What do you think of the censorship circumvention VPNs psiphon[.]ca and lantern[.]io? They are open source, but the docs doesn’t really explain how they bypass restrictions.
I know, it’s usually recommended to choose Mullvad, iVPN, Proton, you name it, they provide Monero/Bitctoin as a payment method, no-logs policy, obfuscation, etc, but I’d like to get some thoughts on these two.
Both Lantern and Pisphon care about breaking GFW (Chinese censorship) and as such are way more advanced in their capabilities (though both have some overlap in technologies and techniques used) than all other VPN providers you listed.
Proton, in the recent past, has brought in some anti-censorship features inspired by XRay/V2Ray/Lantern/Psiphon et al but is no where near as effective nor complete in its implementation as those.
Both Psiphon and Lantern aren’t my idea of “no logs” (in fact, even Proton isn’t and I still recommend and use Proton … but I digress). With Lantern, its privacy policy is ominous. Psiphon’s data handling practices are much more acceptable, but again, it isn’t the guarantees you’d expect from a privacy-focused public VPN (which these two aren’t).
Lantern’s model looks to be in a worse shape financially from what I can tell as an outsider, while Psiphon’s seems to work well.
As for me, both have worked really well in the past. I don’t prefer one over the other when it comes to recommending a public VPN for anti-censorship. I also routinely urge folks use proxifiers like Amnezia, Jigsaw’s Outline, Matsuri’s Nekoray (which is based on SingBox)[1] over public VPNs.
Disclaimer: I’ve contributed to Outline & SingBox and worked with Psiphon and Amenzia code, so I may be biased. ↩︎