Mar 28, 2022 19:00:00

Internet censorship is advancing Russia is moving to build a censorship avoidance network

Since Russia's military invasion of Ukraine began, access to SNS such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram has been

blocked in Russia. In addition, free access to the Internet is being restricted in Russia, as it has been pointed out that the Russian government may be planning to disconnect the domestic Internet from overseas. Meanwhile, it turned out that the Internet censorship avoidance service ' Lantern ' is building a P2P network in Russia that is not affected by the Internet blockade by the Russian government.

Meet the Secretive US Company Building an'Unbreakable' Internet Inside Russia
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3n5e9/russian-internet-lantern

Since the invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government has blocked access to news services such asGoogle News in addition to SNS such as Twitter and Facebook. In addition, the Russian government succeeded in 'experiment to disconnect the domestic network from the Internet' in 2019, and it is pointed out that the Russian government may actually execute the disconnection of the network in the future. The Internet censorship avoidance service 'Lantern' is attracting attention as a countermeasure against Internet censorship by the Russian government.

Russia succeeds in 'testing to disconnect domestic network from the Internet' --GIGAZINE

Lantern is a service with

a track record of receiving a total of $ 1,091,506 (about 135 million yen) from the non-profit organization ' Open Technology Fund ' funded by the U.S. government, Windows, macOS, Ubuntu, iOS , We provide an internet censorship avoidance app for Android . Lantern allows you to access external information through servers distributed around the world, even in areas affected by Internet censorship. For this reason, Lantern has become very popular in areas where internet connections are censored, such as China, and has been downloaded more than 150 million times by the time the article was written. It also has 7 million monthly active users.

According to the Lantern development team, communication via Lantern's servers has increased about 1000 times in the four weeks since Russia's invasion of Ukraine began. However, even if the use of Lantern spreads to the Russian people, it will be impossible to avoid censorship via overseas servers if the measure of 'separating the domestic network from the Internet' is implemented. In preparation for this situation, Lantern's development team has been preparing for P2P communication in Russia for about two years. The development team appealed that if the P2P network under construction actually works, Lantern users will be able to use the P2P network to share protests against the war and movies containing the latest information without fear of censorship. I am.