Lantern – Open Internet for Everyone(getlantern.org)
getlantern.org
Lantern – Open Internet for Everyone
https://getlantern.org/
47 comments
Isn't Hola the company that sells "stressing" services using their network, aka DDOS attacks?
Yes, that's their claim to fame.
But that's a distinct issue from unregulated uplink sharing.
But that's a distinct issue from unregulated uplink sharing.
This is very cool, and in my opinion, a realization of how I feel the interwebs should be working anyway... voluntary distribution of bandwidth, freedom from large ISPs... enables high-capacity short-run network connections to thrive. Exciting!
With regard to states wishing to suppress this sort of activity, I do have concerns that a behavioral signature will emerge that will be fairly telling... I suspect it may not be difficult to crack down on users. Nonetheless, the concept has potential for many reasons.
With regard to states wishing to suppress this sort of activity, I do have concerns that a behavioral signature will emerge that will be fairly telling... I suspect it may not be difficult to crack down on users. Nonetheless, the concept has potential for many reasons.
That's certainly the big picture goal -- to build a decentralized network at the application layer that systematically removes points of control, with censorship being one of those points of control and a useful starting point.
I know someone who uses this in China and apparently it's fantastic. Faster than commercial VPN services even for streaming video. Not sure how that'll work out in the long run if it gets more users than providers.
The concept sounds quite insecure but apparently it only allows HTTPS connections so it's delegating encryption to that instead of doing it itself.
The concept sounds quite insecure but apparently it only allows HTTPS connections so it's delegating encryption to that instead of doing it itself.
This presentation gives an overview of the project:
http://getlantern.github.io/Beating_GFW_With_Go/
The main idea is "domain fronting": hiding proxy traffic inside connections to regular websites.
The actual application is https://github.com/getlantern/flashlight, the proxy library is https://github.com/getlantern/enproxy.
http://getlantern.github.io/Beating_GFW_With_Go/
The main idea is "domain fronting": hiding proxy traffic inside connections to regular websites.
The actual application is https://github.com/getlantern/flashlight, the proxy library is https://github.com/getlantern/enproxy.
Seems great so far! I've been living in Indonesia and Reddit has been blocked - normally I have to pop on my VPN to waste time, now I can do it at my leisure!
I should probably uninstall this.
I should probably uninstall this.
Is bypassing the firewall illegal? How do you avoid getting caught? It would seem that using a vpn all the time would implicate you. I can only see it working with something like tor where you're always connecting through a different node and the nodes aren't officially affiliated with any common organization.
There are no known cases of people getting arrested simply for bypassing censors. Anonymity in the Tor context purely means anonymity from network observers learning your IP, not from network observers learning whether or not you're running Tor.
Well they know that you're running tor, but they can't prove that you used to access censored content. For all they know you just used it to make sure that your website blocks connections from tor exit nodes (please don't do that by the way).
It seems dangerous to use this instead of Tor. If you're in a county censoring the Internet (possibly using deep packet inspection) just getting around the censorship may not be safe enough.
It's better to use a system that can actually help to protect your anonymity.
It's better to use a system that can actually help to protect your anonymity.
Adam Fisk from Lantern here. The big problems with Tor for a lot of censored users are:
Beyond that, though, the vast majority of users are also simply not engaging in activity online that will realistically put them in danger. Users in censored regions are really like users anywhere else in that respect -- they are not doing illegal things online that would make them targets.
On the DPI front, every major censor definitely uses DPI in an effort to block tools like Lantern.
That said, Tor is great at what it does, and we strongly support the Tor team and their work and collaborate with them whenever we can.
1) Download size
2) Speed
Beyond that, though, the vast majority of users are also simply not engaging in activity online that will realistically put them in danger. Users in censored regions are really like users anywhere else in that respect -- they are not doing illegal things online that would make them targets.
On the DPI front, every major censor definitely uses DPI in an effort to block tools like Lantern.
That said, Tor is great at what it does, and we strongly support the Tor team and their work and collaborate with them whenever we can.
That's cool - and I agree that it is important to tackle this since if users aren't using Tor because they can't download it at least they have an alternative.
>Beyond that, though, the vast majority of users are also simply not engaging in activity online that will realistically put them in danger.
This seems like a difficult claim to make - isn't bypassing the censors itself a risky activity? I guess it depends on the specific government, but people getting beaten or killed for what they've written isn't unheard of.
I'd just worry they might get lulled into thinking if they're getting around the censors that means they can't be tracked - when in the case of Lantern the opposite might be true (they might be getting more attention).
Good luck with the project though - I think it's a really important problem to be hacking on.
>Beyond that, though, the vast majority of users are also simply not engaging in activity online that will realistically put them in danger.
This seems like a difficult claim to make - isn't bypassing the censors itself a risky activity? I guess it depends on the specific government, but people getting beaten or killed for what they've written isn't unheard of.
I'd just worry they might get lulled into thinking if they're getting around the censors that means they can't be tracked - when in the case of Lantern the opposite might be true (they might be getting more attention).
Good luck with the project though - I think it's a really important problem to be hacking on.
What about the risk to users who provide access to other users?
Edit: In Give Access mode, what other users get access? Is that limited to those specified via Google Talk?
Edit: In Give Access mode, what other users get access? Is that limited to those specified via Google Talk?
