Lantern is a free

internet censorship circumvention Internet censorship circumvention is the use of various methods and tools to bypass internet censorship. Various techniques and methods are used to bypass Internet censorship, and have differing ease of use, speed, security, and risks. Some method ...

tool that operates in some of the most extreme censorship environments, such as China, Iran, and Russia. It uses wide variety of protocols and techniques that obfuscate network traffic and/or co-mingle traffic with protocols censors are reluctant to block. It also uses domain fronting. It is not an anonymity tool like

Tor Tor, TOR or ToR may refer to: Places * Tor, Pallars, a village in Spain * Tor, former name of Sloviansk, Ukraine, a city * Mount Tor, Tasmania, Australia, an extinct volcano * Tor Bay, Devon, England * Tor River, Western New Guinea, Indonesia Sc ...

. Early versions of Lantern allowed users in countries having free internet access to share their internet connection with those who are in countries where the network is partly blocked. Network connections will be dispersed between multiple computers running Lantern so it will not put undue stress on a single connection or computer. Lantern's CEO and lead developer is

Adam Fisk Adam; el, Ἀδάμ, Adám; la, Adam is the name given in Genesis 1-5 to the first human. Beyond its use as the name of the first man, ''adam'' is also used in the Bible as a pronoun, individually as "a human" and in a collective sense as " ...

, a former lead engineer of

LimeWire LimeWire was a free peer-to-peer file sharing client for Windows, MacOS, Linux and Solaris. Created by Mark Gorton in 2000, it was most prominently a tool used for the download and distribution of pirated materials, particularly pirated mus ...

and LittleShoot. In early December 2013, Lantern had a surge of Chinese users and could reach from 200 users to 10,000 users in just two weeks. Soon after that, the network was almost blocked by the Chinese government. Another surge occurred after the

2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine On 24 February 2022, in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014. The invasion has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths on both sides. It has caused Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II. ...

when internet freedoms in Russia were severely curtailed. The software received US$2.2 million (HK$17.1 million) in seed funding from the US State Department. Lantern is hosted on a wide variety and continually changing set of data centers around the world. It has used Digital Ocean at times, which was briefly reported as blocked in Iran during the civil unrest on January 2, 2018.

History

In early versions, Lantern's framework required the use of Google Talk for users to invite other trusted users from their Google Talk contacts. It has received funding from the

US Department of State The United States Department of State (DOS), or State Department, is an executive department of the U.S. federal government responsible for the country's foreign policy and relations. Equivalent to the ministry of foreign affairs of other ...

. This has raised some concerns about the privacy of users, though Fisk has said the State Department is "incredibly hands off" and never dictates how they should write Lantern, or how they should talk about it. Users are not required to connect by invite since version 2.0 was released in 2015.

Privacy policy

Pe
Lantern's privacy policy document
on their website

Lantern servers do not and will never log: * Linking Lantern account to real identity (such as purchase information) * Connection logs (time stamps of connection of IP addresses from client to Lantern server) * Browsing history * Traffic destination or metadata * DNS queries

Lantern collects as little information about their customers as possible in order to run their service:

Our guiding principle toward data collection is to collect only the minimal data required to operate a world-class service at scale. We designed our systems to not have sensitive data about our customers; even when compelled, we cannot provide data that we do not possess.

Related events

At the beginning of 2019, it was reported that the Guangdong police had imposed penalties on the basis of the "Interim Provisions on the Administration of the International Network of Computer Information Network of the People's Republic of China" for a Lantern user to "create and use illegal channels for international networking." The fine is a thousand Yuan. The document of the punishment was publicized on the “Guangdong Public Security Law Enforcement Information Disclosure Platform”.
In March of 2022 it was reported that Russian users were employing Lantern to bypass censorship measures put in place by the Russian government.

Notes

External links

References