Yeah, their CTO accepting and repeating the complaint at face value, in less than 10 words to justify the censorship, is not a good look

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/216586#...

I tried not to share too much details while we were still in process of figuring out the details.

The legal advice we got was basically “block asap or risk jail time”. Moreover, the risk would still be there even if the complainant is shady or hiding their identity.

So it took us some time to do the digging and make sure that illegal content was removed which was the prerequisite to unblocking.

The digging is not finished btw, we’ll later post a proper analysis of our reaction and the results of the research.

I think that is an unreasonable expectation given the advice they received from their lawyer

Maybe it would have been virtuous to fight it tooth-and-nail from the start, but I don't think it was wrong to comply while investigating further

This is why it’s better to use AdGuard only for its DNS blocking capability and not for DNS resolving - use a real resolver like unbound https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbound_(DNS_server)

I would advise against using unbound on the client side as this way all your DNS queries will be unencrypted and visible to your ISP. Besides that, the DNS responses can be modified, this kind of censorship is very popular and used in many countries.

IMO it is safer to use a big popular DNS recursor (google, cloudflare, adguard, quad9, etc), use DoT/DoH/DoQ and maybe add some additional filtering on top of it.

Thanks for the context - it changes the light of the parent article.