>Is this criticism unfair?

Yes because you judge people by the country they live in. AdGuard has made their stance clear if something like this is important to you: https://www.reddit.com/r/Adguard/comments/t15gr4/announcemen... & https://adguard.com/en/blog/official-response-to-setapp.html

> Yes because you judge people by the country they live in.

This is an extremely uncharitable reading of the preceding comment. The comment is clearly concerned about the national jurisdiction from which the AdGuard binary originates, not the national origin of a human.

American government initiatives against Huawei telecom hardware at critical junctures aren't making a personal statement about Chinese individuals. European regulatory skepticism of American-located cloud services isn't a personal statement about American individuals. Russia and China requiring the on-shoring of data-centers doing business in their internal economies aren't making personal statements about foreigners by doing so.

Whether or not you hold all those governments as roughly equal, none of them mistrusting each others' jurisdictions is "judging people by the country they live in." It is judging the trustworthiness of the governments of those countries. And the people in those countries are inevitably subject to the jurisdictions of the governments that rule them.

If someone actually attacks people on the basis of national origin, have at it, but please don't brow beat individuals for making common-sense risk assessments.

I actually didn't know this. Thanks!

I built it myself for a while but as I mentioned elsewhere, it's now being packaged in the Alpine Linux testing branch. That makes a container image an 'apk add' away.. whether you trust Alpine Linux more or less than the AdGuard Home teams is up to you.

Given that the whole thing is open source and it is possible to build it yourself, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Not that it means all that much, but AdGuard is headquartered in Cyprus, for what it's worth.

> Is this criticism unfair?

Only if you don't trust only Russians and no one else.

I don't trust Iran, North Korea, or China either. It's not hard, I'm an American and it's 2025. These are our adversaries (I didn't choose them) who currently commit cybercrimes against us. Hopefully in 2035 that won't be the case and we can all sing kumbaya.

I hope that you at some point will understand that these are minorities among a huge population that you are talking about.

It sounds like you think that every butcher, barber, dancer, teacher, software dev etc in China is just thinking of how they can hack the US.

Guess what: that's the image propagated by propaganda and very far from the actual truth.

If you don't trust people, study their code and make a formed opinion about it.

This seems like woefully naive virtue-signaling to me. I geo-block all traffic from Iran, N Korea, China and Russia specifically at my clients' firewalls because I have watched the logs and could clearly see IPs from each of these countries attempt connections to American businesses every minute of every day. Try to single out the offending IP and tomorrow it moves to another; you will spend the rest of your days adding to that block list. It is perfectly sensible to block the country entirely; and better yet - as I've made a standard for my clients - block the entire world, and only allow specific countries to talk to your firewall. Then you can add more granular blocks on top of this. If something gets blocked that shouldn't, that's not painful to adjust. I have no doubt there are many fine people in Russia, but that doesn't mean there's a single computer in Russia that has any business talking to mine.

The question is why those specific countries? Do you just assume that all connections made from, say, Netherlands, are safe by default?

Basic statistics. The chance of someone from Netherlands being a state-level hacker is a lot smaller than someone from a Russian IP.

Logically, if Russians would want to infiltrate your organization, they won't do it from Russian IPs directly, but instead do it from cheap proxies, and those proxies are abundant in Netherlands or Germany.

And yet experience shows that GP is correct. The vast majority of mailicious traffic originates from those countries IME.

Only stuff like scanners and other basic stuff (that comes from devices that have been left unattended and without updates). But the actual malicious traffic is not that easy to spot, as it won't be router directly.

i used to do similar on gaming clans' forums; for local rationalized fps we didnt want folks with 300+ ping and country blocking was pretty easy (and folks on the forums were either spamming us with porn or trying to become a member). though since it was forums based i did allow GETs but restricted POSTs ect vs straight up 0 access

But if the binary came from US even with some malicious code, it would be OK simply because the origin is different?

>with some malicious code

Obviously not.