmerica's CupSailGP
    • Rowing
  • Lifestyle
    • All Lifestyle
    • Viva - Food, fashion & beauty
    • Society Insider
    • Royals
    • Sex & relationships
    • Food & drinkRecipesRecipe collectionsRestaurant reviewsRestaurant bookings
    • Health & wellbeing
    • Fashion & beauty
    • Pets & animals
    • The Selection - Shop the trendsShop fashionShop beautyShop entertainmentShop giftsShop home & living
    • Milford's Investing Place
  • Entertainment
    • All Entertainment
    • TV
    • MoviesMovie reviews
    • MusicMusic reviews
    • BooksBook reviews
    • Culture
    • ReviewsBook reviewsMovie reviewsMusic reviewsRestaurant reviews
  • Travel
    • All Travel
    • News
    • New ZealandNorthlandAucklandWellingtonCanterburyOtago / QueenstownNelson-TasmanBest NZ beaches
    • International travelAustraliaPacific IslandsEuropeUKUSAAfricaAsia
    • Rail holidays
    • Cruise holidays
    • Ski holidays
    • Luxury travel
    • Adventure travel
  • Kāhu Māori news
  • Environment
    • All Environment
    • Our Green Future
  • Talanoa Pacific news
  • Property
    • All Property
    • Property Insider
    • Interest rates tracker
    • Residential property listings
    • Commercial property listings
  • Health
  • Technology
    • All Technology
    • AI
    • Social media
  • Rural
    • All Rural
    • Dairy farming
    • Sheep & beef farming
    • Horticulture
    • Animal health
    • Rural business
    • Rural life
    • Rural technology
    • Opinion
    • Audio & podcasts
  • Weather forecasts
    • All Weather forecasts
    • Kaitaia
    • Whangārei
    • Dargaville
    • Auckland
    • Thames
    • Tauranga
    • Hamilton
    • Whakatāne
    • Rotorua
    • Tokoroa
    • Te Kuiti
    • Taumaranui
    • Taupō
    • Gisborne
    • New Plymouth
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Dannevirke
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Levin
    • Paraparaumu
    • Masterton
    • Wellington
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Blenheim
    • Westport
    • Reefton
    • Kaikōura
    • Greymouth
    • Hokitika
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
    • Wānaka
    • Oamaru
    • Queenstown
    • Dunedin
    • Gore
    • Invercargill
  • Meet the journalists
  • Promotions & competitions
  • OneRoof property listings
  • Driven car news

Puzzles & Quizzes

  • Puzzles
    • All Puzzles
    • Sudoku
    • Code Cracker
    • Crosswords
    • Cryptic crossword
    • Wordsearch
  • Quizzes
    • All Quizzes
    • Morning quiz
    • Afternoon quiz
    • Sports quiz

Regions

  • Northland
    • All Northland
    • Far North
    • Kaitaia
    • Kerikeri
    • Kaikohe
    • Bay of Islands
    • Whangarei
    • Dargaville
    • Kaipara
    • Mangawhai
  • Auckland
  • Waikato
    • All Waikato
    • Hamilton
    • Coromandel & Hauraki
    • Matamata & Piako
    • Cambridge
    • Te Awamutu
    • Tokoroa & South Waikato
    • Taupō & Tūrangi
  • Bay of Plenty
    • All Bay of Plenty
    • Katikati
    • Tauranga
    • Mount Maunganui
    • Pāpāmoa
    • Te Puke
    • Whakatāne
  • Rotorua
  • Hawke's Bay
    • All Hawke's Bay
    • Napier
    • Hastings
    • Havelock North
    • Central Hawke's Bay
    • Wairoa
  • Taranaki
    • All Taranaki
    • Stratford
    • New Plymouth
    • Hāwera
  • Manawatū - Whanganui
    • All Manawatū - Whanganui
    • Whanganui
    • Palmerston North
    • Manawatū
    • Tararua
    • Horowhenua
  • Wellington
    • All Wellington
    • Kapiti
    • Wairarapa
    • Upper Hutt
    • Lower Hutt
  • Nelson & Tasman
    • All Nelson & Tasman
    • Motueka
    • Nelson
    • Tasman
  • Marlborough
  • West Coast
  • Canterbury
    • All Canterbury
    • Kaikōura
    • Christchurch
    • Ashburton
    • Timaru
  • Otago
    • All Otago
    • Oamaru
    • Dunedin
    • Balclutha
    • Alexandra
    • Queenstown
    • Wanaka
  • Southland
    • All Southland
    • Invercargill
    • Gore
    • Stewart Island
  • Gisborne

Media

  • Video
    • All Video
    • NZ news video
    • Business news video
    • Politics news video
    • Sport video
    • World news video
    • Lifestyle video
    • Entertainment video
    • Travel video
    • Markets with Madison
    • Kea Kids news
  • Podcasts
    • All Podcasts
    • The Front Page
    • On the Tiles
    • Ask me Anything
    • The Little Things
    • Cooking the Books
  • Cartoons
  • Photo galleries
  • Today's Paper - E-editions
  • Photo sales
  • Classifieds

