stifle867

CORRECTION: It was pointed out to me that I was confusing userStyles.css with userChrome.css. I'm not aware of anyway that styling the UI outside of the DOM could be directly detectable. Theoretically, if you could resize some UI elements that would change the viewport size and therefore be detectable. I'm not informed enough on userChrome.css to make that call however. Original comment is below.

Yes. As CSS styles can be queried, any differences can be used as an identifiable data point used to form a fingerprint.

Oh you're talking about AdGuard VPN not solely the main AdGuard product. Definitely not ideal. It doesn't offer the same level of features as my current VPN who offers ad blocking anyway. Not to mention a few suspicious quotes from their website:

AdGuard VPN protocol uses the most secure and fast encryption algorithm to date – AES-256

From the very outset, we resolved to develop and deploy an in-house VPN protocol instead of picking a canned solution — that’d be too easy

We are going to make our protocol implementation publicly available in the future. Sadly, right now we don't have enough time to prepare the project

we collect data about how you interact with our services, how much traffic you’ve used, and for how long have you been using our services

ADGUARD SOFTWARE LIMITED is a company registered in Nicosia, Cyprus, registered office is at Klimentos 41-43, KLIMENTOS TOWER, Flat/Office 25, 1061, Nicosia, Cyprus and acts as the data controller when processing your data

Considering Cyprus telecommunications laws it doesn't seem like the safest place to headquarter a telecommunications privacy company.

After I posted my comment I found this https://protonvpn.com/support/linux-prerelease/

To reply to your comment: they do send out emails regarding product development occasionally but there's no publicly available "roadmap". I can understand why as development times are hard to predict, so I don't fault them for that.

I can say that even though they are majorly updating things every week, they do make constant progress and release new products. I've been a subscriber for years, back when it was only "ProtonMail".

Now we have Proton Mail, VPN, Calendar, Drive, and Proton Pass. I'm glad my money has been supporting the vision and development of all these great privacy-first services. For me that's why I have been a loyal customer all these years.

That's not what I'm talking about. I meant to say that AdGuard on mobile (Android) runs by pretending to be a VPN in order to intercept all connections and filter the ads out of them. This works great to remove ads in apps, etc.

However, because it hooks into the VPN interface you can't then run another VPN (for example Proton VPN) because Android only allows one VPN to run at any time.

Agreed. Even Android feels like a 2nd class citizen at times. There are obvious bugs that have never been fixed in core features. That being said it's still worth it and I'm glad to be supporting them fund future development.

There are no perfect options but it's hard to agree with a supposedly private search engine that is actively hostile to people who are using VPNs (the same target audience!)

Expensive compared to what? Compared to the price of a coffee? Compared to the price of your privacy? Compared to your disposable income? Compared to competing services?

Look at the value you get:
1Password costs $2.99 per month
ExpressVPN $12.95 per month
NordLocker $7.99 per month
Total $23.93 per month and you do not get email or calendar included

Proton Unlimited $12.99 per month with email and calendar (and future services)

Netflix standard plan $15.49 per month

The biggest issue for me is the VPN client support. It "works" but lacks some notable features such as port forwarding for torrents.

I simply live without this feature and do not use the client at all. I have wireguard installed with the configs you download from the website as a starting point. I also set it up so that connections without the wireguard interface are blocked by default except for within my local network and it's hooked into systemd so I can manually start and stop it. This was non-trivial and I don't suggest doing this.

Another benefit of using uBlock Origin is the ability to use the cosmetic filters so you can remove elements from the page that aren't served as ads in the typical sense. As an example when you're reading an article and there's an obnoxious box half way through that says CONSIDER SUBSCRIBING etc. It's not loading any external resources, it's just inlined HTML. But you can enter element picker mode and if you are able to uniquely target that element you can filter it out.

I did this for the longest time until I realised that because AdGuard works best as a virtual VPN, it is unable to run alongside an actual VPN. Luckily my VPN (and many others) support ad blocking too.

Funny (to me) story when I ran pi-hole in a house with housemates (all friends): I bought an rpi zero and installed pi-hole on it. I notified all housemates that I would be installing an adblocker on the network so if anyone has any problems with sites not working to just let me know.

Years go by and finally the rpi zero dies which makes the internet inaccessible as the router was pointing to it. I reconfigure the network back to default in the meantime. I didn't have time to update everyone before one of my housemates made a funny comment.

He mentions that the internet is working again! And something else, he's now able to click on Google search result ads!

Because I don't use Google search I never realised Google ads links were being blocked, and even if I did I wouldn't have realised how common it is for people to rely on the ads!

After some discussion with this housemate he confessed he actually likes seeing ads as it could show him stuff he wants to buy. Needless to say I didn't bother putting pi-hole back on the network.

The "simplest" method is to plug the USB straight into the TV if the TV supports USB playback. You could also try plugging the USB into the router as many of them support DLNA servers - not a solution but a piece of the puzzle that can be used.