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Comment by adamfisk | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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?

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