Censorship might be dead. Here’s why.
Dear Fight for the Future member,
Imagine how awful it would be if your favorite websites were blocked by your government. And if, no matter how tech-savvy you were, every tool or trick you used to escape censorship was blocked in a matter of months.
That’s what life is like for China’s entire population of 1.3 billion people. In the country that produces 90% of the world’s smartphones, you can’t even reach YouTube – and the government shuts down anti-censorship tools as soon as they become popular.
But now, there’s a new hope in the fight against censors: Lantern.
Lantern is an app that anyone can run to fight censorship. When you run it, you join a global network: If your Internet is uncensored, you *give* uncensored access to others. If your Internet is censored, you can *get* uncensored access via someone else.
Lantern’s features make it really hard to block. It disguises its traffic and bounces it through popular, costly-to-censor services. It also builds a giant cloud of volunteer proxies, using a “six degrees of separation” trick to find friends of friends to proxy through, increasing the number of internet addresses involved and making it impractical for censors to block every one. But to make this work, we need thousands of people (you!) to download Lantern and run it.
Sometimes the Internet wins by banding together as a community. Sometimes we win through clever technical tricks. This time, the problem requires both: we need to come together around tools like this to get a victory.
Lantern is free, open source, and just takes a minute. Can you install Lantern and help beat China’s censors?
Once you install it, you forget it’s there. I’ve been running Lantern for months now with no issues. Please do install it now!
Sincerely,
Holmes Wilson
Fight for the Future
P.S. We’re excited to partner with Lantern to help spread this freedom fighting software far and wide. They’re a non-profit like us, and they’re running an indiegogo campaign right now. If you’re psyched, you should donate; Lantern is a 501©3 non-profit and the proceeds will go to a great cause!
P.P.S. Lantern is built for Mac, Windows, and Linux. If you’re seeing this email on your phone, can you share it instead?