PeerBlock File-Sharing Safety Tool Clocks 100,000 Downloads
Written by enigmax on November 11, 2009PeerBlock is a tool which can control who can connect to your computer on the Internet. In addition to hindering monitoring by anti-P2P companies, it’s also capable of blocking malicious software. As the team is currently celebrating more than 100,000 downloads, TorrentFreak caught up with the creators for the lowdown.
Peerblock is a piece of software which lets you control who your computer communicates with on the Internet. By utilizing lists of ‘known bad’ computers, it’s possible for it to block P2P companies from monitoring a user’s file-sharing activities, along with spyware and other malicious software.
Just over a month has passed since the first stable public release of the software and PeerBlock has now managed to clock up more than 100,000 downloads. To mark this milestone, TorrentFreak caught up with Mark from the project for the lowdown.
Mark told us that the creation of PeerBlock was inspired by him upgrading his PC from 32 to 64 bit in order to utilize 6gb of RAM. Everything worked fine – until he tried to get PeerGuardian (another IP blocker) to work.
Having hacked away and jumped through hoops to get around driver-signing it would still only work half the time and often crashed without warning. As a software engineer who has worked in the commercial sector for more than 13 years, Mark – who admits to being “an arrogant bastard who truly believes he can do just about anything better than just about anybody,” decided he could find a solution. It was “put up or shut up time,” he told TorrentFreak.
Noticing that the PeerGuardian code was open-source but hadn’t been touched for a couple of years, Mark contacted another developer who had the same thing in mind, but having heard nothing back, he went at it alone.
“I started setting up a Sourceforge.net project for it so we could get free source-control, but they took too long to set it up for me so I instead created a project over at Google Code where it was ready within minutes,” he told us.
Having heard from a few people who were interested in helping out with the development side – “night_stalker_z” who’d earlier started trying to hack the PG2 code into shape, “DarC” / “DisCoStu” who wanted to help out with fixing up the installer, XhmikosR who rewrote the installer, and some testers, things moved forward.
After facing troubles due to the lack of a “signed driver” for 64-bit versions of Vista (which resulted in Mark having to set up a registered company before they were allowed to buy a $230 code-signing certificate), a couple of blogs wrote articles on PeerBlock which attracted some much-needed publicity to the project. This resulted in 10,000 downloads in just one weekend.
“We’re still getting donations from people and we now have enough to pay for next year’s annual code-signing certificate, and we’re saving up to be able to rent our own VPS with full root access etc, upon which we’ll be able to build a ‘real’ online-update system, a custom web-app to tie our forums/issue-tracker/website all together, and some other neat things,” Mark explains.
The first stable release of PeerBlock came out on September 27th, and as of November 5th had clocked up an impressive 100,000 downloads. The site now receives up to 7,000 visitors each day.
Aside from fixing one or two bugs, the team has lots of new features planned for PeerBlock. Anyone that has tried to surf the web with a blocklist in place will know how painful that can be, so PeerBlock will have some new features which allow the “whitelisting” of certain apps, such as a browser, the creation of a proxy server to let users configure PeerBlock to listen on certain ports, possibly an integral “AdMuncher” style ad-blocking feature on a per URL basis (as opposed to just an IP-address), and an encrypted chat feature.
TorrentFreak asked Mark why users should choose PeerBlock over the competition.
“Well, first off we need to ask ‘Who IS the competition?’ The only ones I’m really aware of are: Protowall by the folks over at Bluetack which is closed-source and I don’t believe was ever updated for Vista, and Outpost Firewall, which is closed-source and basically just a hack add-on to a more professional firewall product,” he responded, while noting that uTorrent’s built-in IP-filtering feature only handles one manually-updated list.
“We protect your entire machine, and give you the option to try out any P2P app you want – this freedom of choice is a very important thing, I think. And since it does everything automatically, including list-updates, it’s one less thing to think about,” he added.
Another important question relates to the blocklists that have to be used in conjunction with PeerBlock in order for it to block anything.
He told TorrentFreak that he’s a big fan of iblocklist, who serve up a staggering 10TB of blocklists every month for free. The site doesn’t create the lists, but does offer those from Bluetack, including the Level1 list (renamed to ‘P2P’ in PG2/PeerBlock, which contains both Gov and Anti-P2P IP-addresses) and others.
