Meet the tech making online censorship
Images of people taking to the streets in China have filled the news for more than a week. The nationwide wave of demonstrations against the strict zero-Covid policy is believed to be the largest since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
However, it is not limited to the street – the internet is also an important battlefield. Digital protesters use software like top VPN services to break through China’s Great Firewall and spread information beyond the country’s borders.
While the Chinese authorities may be the best equipped in the field, online censorship is on the rise around the world. In Iran, for example, the government recently restricted Instagram and WhatsApp in an attempt to silence protesters. The same happened in Turkey after the blast in Istanbul.
According to the latter Freedom House report, by 2022 two-thirds of the countries analyzed “cut off residents from the flow of news and information across borders”. At the same time, “governments are increasingly blocking, criminalizing or imposing regulatory requirements on circumvention tools.” A act against VPNs is exactly what is happening in China right now.
As authorities increasingly focus on VPN apps, a technology company has developed a tool solely dedicated to helping people bypass censorship. As one of the developers told TechRadar, Lantern (opens in new tab) does whatever it takes to access censored content.
What is Lantern?
“Lantern is still working great in China,” said Lucas, one of Lantern’s developers. “It’s just purely focused on how to get traffic in and out of highly censored countries.”
People who live outside extreme censorship environments may not have heard of such software. But Lantern has been helping people beat censorship for a long time, since about 2013.
Users trying to bypass the Great Firewall were the first to download Lantern when their China VPN wasn’t enough. “We largely earned our stripes in China and learned a lot there.”
Then the wave of pro-monarchy protests in 2016 made it popular among Iranians. A similar increase in demand was matched only in September this year, when the death of 22-year-old girl Mahsa Amini sparked a wave of unrest that continues today.
“I think it was clear relatively early, especially in China, that there was going to be an ongoing battle between tools and censors. So we thought we had a useful role to play. Some useful ideas and technical expertise would get more complicated.”
From protocol variations that hide the traffic the government wants to censor, to different server configurations that can escape authorities’ blocks, Lantern uses a wide variety of different techniques depending on which censorship machine needs to be defeated.
“We made some small optimizations in some countries because we realized we could exploit some loopholes,” Lucas told TechRadar. “There are certainly common things that we do everywhere. But it could be that one protocol that works in one country doesn’t work in another, or that the context is just a little different.”
For example, political events seem to be a big factor to take into account, as most countries have a stricter approach during politically sensitive moments.
Available for all major operating systems (Windows, Android, iOS MacOS and Ubuntu), users can choose between both a free and paid plan. The latter offers unlimited access through the daily data limit of 256 MB. It also gives users access to dedicated data centers.
The vast majority of people who download the tool are Lantern free users. However, following the latest events in China, the company saw a 400% increase in Lantern Pro purchases.
Lantern vs VPNs
Lantern is certainly not the only circumvention tool out there. Secure VPN services are widely used to circumvent online censorship, for example. However, according to the CEO, Lantern is better equipped for such a task.
A means of increasing online privacy, a VPN spoofs users’ real location. This means that, in theory, they can access otherwise censored content no matter where they are in the world.
Unfortunately, as the use of VPNs increased among those living under restricted internet freedom, governments are working harder and harder to hinder their work.
This is mainly possible because providers use specific VPN protocols to encrypt traffic that techniques such as deep packet inspection can identify and block. They also usually have only a few IP addresses in each country, which can be easily recognized.
Despite VPNs now using tactics like obfuscation technology to get around such blocks, Lucas believes the difference between the two is still significant.
“With Lantern, there’s a huge gap with a lot of different techniques to make it more sophisticated to get around what censorship does and what censorship is capable of,” he said.
What’s next?
With nearly 10 years of experience under its belt, Lantern’s user base has grown about four times over the past year. “Unfortunately, as the world gets worse, our users go up,” said Lucas.
As the issue of censorship is expected to become even more relevant in the near future, the company is working on a number of new features to make the internet accessible to everyone around the world.
To discover provides a censorship-resistant and privacy-protected public content archive, while providing an easy way to find and share censored or potentially censored content. Using peer-to-peer technology, all Lantern users can anonymously and securely upload videos and content for the world to see.
“The idea is that it’s a free space to distribute content internally in the country,” Lucas explains.
Available only for Android and desktops at the time of writing, the feature has already been used by Iranians for the past few months.
The use of lanterns in Iran is on the rise…. Currently, at least 8% of Iran’s total internet capacity penetrates our application! Keep sharing our download free and open internet access: https://t.co/j3xsgaShZB #MahsaAmini #filternetSeptember 30, 2022
Has yet to be released, it is To chat feature is a secure and private messaging service. It’s very similar to Signal, but with more secure defaults and built-in censorship bypass. It requires no phone number, no personal registration, and no SIM card for added anonymity.
There is also one in the pipeline web proxying project expected to be out at the end of this year. This works as a widget that can be integrated into any website, allowing visitors to click on it and use it as a proxy to access the open internet.
Whether through effective protocols running under it, or people in uncensored regions contributing with their IP address and bandwidth, Lantern aims to be a tool to make the internet freer on a fundamental level in a truly collaborative way.
“By implementing this type of overlay network on the Internet, we hope that censorship will be very difficult to achieve.”
