Find out how to pay for HMA! Pro VPN using Bitcoins

Bitcoin, the once super mysterious currency which most of us had never heard of until recently, is
now an extremely popular way to make anonymous online payments, and you can use Bitcoins to pay for an HMA! Pro VPN subscription with no billing information required!
It’s easy to purchase an HMA! Pro VPN subscription using Bitcoins, as we explain in this tutorial.


Please note: If you already have a Bitcoin wallet, you can skip down to step 3.

1. How to create a Bitcoin wallet
Before you can pay for HMA! Pro VPN using Bitcoins, you will need to create a Bitcoin wallet. Check out the easy-to-follow guide from WeUseCoins which will quickly help you to set-up your Bitcoin wallet.

2. How to purchase Hide My Ass! Pro VPN using Bitcoins
Once you have created your Bitcoin wallet following the instructions in step 1, you can add funds which you can use to place an order for HMA! Pro VPN.

3. Bitcoin checkout process
If you’ve already created an HMA! Pro VPN account, you just need to login to the VPN control panel, where you can renew your subscription under the ‘Order/Renew’ tab and select Bitcoin as your payment method.
If you haven’t already signed up for an Hide My Ass! Pro VPN account, you will need to create an account, before you can pay with Bitcoin.
To purchase Hide My Ass! Pro VPN using Bitcoin:

• Enter and confirm your email address
• Select “Bitcoin” as your preferred payment method
• Select a subscription package (1 / 6 / 12 months)
• Click  “Continue to Payment“

You’re now on BitPay, the payment processor for Bitcoin payments. An invoice and a unique Bitcoin-address for sending the payment has now been created.
Please note that the payment page (including the generated invoice and bitcoin-address), are only valid for 15 minutes before they expire. If the payment page has expired, you can just go back and repeat the order process.
You are now ready to make the payment using Bitcoin. Open your wallet and send the correct amount of Bitcoins to the Bitcoin-address.
If you are using Bitcoin Wallet on a smartphone that supports scanning QR codes, you can simply scan the QR code displayed on this page and the Wallet does the rest for you. Or if your Wallet supports the Pay with Bitcoin buttons, click the “Pay with Bitcoin” button:


Otherwise just copy+paste the displayed Bitcoin-address into your wallets “Send payment” form, enter the value to send and submit the payment.


Additional Information!

• Once you see the BitPay order page, an invoice and a unique bitcoin-address has been created. Both the invoice and the recipient bitcoin address are only valid for 15 minutes before they expire.
  Do not send payments to this address after the invoice has expired.
• We only receive and accept payments sent through BitPay using the order .process explained above; please do not send Bitcoins any other way!
• When you see the welcome page instead of the VPN control panel after logging in, it means your payment has not been fully confirmed yet.
• Please be patient, and check the transactions confirmation status in your wallet. Transactions need 6 confirmations before they are completed, this can take between 15-60 minutes.
• New to Bitcoin? Check the Bitcoin official website.
• Don’t have enough Bitcoins? You can easily buy or exchange them at many places like BuyBitcoins, Virwox or MtGox.
• See our article Buying and exchanging Bitcoins for more info.
• Comparison of Bitcoin sellers and exchange services.
• More info about wallets.
• Instead of buying or exchanging Bitcoins, you can of course also ‘mine’ them.

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Want to watch online porn in the UK – ID Check!

Adults who want to watch online porn in the UK could face ID-based age checks thanks to a plan
proposed by the porn industry, and which is fully supported by the Conservative government, in an a bid to protect children from inappropriate online material.

The new proposal means that in order to watch online porn in the UK viewers will need to verify that they are 18 years or older by handing over their personal information before viewing porn online. Porn operators in the UK who do not comply risk their site being blocked by a regulator, likely the Authority for Television on Demand (Atvod.)


It’s unclear at the moment whether overseas sites will require ID based age checks for pornography. Chris Ratliff told The Guardian  “As a matter of international law, I don’t understand how it can possibly work.”

Children in the UK are addicted to online porn according to a survey conducted by NSPCC ChildLine  which found that “one in five 12 to 13 year olds thinks that watching porn is normal behaviour.” The Conservative government, among many others, hope that ID-based age checks for pornography will help to protect children from adult content. However, free speech campaigner Jerry Barnett CEO of Sex & Censorship told Wired that he sees this as “dishonest marketing concocted by PR firms” and views the new proposal as more of a guise masquerading  to “protect children from porn” when in fact it’s a manipulate move to introduce internet censorship. “This should worry anyone who cares about online free expression”
He’s not alone. Many other critics are worried that the UK is aligning itself to strict censorship and privacy measures that exist in China. “This is cutting-edge censorship. We are now becoming the world leaders in censorship…” said Myles Jackman, a lawyer in obscenity law who spoke to The Guardian recently.

