It's not the same thing, Hola was found to use clients as exit nodes, which is definitely an abuse of client trust, resources, and potentially exposing them to major legal trouble or otherwise, but I don't think that can be considered a botnet, whereas the VPN app in question here is pulling lists of URLs from control sites and then directly sending requests to them, so it operates in the C&C fashion of a botnet.
I couldn’t disagree more. Scum is scum. The people who can discern the difference are few and far between, and we shouldn’t muddy the waters between different types of scum for the already-overwhelmed layperson.
Most people exclusively care about scum vs. not scum, and all but vuln-dev level sources shouldn’t distinguish.
Maybe HN fell on the savvy side of this at one point, but it was so long ago…
This kind of muddy thinking has hurt a LOT of people.
Nuance matters! While the guy who makes sexist jokes and the guy who will rape you if ever alone with you are both scum, that difference really really matters.
I appreciated the distinction to help form my own opinion. I believe there are varying degrees of scummy-ness and appreciate someone not trying to "decide for me"
Because we're actually quite bad at understanding people's motives (e.g. fundamental attribution error). Not to mention the various ways information gets biased as it flows through people and institutions.