Mark admits that even in a best case scenario, the available blocklists aren’t 100% effective. That said, there have been studies which show that using blocklists along with software such as PeerBlock can help speed up downloads, but no-one knows how many of the potential “bad IPs” are covered by currently available blocklists.
P2P aside, Mark says there has been feedback to suggest that PeerBlock discovered a Conficker infection on a user’s machine that their anti-virus programs missed, and can also stop ads appearing in browsers that lack in-built blocking.
One other exciting thing for the future of PeerBlock is porting it to the Mac. Mark says they’re saving all the donations for additional development and this is the most-requested request right now.
Users of PeerBlock are encouraged to give as much feedback as possible to Mark’s team, via their forums, IRC (#peerblock on freenode.net) or email.
PeerBlock can be downloaded here.
Previously: BitTorrent May Kill Zombieland Sequel, Writer Claims
Next: Pre-Release Music Piracy: Further Arrests, Exec Loses Job
104 Responses (Add yours or TrackBack)
Cool article bro
Ive been using PeerBlock for a few days now AND ITS MINT LIKE.
Seems like a agood program :)
Seems like a a good program :)
Very very cool!
Personally I use a VPN but for others who dont have that option, these tools sure do take up some slack.
Pat on the back to Mark, and hats off to you sir.
Good article, been wondering about PeerBlock for some time now
cool response The queen.
Ive been wondering whether youre affiliated with peerblock or not
PeerBlock is the true successor of PeerGuardian2 and ProtoWall.
Congrats to the devs and many others :3
Ya keep it up .. i can’t wait for the new features!!
should I switch from PeerGuardian to PeerBlock?
@9 same question I currently am on PG wondering if I should switch to this new “peer block”
Why should blocking IPs guard you from bad anti p2p people? Those list do not block dial-up ips. Do you think those anti p2p-people are too dumb to use dial-ups for their actions? Think about it.
You should come to the conclusion that those ip blockers are useless. And to block ads you need an adblocker, not an ip filter.
Anti-p2p organizations can still track anybody by using home/dynamic IPs
@9 I did and while it looks almost identical peerblock runs way better and it actually updates.
To #9:
You should. I just downloaded and it’s working just fine. PeerGuardian wasn’t stable. I couldn’t even update IP addresses last three-four days. Several other people had the same problem.
If you think an IP blocking program will protect you on the internet you are fooling yourself big time.
While i dont totally agree with IP blockers I dont agree _totally_ with agree with the negative comments above either.
Personally like I said, I dont use a IP blocker myself, the reason is:
An IP blocker can kind of be compared to an umbrella, its going to keep most of the rain away and will probably keep most of you dry… but you are still going to get get a few drops, your feet wet or the soles of your feet… as its going to be trampling wet ground.
To most getting the soles of your feet wet does not matter, when it comes to P2P… it may.
The anti-pirate scumbags have been known to use their dial up and home connections as well as office connections, its almost impossible to block _all_ of these.
The better option would be a good proxy, or seedboxes or changing your DL’ing habits from BT to something like rapidshare.. or a VPN.
But if you dont want to spring for a seedbox,rapidshare,vpn etc and still want a bit of protection… its still better to have this like nothing at all.. kind of like a condom, it may be her “safe day” but a rubber makes it a bit safer.
“The site now receives up to 7,000 visitors each day.”
That is, before you wrote about it :3
Post moderated
I would like to see something that used the inverse. White lists and mapped the allowed programs that access the internet so it makes difficult to people to spoof messages from some program. On the top of that I would like to see something dynamic and not static. Like if you receive to many bad packets from one location it will block that IP or DNS for a day and increase the time till a limit lets say of a month everytime it releases that IP or DNS from jail but it would have to talk to applications the chances of this being implemented are slim.
Black lists are useless:
- They don’t block really the bad guys out. At one point it worked, today it doesn’t, this is an arms race.
- They have an unacceptable rate of false positives.
- They could speed things up, as they can slow you down blocking people to whom you could have had better connections and was listed as a positive bad peer. Dynamic blocking would be better.
- Ad servers could be blocked but browsers already have this feature and apps that show you ad already can have those IP’s blocked but if it does in an easier way this is a point for it.