Adults who wish to watch online porn in the UK will be able to prove their age by one of many ID based age check providers, such as mobile operators, banks, the post office, credit agencies or even perhaps the NHS.

According to the proposal, an “anonymising hub” would be used that would only confirm a user’s age – no personal identifying information would be stored and that a third party such as a bank or post office would not know the reason for age verification. However, as we know, data breaches do happen. Could this new measure open the door wide open to abuse from attackers and other unscrupulous third parties? Can we really trust this system? Can we really believe what we’re told?
Jerry Barnett, a free speech campaigner, sees this as another control measure being embraced by the UK government. “This is the state, yet again, intervening in people’s private lives for no reason other than good old British prurience and control-freakery.”

The UK government has been working hard to control porn in the UK, from banning a number of sex acts from UK-produced porn, to implementing porn filters which inadvertently blocked a number of sex education sites.

UK laws work in mysterious ways, and while it is important to protect our children from inappropriate material, and other online dangers, when you’re 16 in the UK you can get married (with parental consent), and you can buy a lottery ticket. Males and females 16 and over may have sexual relations, (heterosexual or homosexual), with other people aged over 16. And it’s not illegal for children over the age of five to drink at home or on other private premises! BUT young adults under the age of 18 still need to be protected from online porn?!

The sex industry has been around for centuries, it’s not going anywhere – unless of course, the UK has its way and ID based age checks for pornography is made law.

Do you think this proposal for ID based age checks for pornography is about protecting children from online porn or more about censorship?

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Hola VPN sells YOUR bandwidth – remove now!

Users of Hola VPN are justifiably angry and surprised to learn that their bandwidth has been sold
under the guise of a service called Luminati (which Hola owns). It’s not easy to think of a legitimate use or reason for a business to want to purchase Luminati’s multiple user connections, especially without the users’ knowledge but it does seem to be a perfect, although downright illegitimate, ‘botnet-for-hire’. A botnet is a network of computers which can be used for illegal reasons, such as targeting businesses with a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, without the owner’s knowledge, and is powerful enough to bring down even the biggest websites! Just look at what one can do to companies like Sony and Microsoft.


The botnet issue was recently raised by 8chan founder, Fredrick Brennan, who claimed that an attack on his website could be traced back to computers on the Luminati network.
Hola VPN is actually a peer-to-peer (P2P) VPN service which is able to provide its services for nothing by selling Hola users’ bandwidth. However, this leaves the door wide open to spam, malware and potential unscrupulous third parties accessing Hola VPN users’ connections and use it for illegal activities, with the user having no clue as to what is going on.

A group of researchers and coders from Adios-Hola said on their website ”Hola is a ‘peer-to-peer’ VPN. This may sound nice, but what it actually means is that other people browse the web through your internet connection, similar to the way Tor works. To a website, it seems like it’s you browsing the site… imagine that somebody uploaded child pornography through your connection, for example. To everybody else, it seems as if it was your computer that did it, and you can’t really prove otherwise.”

The Adios researchers also found a number of serious security flaws with Hola VPN. Hola claim that they fixed “two vulnerabilities” but Adios-Hola found that “The vulnerabilities are *still* there, they just broke our vulnerability checker and exploit demonstration. Not only that; there weren’t two vulnerabilities, there were six.”
But that’s not all! According to Adios-Hola “…on some systems, it gets worse; Hola will happily run whatever you feed it as the ‘SYSTEM’ user. What this means in simple terms, is that somebody can completely compromise your system, beyond any repair. It allows for installing things like a rootkit, for example.”

In a bid to reassure around 9.7 million users of its free VPN, Hola quickly updated their FAQ’s to ensure that their users (if they have any left), are fully aware that their free VPN service is actually a P2P program.

“We assumed that by stating that Hola is a P2P network, it was clear that people were sharing their bandwidth with the community network in return for their free service. After all, people have been doing that for years with services like Skype. It was not clear to all our users, and we want it to be completely clear.”

The problem here is that their users weren’t aware that Hola VPN were selling users’ bandwidth and, more worryingly, Luminati / Hola didn’t seem to check or care what people were using it for.
“If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product!”, as they say.

There’s no such thing as a free lunch!
When we subscribe to any ‘free’ service, we have to ask ourselves, why is it free? What is the company getting out of this? Companies very rarely give us something for free out of the goodness of their hearts. In this digital age, we’re often giving away our personal data in exchange for products or services or to save money on health insurance – and in this case, Hola VPN users are giving away their right to privacy and security which could be used against them by criminals and other third parties.

Hola VPN are now looking to employ a Chief Security Officer… yep – good idea!
Is it really worth comprising your security and privacy for free VPN?

