Hacker News Reader

Comment by 8chan | Hacker News Reader

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

View on HN

I've reverse engineered it a long time ago and are using their proxy clients (ZAgents as they refer to them internally) as proxies for clicking on my own ads. I have their username and password and a list of dyndns domains. Email me if you want the data.

Published the list here: http://milankragujevic.com/post.php?id=72&ref=hackernews&cid...

If they are in the EU – great, the right to learn covers the right to take apart, understand, reassemble, and remix any technology that you have a license to use and where, during the process, the original owner has no material losses.

So, if he’s in the EU, he can do it. (IANAL, but this was the conclusio of an EUGH decision). Otherwise it gets harder.

My google-foo is failing; could you please link to some information on "the right to learn"?

There is a decision from the european court of justice on this matter, it is also the only info existing on the topic.

(I can’t find the ruling right now either)

Two companies were involved, company A and company B. Company A developed an office suite containing a macro language, company B developed their own office suite and wanted to have compatibility to the macro language of company A’s suite.

So company B decompiled company A’s suite, copied the decompiled code of their APIs and built their own interpreter.

The court ruled that while source code itself is a copyrightable creative work, compiling and decompiling it produces code that is not directly related anymore, and, while it is based on the original code, the only similarities between both types of code are that they describe the same algorithms. But, per european law, algorithms are not copyrightable, only patentable, so the result of a decompilation step is not directly copyrighted work.

Additionally they argued that in other industries, like automobiles, it is common to take apart the products of your competitors, analyze them, and use the knowledge gained for your own products (unless you infringe patents, of course).

And this basic right to own stuff also gives you the right to take apart stuff you have a license to use under the condition that it does not provide a direct loss for the person selling you the license, for example you can not take apart a rented car, but you can take apart a car you bought.

Additionally the court argued that this right can not be signed away, not even in private contracts or through ToS or EULAs, as it would severely restrict the right to "own" stuff.

IANAL, this is not legal advice, consult a lawyer (or rather several, this topic is complex) if you intend to use this as defense in court.

I assume they forward the requests to their own servers? In that case there isn't much to reverse engineer without access to their servers. Unless they use some kind of P2P system, which I doubt.

their updated faq says the following

'Hola built a peer to peer overlay network for HTTP, which securely routes the sites you choose through other Hola users' devices and not through expensive servers'.

so it is a p2p system...

It's a mix of both. Each peer connects to one of their servers which then acts as the middle-man for the traffic between users. The descriptions they use is incredibly incorrect in so many places. Reads like they have some marketing guys with a vague idea on how it works writing it up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com