How to remove ads that Hola Unblocker injects on websites you visit
Some very popular services, Hulu and Netflix for example, restrict access to their services to users from specific countries. If you try to access the services from another country, one that is not officially supported, then you will receive a message that contents cannot be made available to you.
That is the case even if you live in a country where the service is available. All that matters is the location you are connecting from.
One way to get around those restrictions are virtual private networks. You connect to a network that more or less acts as a proxy for you. All sites you connect to while connected to the VPN will communicate with it first, and not with your computer system directly. The connection flows through it so to speak.
There are paid VPN services that you can subscribe to and use, but also browser extensions that make the functionality available.
These browser extensions are very convenient. All you have to do is install the extension in your browser of choice to activate it whenever you need to access blocked sites.
Hola Unblocker is without doubt one of the more popular choices (another is Media Hint). It is available for Chrome and Firefox among other devices and programs, and can be enabled or disabled with two mouse clicks. That's very convenient.
The extension has recently been heavily criticized by part of its userbase as its parent company has started to use it to inject advertisement on Internet websites.
What most users who have left a review on Google's or Mozilla's web store object to is that this has been implemented in a sneaky way in the extension.
If you have the browser add-on installed and noticed recently an increase in advertisement on pages you visited in the browser, you now know why that is the case.
Block Hola Unblocker ads
Some users have probably uninstalled the extension by now and moved to Media Hint or a comparable extension instead for the same functionality. Others may have had issues to pinpoint the source of the advertisements.
It is possible to remove ads so that they are not injected when you use the extension. You can either upgrade to a premium account, available for a reasonable sum of $2.99 per month, or use the option instead.
Visit this page on the hola website to disable Hola Shopper.
Once you have done that, you should not see any more ads pop up on websites that you visit.
Additional information: Hole seems to inject Superfish contents in the browser you are using. Some users reported that it added a huge ad bar to the bottom of the Chrome browser that suggests to install software on the system.
It is also interesting to note that ads will still be shown even if you disable the extension in the web browser, and that some users have mentioned that ads are displayed some time ago.
Closing Words
It seems that quite a few extension authors have discovered this form of revenue generation. Some companies have even started to purchase popular add-ons to earn revenue with them using this or similar methods.
You can find out if extensions are manipulating website contents in various ways.
The user outcry over this practices would be less if companies would be upfront about the monetization method.
Have you encountered extensions before that inject ads on websites?
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.