We at Hide My Ass! Pro VPN take your security and privacy extremely seriously – it’s what we do. We have VPN servers in over 190 countries around the world allowing you to safely, and securely surf the net anonymously, evade hackers and access your favourite sites and services around the world, for as little as $6.55 per month.


If you use Hola free VPN, will you continue to do so?

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Digital Magna Carta launched by British Library – vote now!

Students from around the world are taking part in a British Library project to consider which topics
should be included in a digital Magna Carta. The clauses fall under 3 categories; freedom, access and privacy.
3000 students from the UK and overseas have created over 500 My Digital Rights clauses for the British Library project, highlighting some of the concerns young people have with the digital age, including online safety and security, calls for online privacy, and to be able to enjoy freedom on the net.


Researchers at ComRes recently found that 29% of young people aged 10-18 wanted to feel safe and protected on the net, and 17% of those polled want to see freedom of speech and an uncensored net for everyone, no matter where they are in the world.

The digital Magna Carta marks the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta and the 25th anniversary of the web. The Magna Carta (meaning Great Charter in Latin) was granted by King John on 15 June 1215 at Runnymede, which meant that no one, even a King, was above the law. One of the four remaining copies of the 1215 Magna Carta is preserved in Salisbury Cathedral’s Chapter House, in the UK.
At the time of writing, the top ten digital Magna Carta clauses include “not to be censored by the government”,  “be free from censorship and mass surveillance”, and “not allow the government and technology companies to intrude on our privacy when online; whether searching information or surfing social media, the web we want should be private and safe.”

We at Hide My Ass! couldn’t agree more with the clauses young people have put forward for the digital Magna Carta!  We abhor net censorship and ridiculous blocks placed on websites by so many governments around the world – which is the main reason our VPN service was originally established.

Inventor of the world wide web Tim Berners-Lee believes a digital Magna Carta is critical to secure users’ online privacy, and freedom of speech on the net. Speaking at a We Want Web event in September last year Tim Berners-Lee said “There have been lots of times that it has been abused, so now the Magna Carta is about saying…I want a web where I’m not spied on, where’s there’s no censorship” Berners-Lee added  “Our rights are being infringed more and more on every side, and the danger is that we get used to it.”

Voting is open to the public and runs this week, with the top 10 digital Magna Carta clauses to be announced on Monday 15th June – Magna Carta Day!

What the digital Magna Carta will conclude, well, we’ll find out next week – but don’t forget to cast your vote!

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How to stay anonymous online: 5 more tips

Staying anonymous online isn’t difficult to achieve. In the second part in our series on how to stay
anonymous online, we provide 5 more tips which will help you to surf anonymously and stay anonymous online! You can also check our previous article on how to stay anonymous online: 5 top tips. 

Staying anonymous online – 5 tips to surf anonymously and stay secure online

1. Proxy server
When you connect to a proxy server all your internet requests go through the proxy, and your source IP address (your originating IP address), is replaced by that of the proxy server. It’s a great way to stay anonymous online. When you use a proxy server you use the IP of the proxy server, not the IP your ISP gives you. However, it’s worth pointing out that none of your data is encrypted, which leaves the door wide open to any attacker or thief. Why not use our HMA! proxy

2. ZRTP
ZRTP is a cryptographic key-agreement protocol, and as such, isn’t an application or piece of software in itself, rather the secure layer the application uses across a network. Currently, it has many advantages over other methods of encryption as it doesn’t rely on server management, shared secrets or PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) and provides protection against man-in-the-middle attacks, amongst many others. ZRTP is mainly implemented in cellphone / VoIP software at the moment and so while perhaps not something for the average user to concern themselves with, it may be worth looking out for as things develop.

3. Spies on the net  
In our article ‘Who’s watching you?’ you will see that a number of companies can easily track you, and these companies DO track you – building a spiderweb of user activity. You won’t normally be able to see these stealth operators, but they are watching you and building up a profile of your surfing habits.  There are a couple of services you can use, such as Ghostery, that block the cookies, tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons of over 1,900 ad networks as well as letting you see what it blocked in real time.

4. Bitcoin
Given the attention the media has lent Bitcoin recently, both good and bad, you’re probably somewhat familiar with the crypto-currency by now. Leaving the political issues to one side, Bitcoin allows a user to pay for goods or services with complete anonymity, with companies such as Microsoft and Virgin Galactic and HMA! Pro VPN now accepting it as payment. Setting a Bitcoin wallet up is a simple process nowadays but beware, due to the anonymous nature of Bitcoin, there’s not always a great deal of transparency available when it comes to determining who has control of your wallet. Also, while the currency itself is anonymous, the way you use it to pay for things, what those things are and how you receive them may not have the same level, or any, anonymity applied.

