China blocks censorship circumvention software Lantern after a surge of Chinese users

Authorities in China don’t like its citizens vaulting over the Great Firewall, bypassing its behemoth machine of online censorship. That’s why the Great Firewall has infiltrated and managed to block Lantern, a free peer-to-peer censorship circumvention tool.

Yesterday, lots of users of Lantern in China began posting to social media about how it was no longer working as a proxy web connection for them. Today, the Lantern team confirmed:

As many of you know, Lantern fallback servers have been blocked by the Great Firewall in China. For more information: http://t.co/vdAgwjXxZx

— getlantern.org (@getlantern) December 11, 2013

The getlantern.org homepage for the software is also blocked in China.

The Lantern team explained in a blog post how the infiltration into this invitation-only free service happened:

The way we have allowed users to request invites meant that anyone could sign up, including the censors. If you happened to sign up at the same time as a censor, you would be sharing the same fallback proxy, which the censor would end up blocking. This means that all other users who signed up at that same time would also get blocked.

But the team is fighting back: