While you can find examples of companies doing it correctly, it’s also easy to find companies who do not. Also, some update theirs seemingly daily but don’t actually state this. Sure, you can check and see that it was updated “today”, but what if it doesn’t get updated and you don’t know its “typically” updated daily. Again, no date for the next update.
These are all examples of companies who do not explicitly specify when the next update will be: kagi.com/privacy nordvpn.com/security-efforts/ cloudflare.com/transparency/
What do you mean by a failed warrant canary? In most cases there is no clear failure because there’s no clear plan in place to maintain them.
For example, if a website has a statement “we have received 0 warrants”. When was that published? Yesterday? A year ago? More? Even if it has a date, say 6 months ago. What does that mean? That they only update it every year? Or maybe there were meant to update it they just forgot, maybe they aren’t allowed to update it due to a gag order.
Due to the way each website does things differently with no clear guidelines, there isn’t actually a defined failure case.
This is a great idea! I wish more websites did warrant canaries, and those that do often fail to maintain them or plan for the case when a gag order prevents them from updating an existing canary. The only thing I would suggest is making it more clear that being in an alpha stage means that the product should not be relied upon in critical situations.
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.
The top/1st line is the first service and it cascaded down as each subsequent service starts. Left to right is time elapsed. Bright red line is time to start that service. Shorter is better.
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.
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.