NZME Network

  • Advertise with NZME
  • OneRoof
  • Driven Car Guide
  • BusinessDesk
  • Newstalk ZB
  • What the Actual
  • Sunlive
  • ZM
  • The Hits
  • Coast
  • Radio Hauraki
  • The Alternative Commentary Collective
  • Gold
  • Flava
  • iHeart Radio
  • Hokonui
  • Radio Wanaka
  • iHeartCountry New Zealand
  • Restaurant Hub
  • NZME Events

SubscribeSign In
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Home / Business

Hola - a shocker of unblocker

Juha Saarinen
By Juha Saarinen
Tech blogger for nzherald.co.nz.·NZ Herald·
2 Jun, 2015 09:30 PM6 mins to read

Subscribe to listen

Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Already a subscriber?  Sign in here

Listening to articles is free for open-access content—explore other articles or learn more about text-to-speech.
‌
Save

    Share this article

Services like Hola promise access to websites blocked in your country or company. Photo / Thinkstock

Services like Hola promise access to websites blocked in your country or company. Photo / Thinkstock

Juha Saarinen
Opinion by Juha Saarinen
Tech writer for NZ Herald.
Learn more

One important issue is often neglected when it comes to "unblockers" and other services that are used to bypass geoblocking and firewalls: your traffic could go through a network that you know nothing about and it might even be unsafe.

That message is quickly overlooked when people want an easy way to reach blocked video on demand sites, pro-democracy forums and other content on the internet.

The desire for convenience is what Hola, billed as a "peer to peer virtual private network" takes advantage of. It promises that you can "access websites blocked in your country, company or school" and it's free as well as easy to use.

Read also:
• Cyber warmongering in full swing
• Shoplift security bug leaves sites wide open

I looked at the Hola web browser extension some time ago as it received glowing reviews in well-known publications but never got around to trying it out.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Reading the Adios, Hola! page written by a bunch of security researchers, I'm glad I never did.

In simple terms, using Hola could expose you to serious risk. Hola operates as an "exit node" for traffic, which means someone else's data goes through your computer. That makes it seem as if your connection was being used, which could be for anything, even unsavoury and illegal activities.

You can't control this, nor can you see what your bandwidth (or how much data) is being used for by Hola.

Anyone with a Hola account can go through your computer's connection - and it will look like it was you who generated that traffic.

It gets worse though: through its separate Luminati business Hola sells access to its network of millions of users.

Discover more

Opinion

Juha Saarinen: The gold Apple watch is how much?

10 Mar 01:00 AM
Opinion

Juha Saarinen: Telco aid Ushahidi site for Vanuatu

17 Mar 08:30 PM
Opinion

Juha Saarinen: Connectivity even more vital for rural users

24 Mar 04:30 PM
Opinion

Juha Saarinen: The long and rather slow arm of foreign law

27 Mar 12:20 AM

Luminati customers use Hola installations as proxies, as per above, for anything they want, charging up to US$20 per gigabyte. Hola users don't get any of the Luminati charges however to offset the cost of the bandwidth being used.

Some of the things you can do with Luminati include setting up a botnet for a large denial of service attack with Hola users' bandwidth.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Now, there's nothing illegal about Hola per se. You could even argue that it's clever peer to peer technology, and besides, the end-user license describes how Hola works.

How many Hola users read the fine print though?

Unless you're comfortable not having full of control over how your network connection is used, and by whom, remove Hola.

Gear: Synology DS415+

If like me you have an ever-growing amount of business data and personal files to store, you've probably thought about what's the best way to do it. There's the cloud which is superbly convenient and accessible from anywhere as long as you have a fast internet connection with a large data cap. Oh yeah, and cloud storage accounts can be costly with regular subscriptions to pay.

Using both local, fast network accessible storage (NAS) with the cloud is a way to get the best of both worlds. NAS vendor Synology is attempting that scenario with the four-drive DS415+ and has done a good job of it.

The DS415+ comes with a very impressive array of features, available through mostly free downloadable apps. It can be used as a small business server, for development, to run a website, your own private cloud service and to try out things like virtualisation, Docker containers as well as the usual content playback features.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Despite this, the DS415+ is easy to set up and to use, although figuring out at least some IT jargon and terminology is as always helpful before you start.

It's not the cheapest NAS box out there at just under a grand; the total cost of the DS415+ with four Seagate 4 terabyte drives was $2,100, but you get a fair bit for your money including 2GB or RAM, a reasonably powerful quad-core 2.4GHz Intel Atom processor, dual gigabit Ethernet network ports, USB 3.0 and eSATA connectors for external drives.

What's more the DS415+ is unobtrusively designed and very quiet, suitable for home and small office environments.

The four drives were set up with Synology's Hybrid RAID, and with one disk fault tolerance. You can have two disk fault tolerance too, but at the cost of storage space. I ended up with 10.2 terabytes of space out of a possible total of 14.5TB. That's an acceptable trade-off and the fault tolerance works: I pulled out one drive from the running system, which recovered gracefully and without data loss.