5. Delete cookies
Cookies and supercookies stored on browsers such as Safari, Internet Explorer and Chrome are created every time you carry out an online search, log in to a website or simply browse certain sites. They tell the owner of the website information such as whether you’ve visited their site before. For example, travel websites use cookies to track and record the number of times you check a flight by using your IP address. Did you know that a VPN can save money on your airfares?!  Cookies can provide you with an enhanced browsing experience, as they allow companies to track your surfing activity. They can remember if, for example, you like a specific brand of handbag. Using incognito mode or private browsing mode on your computer will help to control them, but this will only remove the information from your computer and not the server.

Travel sites use cookies to track and record how many times your IP address has checked the price of a flight.

It is a good idea to delete cookies every now and then using software such as CCleaner. It’s also a good idea to block third party cookies (ad company cookies) in your browser.
Now, according to Edward Snowden if you use CSpace, VPN, Tor and ZRTP all together, you will achieve “Level 5 catastrophic” levels of privacy – the NSA cannot break the encryption – yet!


Looking for more information about how to stay anonymous online? Then take a look at our website where you will find all the information you need about HMA! Pro VPN to help you surf anonymously and stay anonymous online. Of course, if you prefer you can always send us an email or contact us via HMA! chat (look for the ‘Chat with us’ icon in the bottom right hand corner on our website) and one of our support donkeys will be happy to help you!

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Cambodia net censorship is coming!

Net censorship in Cambodia is rearing its ugly head again as Cambodia’s government revisits a
Cybercrime Law and a Law on Telecommunications that will seriously impede Cambodian netizens’ right to freedom of speech and expression – internet censorship is on its way!


Where freedom of expression is heavily restricted in countries such as China and North Korea, Cambodians currently enjoy relatively uncensored net access thanks to low-cost handsets and affordable monthly ISP charges, allowing them to voice their opinions freely on social media platforms such as Facebook (which has 1.76 million registered Cambodian users) and Twitter. But with increased numbers of Cambodians using the internet, the Cambodian government is preparing its Cybercrime Law and Law on Telecommunications to restrict free speech, to crack down on political dissidents, and to conduct mass surveillance on Cambodian internet users.
Or as a Cambodian spokesman puts it, the cybercrime law is meant to crack down on “hackers.”
Unfortunately, it does look like Cambodia internet censorship is coming!

A new report from the rights group Licadho “Going Offline? The Threat to Cambodia’s Newfound Internet Freedom” details Cambodia’s plans to stifle freedom of expression on the net – to match censorship which already exists in broadcast media and in print in the country.
Am Sam Ath, technical coordinator at Licadho said in a statement “Freedom of expression is a right that many Cambodians have never truly experienced. It comes as no surprise that as soon as Cambodia found a way to have their voices heard, the government has begun a comprehensive effort to once again silence them.”

Cambodia’s Cybercrime Law was first announced in May 2012, and in 2014 a draft version of the Cybercrime Law was leaked to the public which revealed that the government were leaning towards suppressing freedom of expression in the country by making it an offense to post content that “generates insecurity, instability, and political cohesiveness.”

The draft Cybercrime Law was “scrapped” in December 2014, according to Licadho “one official claimed that it was ‘not a priority’ any longer.” But now government officials have changed their minds, it is now a priority. The Cambodian government hopes that the draft Cybercrime Law, and the draft Telecommunications Law will thwart online internet crimes, such as hacking. However, this raises the question – how far will the Cambodian government go? According to Licadho’s report, the “provision of the Cybercrime Law are so broad and vaguely defined that the law could be stretched to encompass nearly any form of critical online content…that could easily apply to routine news postings, citizen journalism and online commentary.”

The Law on Telecommunications brings grave concerns that the Cambodian government could use mass surveillance technology to spy on its citizens’ online activities. Both these laws, the Cybercrime Law and the Law on Telecommunications would stifle freedom of expression, and place a stranglehold on free speech, stripping Cambodians’ right to freedom of opinion. Imagine not being able to voice your opinions on Facebook or Twitter in fear that your government will come down on you like a ton of bricks?!

Naly Pilorge, director at Licadho told Voice of America “The draft Cybercrime Law and Law on Telecommunications are a clear attempt by the CPP (Cambodian People’s party) to establish complete control over Cambodia’s Internet.  The extreme discretion that the Cambodian government would wield under these laws could and likely will be used to suppress virtually any form of critical online content.”

The Cybercrime Law, if made law, would seriously impede Cambodians right to privacy and freedom of expression, by imposing censorship on those with opposing political views – and that is never a good thing! However, it’s OK, because Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications spokesman Meas Po says that the draft Cybercrime Law will be debated by the end of year and said “We made the law to guide and to monitor…we did not make the law to create problems.” Phew!

While Cambodian net censorship is under threat – many canny Cambodians use virtual private networks (VPNs) to gain access to blocked websites – largely political opposition driven sites. For more information about HMA! Pro VPN visit our website.

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