Making Sure Lantern Is Genuine
Malicious actors may try to impersonate official Lantern web pages, software, email, and other content to spread false information, track potential Lantern users, or spread malware disguised as Lantern. It is very important to always make sure Lantern content is genuine.
Fortunately, verifying that Lantern content is genuine is relatively simple. See below to find out how, but first, here is how you can tell that this page is itself genuine: Look at the address bar in your browser and note that the address begins with exactly the following: https://github.com/getlantern. This is the official home of the Lantern project on github.com, which is the site used to host Lantern's source code and documentation. (TODO: Update this when we migrate the docs off the GitHub wiki.)
With that out of the way, read on to find out how to verify other sources of Lantern content.
The official Lantern web site is https://getlantern.org. Notice the https (as opposed to http) in the beginning of that address. Always using the https address means your browser will guarantee it's connecting to the official getlantern.org web site. If anyone with the ability to intercept your traffic, such as your government or ISP, tried to tamper with it, your use of https means your browser can detect the interference and warn you about it rather than loading the phony site.[1]
Also notice that "getlantern.org" looks a lot like "getIantern.org" (with a capital "i" in place of the lowercase "l") and also looks a lot like "getlantem.org" (with an "m" in place of the "rn"), especially with certain fonts. Team Lantern has bought up all these lookalike domains, as well as registered the lookalike usernames on GitHub, Twitter, and other sites, to prevent harmful impersonation, but you should beware that this trick can still show up in other places.
The getlantern.org web site is blocked in certain countries, but Amazon S3 -- a widely used web hosting provider -- is often unblocked in these countries. For this reason, the Lantern developers maintain an official mirror of getlantern.org on S3 at the following address:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/getlantern.org/index.html
This is the one and only official mirror of getlantern.org. If you ever see a web site claiming to be Lantern that is neither https://getlantern.org nor the official mirror above, don't trust it.
TODO
TODO
The following is an exhaustive list of all official Lantern accounts. If you ever come across Lantern content that is not listed here, please email team@getlantern.org with subject "Genuine Content?" and we will verify it and add it here.
- https://twitter.com/getlantern
- https://www.facebook.com/getlantern
- https://www.youtube.com/getlantern
- http://get-lantern.tumblr.com/
- http://lanterndev.tumblr.com/
- http://instagram.com/getlantern
[1] Advanced users who wish to verify getlantern.org's https certificate can check that its SHA1 matches the following fingerprint: DE 5F B1 45 AE 9A D3 15 30 D7 DB AF 85 91 C7 A8 62 F5 15 D3. See https://www.grc.com/fingerprints.htm for third-party verification.