AdGuard

📩 Our new product to protect your email — AdGuard Mail Our inboxes are often so overloaded with spam and promotional emails that we barely notice when new subscriptions start arriving — ones we never signed up for. As a result, we lose important emails amidst the flood of spam and spend hours manually unsubscribing from unwanted mailings. Temp Mail and aliases can solve this problem and bring order to your inbox. Today, we’re excited to introduce AdGuard Mail — our new product that combines these two powerful features! 💌 Temp Mail Need a promo code or want to activate a free trial for a product or service without receiving newsletters on your personal email? Temp Mail — is the best solution. All the necessary emails will go directly to the AdGuard Mail. However, keep in mind that temporary mail is a less secure place to store important messages: you can easily delete an email but it is impossible to recover them. We recommend using it only for one-time interactions. 💌 Aliases Worried about registering on a website and having your email leaked or spammed? Use an alias. An alias acts as a filter, forwarding emails to your chosen address while keeping your personal or work email address private. If an email subscription you signed up for turns into spam, simply disable the alias, and the emails will stop coming. Aliases are better suited for managing subscriptions, while temp mail work best for one-time interactions. In some cases, one will be more convenient; in others, the other. Try AdGuard Mail today and see which feature works best for you. Currently, AdGuard Mail is completely free. You can install it on Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, or use the web version. This is our first experience with email management tools and we would be very happy to get your feedback — we will keep it in mind while further developing our product! Read more about AdGuard Mail on our blog: https://lnkd.in/dMPjRjUV

👩💻❓ AdGuard's TechTok: where we give answers to the tech questions that bother you A large portion of articles on our blog revolve around various technologies. We try not just to update you on the latest AdGuard releases, but also to keep you in the loop about what is going on in the world of ad blocking and privacy protection. However, this is mostly a one-way communication channel: we do our best to pick topics that you would find worth your attention, but we rarely see any direct feedback. And we'd like that to change. We're introducing ✨TechTok✨ — a new regular Q&A-style column where you can ask us anything tech, and we will select the most popular and the most interesting questions to answer. The preferred topics are ad blocking, privacy protection, VPN- and DNS-related technologies, email hygiene — but really anything that strikes your fancy goes here. Just don't ask us about AdGuard bugs, there's a dedicated support hub for that 🙂 📬 Submit your questions through this online form and perhaps it will get featured in the very first edition of TechTok: https://lnkd.in/dNyxM5Qt https://lnkd.in/dfhwS2NT

🤝 Encrypted Client Hello didn't solve censorship, but still may have a role to play Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) is a standard designed to address "the last privacy hole" in the TLS protocol — the initial unencrypted information your browser sends when establishing an encrypted connection with a website. This was always its primary goal, but it turned out that, due to its nature, ECH could also be used as a tool to bypass censorship or geo-blocking. This didn’t sit well with Russian authorities, who called ECH "a means of circumventing restrictions on access to information banned in Russia" and subsequently blocked Cloudflare’s implementation of ECH. Russia wasn’t the first to do so — China has been blocking ECH for similar reasons for some time, albeit in a different manner. There’s no guarantee that other countries (or corporate networks) won’t follow suit. While ECH remains a crucial part of the privacy protection toolkit and plays a key role in enhancing online privacy, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. If you’re serious about privacy, it’s better to rely on more robust, tailored tools like VPNs. https://lnkd.in/drPnqCxi

📢 We value transparency and staying connected with our users. That’s why we’re inviting you to join our Q&A session about AdGuard VPN! Drop your questions in the comments under this post on our social media, and in a week, the Chief Product Officer of AdGuard VPN will answer them in our blog. P.S: The author of the most interesting question will get some nice AdGuard merch 😎