Yeah great question. The short answer is that we'll ultimately allow give mode users to control what sites are proxied through them. In Lantern 2.x so far we've actually stripped this functionality entirely as a temporary measure for a few reasons. First, we re-wrote the whole app in Go, and we wanted to cut as much scope as possible to make the leap. Second, the whole p2p model works a lot better with a lot of users in censored regions, particularly from more of a marketing perspective in terms of users really having a real impact from uncensored regions as soon as they run Lantern. So for a long time that wasn't the case, but we're now seeing large user numbers and very fast growth in censored regions around the world. So we're going to re-introduce peers very soon, and those peers will have a really significant impact on blocking resistance and cost scalability.
Thanks very much for the thoughtful answer. I do get your focus on providing access for users in censored regions. And it is arguable that few of those users are doing anything that would be problematic for access-providing peers in uncensored regions. But still, Lantern is a system proxy, and so there's more potential for abuse. Have you looked at port filtering and blocklists?
Yeah how are they solving the tor outproxy problem? You are essentially letting another user use your IP to access websites, which holds a lot of room for abuse.
> Can I trust Lantern?
> Lantern is open, anyone can check our source code ...
While it's great that this is open source, I don't see how I have any guarantee that the public source code is actually what's running on the server I connect to.
While it's great that this is open source, I don't see how I have any guarantee that the public source code is actually what's running on the server I connect to.
Where's the link to a sitemap so I can find the downloads section? The autodetect offers me the wrong file for my PC. Minimalism can go too far when you strip out the most basic of basic functionalities.
All the available binaries are listed at the top of the readme on https://github.com/getlantern/lantern
I wonder how many people are donating their bandwidths to this. Will it become unsustainable in the near future when more and more Chinese (a huge number of people) adopt this?
Blocked from work. Fortinet.
Really? Remember Lantern is only an HTTP proxy. It can't access web sites that are blocked from your work?
Uh oh; Get ready for another large-scale DDoS from somewhere in the vicinity of China.
not a lot of people knows this tool in China.
surf facebook smooth in china, +1
I was part of the indiegogo campaign to get the lantern [1] off the ground. I've heard very few updates from them since the campaign ended; here's hoping they still pull it off!
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lantern-one-device-free-d...
[1] https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lantern-one-device-free-d...
Thanks for your support! We are very much still active in the development of Lantern (the physical satellite data receiver). We've sent about 12 updates regarding the campaign; we're a little uneasy about flooding inboxes with campaign updates. You can always read about the latest here: http://blog.outernet.is/
Our newsletter archives are here: http://us3.campaign-archive1.com/home/?u=3b850004d879edb7542...
Our newsletter archives are here: http://us3.campaign-archive1.com/home/?u=3b850004d879edb7542...
That looks like a different project of the same name. The lantern in this post is a desktop app that bypasses site blockers.
Ahh, you appear to be completely correct! The project I was referring to had a software component as well (which is on GitHub); I mistakenly associated the two. My apologies!
I will leave my GP comment here in case people find the other project interesting; but they do appear to be unrelated. Thanks for clearing that up :D
I will leave my GP comment here in case people find the other project interesting; but they do appear to be unrelated. Thanks for clearing that up :D
Page doesn't really say what it does. Can't it climb the great firewall?
[deleted]
They seem to have accidentally replaced their README with their INSTALL file.
The README has so much information except... From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantern_(software)
Lantern is a free peer-to-peer internet censorship circumvention software. It provides a way to bypass state-sanctioned filtration through a network of trusted users, but it's not an anonymity tool like Tor. Using Lantern, users in countries having free internet access can share their bandwidth 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 is a free peer-to-peer internet censorship circumvention software. It provides a way to bypass state-sanctioned filtration through a network of trusted users, but it's not an anonymity tool like Tor. Using Lantern, users in countries having free internet access can share their bandwidth 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.
Yeah it would be nice if they actually said what the software does on the github or in the headline. At first I thought it was a browser or something. Here's the one liner though: "Lantern is an Internet proxy tool that lets you access blocked sites."
The FAQ does mention the anonymity part
> Lantern is not an anonymity tool. Lantern was built for fast and open Internet access. If you feel you need to be anonymous online (if you are posting something you think could bring legal action against you, for example) we recommend using Tor. Otherwise, Lantern will give you faster access to blocked sites.
> Lantern is not an anonymity tool. Lantern was built for fast and open Internet access. If you feel you need to be anonymous online (if you are posting something you think could bring legal action against you, for example) we recommend using Tor. Otherwise, Lantern will give you faster access to blocked sites.
Pretty slick tool, hope it works well! How do they avoid the Tragedy of the Commons?
It appears that it decides for itself when to go direct and when to circumvent. This will limit bandwidth usage and the ability of bad guys to exploit it as an open web proxy, assuming they are good at software.
On the minus side, observer at the Great Firewall can probably learn a lot about Lantern users, unless the Lantern software is really careful.
On the minus side, observer at the Great Firewall can probably learn a lot about Lantern users, unless the Lantern software is really careful.
Mods, please change URL to https://getlantern.org/
Ok. Url changed from https://github.com/getlantern/lantern?.
Wonder how this will play with BitMesh: https://www.bitmesh.network/
[0] http://www.dailydot.com/technology/hola-vpn-security/