Adding the drive back results in the DS415+ rebuilding the disk array, and that took almost a working day.

You can also configure the drives in various way, mirror them, or just use them in one big array for maximum speed and capacity at the expense of safety when something goes wrong.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

It's also possible to add solid-state drives (SSDs) to the DS415+. These won't make much difference in performance for large files compared to normal hard drives, and will be more expensive and you'll have less space. If on the other hand you have lots of little files to read and write, the SSDs make a big difference as they're more responsive.

Overall, I was quite happy with the Seagate hard drives, and by combining the two Ethernet ports, hit 150 to 200 megabytes per second transfer speeds. That's not the fastest there is, but pretty good for the class. The DS415+ wouldn't be the best choice for say image and video editing; for that you'd want a NAS box with fast, 20Gbps Thunderbolt connections for instance.

It might seem a bit strange to suggest you need a backup for a NAS, but you should. The DS415+ is not invulnerable, or could get stolen or if misconfigured, hacked.

Also, the Linux-based DiskStation Manager operating system does not yet offer a "bit rot resistant" file system - Synology said it will launch one later this year, using the BTRFS file system that tries to make sure your data remains in correct form and the bits on the disks aren't flipped by cosmic rays or whatever.

Backing up could be to external drives, another NAS box, or a cloud service like Crashplan which I will report back on once it's set up. One piece of advice though: start backing up early on, before the NAS box fills up, so you don't need to start with a huge amount of data to transfer.

The DS415+ is managed through a secure browser-based interface that mimics a computer desktop. Once you figure out where things are, it's not that hard to use, but Synology could do some more fine-tuning here.

Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Also, the web-based interface is annoyingly single-threaded in parts: updates to apps and the NAS operating system have to be done one by one for instance.

Speaking of updates, lots arrive from Synology to the DS415+ OS and from third party developers of apps on a regular basis, which is good news.

The Synology DS415+ has turned out to be a surprisingly useful little device for business and personal use, allowing me to dump a bunch of gear and run services with storage on the NAS box, and comes recommended.

Save

    Share this article

Latest from Business

Premium
Media Insider

From the heartbreak of losing her husband at just 48, a couple's enduring media legacy

09 May 05:00 PM
Premium
Opinion

Fran O'Sullivan: Political games hinder vital superannuation reform

09 May 05:00 PM
Premium
Opinion

Mary Holm: Is there are pot of gold waiting for those who invest in non-bank deposits?

09 May 05:00 PM

“Not an invisible footprint”: Why technology supply chains need optimising

sponsored
Advertisement
Advertise with NZME.

Latest from Business

Premium
From the heartbreak of losing her husband at just 48, a couple's enduring media legacy

From the heartbreak of losing her husband at just 48, a couple's enduring media legacy

09 May 05:00 PM

'It allows me to focus on myself and the kids and figure out life without Allan.'

Premium
Fran O'Sullivan: Political games hinder vital superannuation reform

Fran O'Sullivan: Political games hinder vital superannuation reform

09 May 05:00 PM
Premium
Mary Holm: Is there are pot of gold waiting for those who invest in non-bank deposits?

Mary Holm: Is there are pot of gold waiting for those who invest in non-bank deposits?

09 May 05:00 PM
Premium
Noise ban, off-limit interviews: TVNZ's rules as RNZ moves in; Ad agencies take aim at global merger

Noise ban, off-limit interviews: TVNZ's rules as RNZ moves in; Ad agencies take aim at global merger

09 May 10:58 AM
Deposit scheme reduces risk, boosts trust – General Finance
sponsored

Deposit scheme reduces risk, boosts trust – General Finance

NZ Herald
  • About NZ Herald
  • Meet the journalists
  • Newsletters
  • Classifieds
  • Help & support
  • Contact us
  • House rules
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of use
  • Competition terms & conditions
  • Our use of AI
Subscriber Services
  • NZ Herald e-editions
  • Daily puzzles & quizzes
  • Manage your digital subscription
  • Manage your print subscription
  • Subscribe to the NZ Herald newspaper
  • Subscribe to Herald Premium
  • Gift a subscription
  • Subscriber FAQs
  • Subscription terms & conditions
  • Promotions and subscriber benefits
NZME Network
  • The New Zealand Herald
  • The Northland Age
  • The Northern Advocate
  • Waikato Herald
  • Bay of Plenty Times
  • Rotorua Daily Post
  • Hawke's Bay Today
  • Whanganui Chronicle
  • Viva
  • NZ Listener
  • What the Actual
  • Newstalk ZB
  • BusinessDesk
  • OneRoof
  • Driven CarGuide
  • iHeart Radio
  • Restaurant Hub
NZME
  • About NZME
  • NZME careers
  • Advertise with NZME
  • Digital self-service advertising
  • Book your classified ad
  • Photo sales
  • NZME Events
  • © Copyright 2025 NZME Publishing Limited
TOP