📺 YouTube scam ad causes doctor to lose $90,000: How not to get duped Fraudulent ads are a persistent issue on online advertising platforms, with billions of malicious ads slipping through detection systems each year. Google alone removed over 5.5 billion ads and suspended 12.7 million advertiser accounts in the past year, but even advanced machine learning tools fail to catch every scam. Malicious ads often mimic legitimate ones, making it easy for unsuspecting users to fall victim to scams, such as a recent case where a doctor in India lost $90,000 to a fraudulent investment opportunity advertised on YouTube. To protect yourself from these threats, proactive measures are essential. Ad blockers are recommended by the FBI as a first line of defense, blocking harmful ads before they load. Remaining cautious and skeptical of ads that promise unrealistically good deals is key, as platforms still struggle to fully eliminate fraudulent content. https://lnkd.in/dCfEf9bh

🌐⚔️ The Kingdom of the Internet calls for its hero This Halloween, we decided to do something special and took a shot at game dev. Here’s what we came up with: https://lnkd.in/d3BKYQja Was our humble attempt to try something different a success? We’ll let you be the judge!

⏸ YouTube finds yet another way to show you ads. How do they do it? Bumper ads, non-skippable in-stream ads, overlay ads — there is no lack of ad types when it comes to YouTube. Yet, the company decided there should be even more of them, and introduced so-called pause ads. As you can guess from the name, the ad appears when you pause the video and is displayed in the form of a static banner. A YouTube spokesperson said that the company has "made the new ad type available to all advertisers" and has already seen "strong responses from both advertisers and viewers." However, the latter claim is being met with skepticism, as massive negative feedback has surfaced from users on various social media platforms. While the new ad type is gaining traction, the majority of viewers haven't encountered it just yet. We at AdGuard are in the same boat — it's hard to make predictions before we experience these ads firsthand. But from what we've seen so far, blocking them shouldn't be much different from blocking other YT ads. If you are seeing pause ads on YouTube, please let us know in the comments to this post. It will help us a lot. https://lnkd.in/dhe_t3Wn

🌐 AdGuard Browser Extension v5.0: From beta to release The work on the Chrome Manifest V3 extension started long ago. In July, we finally released the beta version, and today we’re excited to officially introduce the release version of the extension! 🔜 Why MV3 and what will happen to MV2? In August, Chrome users were alarmed by a warning about their browser extensions: “This extension may soon no longer be supported because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions” This warning was directly related to Chrome's transition to the Manifest V3 platform. The full switch to the new platform was only a matter of time, which is why we started working on migrating our extension to MV3 early on. AdGuard MV2 extension will still be available for other browsers. However, Chrome users will soon have to say goodbye to the MV2 version: Google is phasing out MV2 and will eventually stop supporting extensions that run on this platform. But don’t worry — the new version of the AdGuard browser extension runs smoother and faster than ever before. We’ve adapted the familiar features and capabilities of the AdGuard browser extension to fit the new Manifest V3 framework, so it will continue to help you browse the web without ads or threats. Read more about the new version in our blog and download the updated browser extension: https://lnkd.in/dBzckVWr

🦊 Mozilla removes ad-tracking code from Firefox Mobile: What does this mean? It might come as a surprise to some that Mozilla has been using Adjust — a third-party data-gathering SDK — to monitor the effectiveness of its marketing campaigns for years. This has raised concerns among Firefox users, given Mozilla’s strong stance as a privacy advocate. Recently, however, Mozilla removed the SDK from the Android and iOS versions of its flagship browser, which at first glance seems like a strictly positive move. Yet, the complete lack of communication surrounding this seemingly pro-privacy decision leaves room for speculation: what was the real motivation behind it? In our latest article, we dig deeper to understand whether Mozilla remains a leader in privacy protection or if it has strayed too far into the adtech landscape. https://lnkd.in/d4GpdAGJ

⭐ Ad-Filtering Dev Summit returns for 2024 ⭐ And AdGuard is co-hosting this year! Expect two days of tech talks, presentations, panels, networking and fun and join us to discuss the latest in ad-filtering tech. Already have an idea for your talk? Submit it here: https://lnkd.in/dGSfCh2E See more details: https://lnkd.in/dbc8mYhK