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Hello! Today we're starting AirVPN ninth birthday celebrations! From a two servers service located in a single country providing a handful of Mbit/s, the baby has grown up to a wide infrastructure in 22 countries in three continents, providing now 230,000+ Mbit/s to tens of thousands of people around the world. Software related development has also been powered up. Eddie Android edition is now a fully mature application which features an exclusive best effort method to prevent traffic leaks and a complete integration with AirVPN. In 2019 AirVPN has also started operating in South America, on top of Asia, Europe and North America, and the infrastructure has grown significantly, counting now on more than 260 bare metal servers, whose traffic is mainly powered by tier1 and tier2 transit providers. AirVPN has also become recently an EFF "Super Major Donor" member. Furthermore, and we're very glad to announce it here publicly for the first time, development for OpenBSD and FreeBSD has started. We are also integrating OpenVPN 3 on new software which will couple Eddie on UNIX-like systems, including Linux, during the second half of 2019. GDPR compliance was already a de facto standard for AirVPN way before the Regulation entered into force, mainly because we don't collect personal data, period. By the way the compliance is now fully formalized (check details in our Privacy Notice and Terms https://airvpn.org/privacy ). AirVPN provides probably the strongest protection to your data, not only personal data but all data, you can find on any service. If you are an AirVPN customer or user, you are probably aware that our service is radically different than any other VPN service you might have met anywhere. No whistles and bells, no marketing fluff, no fake locations, no advertising on mainstream media, a transparent privacy policy, no trackers on the web site or in mobile applications, no bullshit of any kind in our infrastructure to sell your personal data to any personal data merchant, and above all a clear mission which is the very reason which AirVPN operates for. https://airvpn.org/mission Many of you know that when you buy AirVPN service, you not only support yourself and improve your ability to exercise your fundamental rights, but you also support AirVPN mission. However, while AirVPN in itself has flourished, AirVPN mission aims and values related to fundamental rights have experienced, in 2018 and 2019, a grim time. Australia "encryption-busting" monstrous law is fully in force; the European Union has definitively approved the bad Copyright Directive, mandating automated filters, which will unavoidably limit freedom of expression on big boards, and making the first step to undermine the liability exemptions of mere conduits and web publishers alike; new threats to citizens' privacy are becoming real through plans of wide face recognition deployment, indiscriminate DNA databases proposals, more pervasive and efficient profiling (possibly even through AI), and strict cooperation between Internet tech giants and intelligence agencies; the persecution of journalists, publishers and whistleblowers all around the world has reached unprecedented levels, revealing a widespread plan to suppress freedom of the press and freedom of expression even in so called "Western democracies". One of the greatest journalists and publishers of all times, Julian Assange, nominated seven times for the Nobel Peace prize and winner of many journalistic prizes and awards, has been and is prosecuted and persecuted for having merely published the truth about war crimes, corruption, torture and more, with a 100% accuracy, and for having protected his sources as any good investigative journalist does. He has been detained arbitrarily and illegally, as widely ascertained and recognized by the UN. He has been victim of an abominable smear campaign based on ignominious lies and defamation, a campaign aimed to turn the public opinion against him and distract from WikiLeaks publications content exposing war criminals in governments key positions, warmongers, torture maniacs, systematic illegal surveillance, endemic privacy violations and plots to limit and reduce fundamental rights. He is currently detained in solitary confinement 23 hours a day, with no access to books, maximum two visits per month, forbidden in practice to coordinate a defense with his lawyers, in a tiny cell of a maximum security UK prison which has been designed for dangerous murderers and terrorists, while UK will decide whether to extradite him to the USA to face a potential 175 years imprisonment. Whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, who should be regarded as a hero, as Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Daniel Ellsberg and other titans of our times pointed out, have been tortured and are still persecuted by the very same criminals whose crimes were exposed. Privacy activists and software developers, like Ola Bini in Ecuador, are imprisoned without charges, simply for having showed friendship to Assange or WikiLeaks, or for having developed software aimed to protect privacy through encryption. And the list can go on and on and on. But make no mistake: the dark times we are living in, the environment of fear and intimidation that various governments are building against the exercise of those fundamental rights which our mission forces us to protect to the best of our abilities, the mounting attacks against "encryption for everyone" and the awareness that enemies of human rights nestle inside government agencies, have not undermined our determination. Quite the opposite: they have convinced us that our service is even more necessary now and we are resolute to do even more. Our mission has been and will be empowered by the ongoing support to projects and NGOs which aim to the protection of privacy, personal data and freedom of expression, now more than ever. We have confirmed our support to Tor and we will progressively add support to champions of freedom of expression and privacy in any way our capacities and abilities will allow us. If you're curious to know something about a series of fortunate events which gave birth to AirVPN, have a look here: https://airvpn.org/aboutus To worthily celebrate AirVPN ninth birthday, we're glad to inform you that starting from now we will offer a 20% discount on all long term plans. Hurry up, this special offer will end on June the 11th, 23:59:59 UTC! Check the new prices here. Kind regards and datalove AirVPN Staff

