How to Access Geo-Restricted Websites on Ubuntu Using Lantern

So your friend in the United States told you about Pandora, and the service immediately caught your fAndy. You tried accessing it from your location (say India) but got an error saying that Pandora isn’t available in your region. I am sure this situation happends often.

Frankly speaking, it’s the end of the road for most users who aren’t tech savvy. For the well-informed, however, web proxies and VPN services are the available options, but rarely do people put in so much effort to access a single service, except of course if it’s something urgent.

What if you could just install a software that automatically bypasses geo-restrictions while you go about surfing the Internet the same way you do now? Sounds interesting, right? In this article we will discuss a tool, Lantern, that does this for you.

Lantern

So, what exactly is Lantern? It’s an Internet proxy tool that lets you access blocked sites. Developed by Brave New Software Project, the application is free as well as open source, and according to the company, it “delivers fast, reliable and secure access to the open Internet.”

As for how the tools works, the official website explains: “Lantern automatically detects whether or not a site is blocked and then accesses the blocked site either through our own servers or through Lantern users running as access points in the uncensored world. If a site is unblocked, Lantern gets out of the way, and your browser accesses it directly to give you the fastest possible access.”

Download and Install

You can download the installation package from Lantern’s official website. It’s worth mentioning that Lanternsupports multiple OS platforms – including Windows, Linux, and Android – but this article will focus on how to get the application up and running on Ubuntu.

There’s only a single “Download Desktop” option on Lantern’s website, and clicking on it triggers the download of your OS-specific package. For example, in the case of Ubuntu, a .deb package will be downloaded which can be easily installed by double-clicking on the downloaded package file. Once the installation part is over, you can launch Lantern either through the Unity Dash