I’m sure the TLAs work closely in conjunction with all companies responsible for internet infrastructure, yeah. That is their mandate.

Remember not to compromise security in favor of privacy. To me they’re both important, but security wins every time.

Remember that services directly accessible over tunnels, whether from cloudflare or frp or ngrok or whatever, are directly accessible over the internet. So if any of those various self-hosted services have a remote vulnerability, and EVERYTHING does sooner or later, you will be exposed. This is why I personally WG VPN to my home LAN rather than exposing most of my stuff via any sort of tunnel. Tailscale is another option I often recommend.

I do use CF tunnels for specific purposes; Home Assistant Google Home integration for example, but I secure that via their “zero trust” authentication by validating incoming IP ranges, so only Google can reach the tunnel in the first place, everybody else is stopped by Cloudflare. For other services with human users, I have them authenticate via github or google oauth first. I also run all services accessible by the internet by any means on a restricted VLAN firewalled off from the rest of my LAN.

I’m all for healthy paranoia, keeping my attack surface small. That’s just professional IT ops.

Incendiary statements like saying US intelligence compromised the supply chain with hidden backdoors, those really do need to be substantiated to not sound like a crazy uncle. Our adversaries have counterintelligence also, they aren’t incompetent, and if Cisco or Juniper or whatever planted backdoors in hardware shipped to China, the Chinese would make a ton of noise about it. And so would we; Huawei was banned without any substantiated proof, out of fears that if used, their 5G infra could have hidden backdoors and the hardware would be so widely distributed that it would be onerous to replace.

Yes there are a bunch of self-hosted options like frp, all of which require an endpoint on the internet somewhere, typically a cheap or even free VM. Here’s a pretty comprehensive list:

https://github.com/anderspitman/awesome-tunneling

Cloudflare is a MITM by design. Calling it an attack is disingenuous; you’re signing up for the service of your own free will, not a victim.

If a substantiated news article came out showing that Cloudflare shared SSL keys or otherwise gave direct access to various intelligence agencies without a court order, that would essentially destroy the company. So they certainly aren’t doing that.

So then the question becomes whether those nefarious three letter agencies penetrated Cloudflare with APT tools and are silently listening to everything. Our adversaries are certainly trying, China, Russia, Iran, etc. If the NSA (which lacks a mandate to act on US soil, and CF is a US company) or perhaps the FBI hacked a US company, particularly one that covers like a third of the internet like Cloudflare, that would be a truly enormous scandal.

But in the end, yes, it is a MITM. If you need your data to be E2E encrypted, don’t use it.

Yeah that’ll block all ads and trackers that’re possible without severe annoyance with a non fingerprinted browser etc.

Specifically, the way iOS content blocking works is guaranteed safe. All it does is write to a file loaded by the Safari browser to block content, the app can’t do anything at all itself. No indication any VPN sold by AdGuard (or the local device-wide fake VPN) is particularly unsafe that I’ve seen.

Clearly it will be monetized in some way. Otherwise why would they have bought it?

I just tried “2FAs”, which seems to be the most recommended free one. It failed to import any 2FAs from the Raivo export with 7 digits, but otherwise worked fine. Problem is it failed to import silently, didn’t give any errors, which was offputting. Using it for now, but Raivo was better software. Pouring one out.

From what I can see on their website, the 2FA feature is only available if you pay $1/month. No gratzie.

There’s zero evidence of any wrongdoing or shadiness other than them having employees living in Russia. The company itself moved to Cyprus, many of their engineers left Russia, none of their servers are physically located in Russia, and they publicly disavowed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This doesn’t mean Russia couldn’t apply massive pressure by threatening family members, etc, of course, but I personally have no concerns at this time and use AdGuard Home (their local adblocking DNS server) in my LAN and their iOS app on my devices. The iOS app in particular uses Apple’s content-blocking Safari tech so it should be completely safe so long as you don’t pay for a VPN or use a local VPN to block everything outside Safari.

If you’re rooted on Android, definitely use AdAway instead, it just replaces the hosts file.

https://adguard.com/en/blog/official-response-to-setapp.html