I can confirm that ad-blocking is a difficult thing on Android. Maybe you won't need root forever, only for installing Magisk and from there any change is system-less, i.e., without writing to /system. Edit: Split from Eddie Android 2.3 beta 2 released. Use to discuss ad-blocking in general and Magisk/AdAway combination in specific.

Hello! We're very glad to inform you that a new 1 Gbit/s server located in São Paulo, BR, is available: Lalande. The AirVPN client will show automatically the new server. If you use the OpenVPN client you can generate all the files to access it through our configuration/certificates/key generator (menu "Client Area"->"Config generator"). The server accepts connections on ports 53, 80, 443, 1194, 2018 UDP and TCP. Just like every other "second generation" Air server, Lalande supports OpenVPN over SSL and OpenVPN over SSH, TLS 1.2 and tls-crypt. Full IPv6 support is included as well. As usual no traffic limits, no logs, no discrimination on protocols and hardened security against various attacks with separate entry and exit-IP addresses. You can check the server status as usual in our real time servers monitor: https://airvpn.org/servers/lalande Do not hesitate to contact us for any information or issue. Kind regards and datalove AirVPN Team

I'm struggling with the same dilemma. Since NetGuard, a root-less Firewall + custom Host file for ad-blocking uses a custom VPN Tunnel, and Android does not support chaining VPNs, I thought of following solution for my future Android: Install NetGuard, then all other necessary apps to configure FW-rules. push a custom host file (EnergizedProtection + Entries from FW-ruleset) via (temporary) adb root. Use Eddie forth on. Never owned any smartphone to this date, so constructive criticism/tip is warmly welcomed.

Please for the love of it always refer to the official XDA thread about Magisk! There are millions of copycats who design fancy-looking websites and claim they are the official Magisk website. Magisk does not have a website! Their downloads are malicious! Root is mighty and can turn your phone from average to super-freedom but also to super-spyware. Magisk is much more. It's actually the modern replacement for old-school rooting apps and the famous XPosed Framework. App developers with the help of Google nowadays have more options to detect root and disallow usage of their apps if they so desire. It's very easy: You can for example simply check for /system/sbin/su. A phone with original firmware from the manufacturer does not have that binary, so anyone with it obviously had write permissions to /system at some point. SuperSU for example, but also such old apps as Framaroot, are doing this. On the contrary, Magisk does not do that. It still must write to /system to make at least some libraries accessible to the system, but anything else happens in RAM.

Thanks for the reference to Magisk. I looked it up and it is worth further investigation. (I'm used to SuperSU but evidently Magisk is more up-to-date and has other advantages.)

My imprecise and vague understanding is that generally the ad blockers on Android use a VPN to allow them to change the DNS resolution of ad sites to 127.0.0.1 . Apparently without the VPN they are not allowed to make those changes. AFAIK, PIA and IIRC PureVPN have ad blockers within their clients.

Usually 9 months of testing is enough for any creature... 😀

Running three machines on Deb Stretch. Smooth as silk, fast too!