
Lantern – Open Internet for Everyone - obilgic
https://getlantern.org/
======
gardnr
The README has so much information except... From
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lantern_(software)](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.

~~~
neonbat
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."

~~~
adamfisk
Yeah sorry about that! I just added a more detailed description.

~~~
neonbat
Thanks :) Love the idea of making proxies simple by the way.

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mirimir
This reminds me of Hola.[0] Even if there's no risk of exploitation by
developers, it's risky to freely share your uplink.

[0] [http://www.dailydot.com/technology/hola-vpn-
security/](http://www.dailydot.com/technology/hola-vpn-security/)

~~~
timboslice
Isn't Hola the company that sells "stressing" services using their network,
aka DDOS attacks?

~~~
mirimir
Yes, that's their claim to fame.

But that's a distinct issue from unregulated uplink sharing.

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wmf
Mods, please change URL to [https://getlantern.org/](https://getlantern.org/)

~~~
dang
Ok. Url changed from
[https://github.com/getlantern/lantern?](https://github.com/getlantern/lantern?).

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nanocyber
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.

~~~
adamfisk
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.

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gue5t
They seem to have accidentally replaced their README with their INSTALL file.

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halosghost
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...](https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lantern-one-device-free-data-
from-space-forever)

~~~
livingparadox
That looks like a different project of the same name. The lantern in this post
is a desktop app that bypasses site blockers.

~~~
halosghost
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

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Lorento
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.

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andor
This presentation gives an overview of the project:

[http://getlantern.github.io/Beating_GFW_With_Go/](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](https://github.com/getlantern/flashlight),
the proxy library is
[https://github.com/getlantern/enproxy](https://github.com/getlantern/enproxy).

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wodenokoto
Page doesn't really say what it does. Can't it climb the great firewall?

~~~
hackuser
See [https://getlantern.org/](https://getlantern.org/)

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tjbiddle
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.

~~~
adrusi
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.

~~~
adamfisk
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.

~~~
adrusi
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).

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avinassh
The repo does not have License for the code. So is it not 'open source'
project?

~~~
adamfisk
We recently migrated repositories when we ported things to Go, and this got
lost in the process. I just added it back in!

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Kinnard
Wonder how this will play with BitMesh:
[https://www.bitmesh.network/](https://www.bitmesh.network/)

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PhaseMage
Pretty slick tool, hope it works well! How do they avoid the Tragedy of the
Commons?

~~~
greglindahl
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.

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fossuser
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.

~~~
adamfisk
Adam Fisk from Lantern here. The big problems with Tor for a lot of censored
users are:

    
    
      1) Download size
      2) Speed
    

Especially in a country like Iran where bandwidth is limited, the download
size of the Tor Browser alone is enough to make it used relatively rarely.
Couple that with much slower speeds once you're up and running, and it's just
a non-starter for many users.

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.

~~~
mirimir
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?

~~~
adamfisk
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.

~~~
mirimir
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?

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michaelmior
> 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.

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Paul_S
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.

~~~
cholmesny
All the available binaries are listed at the top of the readme on
[https://github.com/getlantern/lantern](https://github.com/getlantern/lantern)

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rsy96
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?

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daveloyall
Blocked from work. Fortinet.

~~~
adamfisk
Really? Remember Lantern is only an HTTP proxy. It can't access web sites that
are blocked from your work?

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mangeletti
Uh oh; Get ready for another large-scale DDoS from somewhere in the vicinity
of China.

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nickleefly
not a lot of people knows this tool in China.

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ninjachen
surf facebook smooth in china, +1

