1/24/2024 0 Comments Lantern for mac download free![]() Please note that Lantern is a Beta product (at the time of writing this). There aren’t many settings to play with: choose if you want Lantern to automatically run at startup, choose if you want to proxy all traffic, choose if you want to report anonymous usage statistics. When Lantern launches, your default web browser will launch as well and will take you to a “Welcome to Lantern” webpage, webpage that features tabs for several websites, including Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook.įrom this Welcome page, you can access Lantern’s settings. Speaking about that, while Lantern is up and running, you will see its icon in the system tray (that’s in the lower right hand corner, where the clock is). Once you have the installer, run it and a setup wizard will show up and guide you through the steps you need to take to get Lantern up and running on your PC. Lantern’s installer is quite lightweight, so downloading it shouldn’t take long. The bottom line is this: if you can’t access certain websites because they’re blocked in your region, Lantern will help you “unblock them”. ![]() It automatically detects if a website is blocked or not if it is blocked, Lantern finds a way around the block, either by using its own servers or by redirecting traffic through Lantern users who live in an uncensored part of the world. I'll update the post should that change, but for now, you're still better off with one of the services in our VPN buyer's guide - my recommendation is ProtonVPN or Mullvad.Lantern uses proxy technology to help you access blocked sites. Accessing a reliable VPN is always a hassle in the country, so I want to see if Lantern's claims of providing access to the broader internet hold up in that situation.Ĭonsidering what the Pro tier costs and the inherent limitations, Lantern doesn't really make sense as a general-use proxy service or as an alternative to a VPN. Lantern's best use case is evading censorship, and I intend to test the service to a better extent the next time I'm in China. Free services like Freegate do a decent enough job when it comes to unblocking websites, and if you need additional features, I'd still suggest going with a VPN. Ultimately, Lantern does a good job as a proxy service, but it isn't the only one to do so. It is useful in getting around content restrictions, and the local nature of the service means content uploaded in a region stays in that country. Users have the ability to upload documents, audio and videos, and images that can be accessed by other Lantern users. (Image credit: Harish Jonnalagadda / Android Central)Īnother differentiator for the service is a Discover feature that's essentially a P2P network. Lantern clearly has a few benefits in how aggressively it rotates IPs and the fact that it guarantees uptime when similar services go down, but that only comes in handy in countries like Iran and China, and it's no wonder that an overwhelming majority of the service's userbase is in those regions. If you just need a reliable way to stay safe online, a VPN still makes a lot of sense as it gives you better privacy and more choice with regards to region selection.Īnd even in scenarios where a VPN is targeted by a government, the IPs are cycled frequently enough that you can get back up without too much of a hassle. That said, there are limitations around usability - there's no way to select a region, no account management, and the free tier is hobbled by bandwidth restrictions. In my usage, I found Lantern to be just as fast as my VPN of choice - ProtonVPN - and it did a decent job unblocking websites. The lack of account management is an annoyance I use zero-knowledge services like ZeroTier and Tailscale that do a much better job in this regard, and Lantern says that it is considering going a similar route. That includes user credentials there's no account management as such, and if you buy a Pro account, you get a code that you'll need to key in on every device you use to unlock unlimited data (it works on up to three devices). ![]() ![]() As for security, Lantern anonymizes your data in transit, and the brand notes that it flushes server logs every day and doesn't store any user data. ![]()
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