- Virus, worms and botnets can’t be disrupted with a black list. White list on the other hand can disrupt malicious apps from sending and receiving data and instructions but only if the app responsible for blocking have some way of knowing which program is sending the data. Hashing the binaries somewhere and checking to see if they match could be a solution to this problem.
@15
“If you think an IP blocking program will protect you on the internet you are fooling yourself big time.”
You’re fooling yourself big time if you think IP blocking programs are useless. Of course they won’t protect you from everything, but they protect you from some things. A pill that prevents cancer may not also prevent AIDS, but that doesn’t mean the cancer pill is useless.
this has served many of my friends well. I know at least 50 people who use it and are quite happy, No ISP letters for any of them in months. Not the best security / privacy in the world by any means but an added layer and a nice piece of open source work. Great job with it Mark and a good topic for an article enigmax
Locking the door to my apartment at night isn’t a 100% proof way to keeping thieves out either, but it can still keep most at bay.
Sounds like a good program.
I usually use Peergaurdian but when I changed out my hard drive went to peerblock. Pretty much the same, updates everytime, while pg2 rarely if ever updated at all…
Screw the Mac. It’s not worth the time and effort.
I use Peerblock and in my blocked IP log I see plenty of attempts to connect to me through the port that I use for uTorrent. They generally have something like “anti-p2p” in the name assigned to their range. Whether those people are actually bittorrent spies or not is anyone’s guess, but I feel a lot better knowing that those attempts to connect to me were stopped.
If I was a business I would be sending the range of IP’s of my competitors to the that black list.
Or if I was an ISP I would send my range of IP’s to that list.
Better to kill P2P with their on weapons LoL
How do people make those lists any ways? can people cheat?
Actually there are many usages of such programs. How about parent control? The integrated filters in the browser (or their add-ons/plugins) have too many flaws. Putting IPs of pedofile site for example in a block list does wonders.
Of course such things aren’t perfect. As many people here mentioned – you might easily get in a black list without your knowledge and without even deserving it – just because you landed in a range of bad IPs.
I’ve always stuck by PG (could never get Protowall to work), but was concerned about the issues with Windows 7 & 64bit (which I’m going to try upgrading to in a week or so).
I’ll give this one a shot and hope for the best – “Mark” certainly has the right attitude, imho.
While good in concept, block lists/programs are generally shit. IPs change and get reassigned all the time, and the people who poison BT swarms aren’t going to be obvious. Unfortunately a lot of legitimate Bittorrent users get blocked in these lists.
and it’s not like these programs prevent them from seeing your IP (which is all they really need to identify you)
enigmax, don’t forget the ohloh site:
https://www.ohloh.net/p/peerblock
code analysis will be available soon, i’ve just set up the enlistment coz noone has done it earlier
And I’d like to see people using I2P/Tor instead of whining and making inane solutions like blacklists.
Peerblock works wonders, haven’t had a single crash since I started using it 5 days ago (PG2 was crashing almost everyday out of the blue and not updating at all).
While I do agree it won’t protect you 100% against anti-p2p stuff it does a good job making it more difficult for them. As it was pointed out, even VPNs or seedboxes can be tracked with enough judicial motivation.
However, it also blocks some ad and malicious ips that my Adblocker (firefox) could not block. So its usage go beyond protecting your file sharing activities.
And yes, a white list could be awesome, specially for parental control. However, for p2p, it’s a matter of time till the anti-p2p guys get themselves into the white lists pretending to be good ol’ pirates. They will also notice they’ll have to send over 50 million people to jail for file sharing illegal stuff but that’s another story…
True anonymity can only be achieved by using a proxy or vpn that won’t log any activity at all OR the vpn is located at a country that couldn’t care less with MAFIAA and merry friends.
Also, if they get popular they’ll block “innocent” netblocks, like PeerGuardian did with CCC. Relying on third-party-provided blacklists is asking to be fucked by them.
> While I do agree it won’t protect you 100% against anti-p2p stuff it does a good job making it more difficult for them.
It provides false sense of security. They get to nice they are blacklisted and will order a new range.
> And yes, a white list could be awesome, specially for parental control.
I’d get pissed if I was a minor and my parents tried to restrict my internets to a whitelist.
s/nice/notice/
> True anonymity can only be achieved by using a proxy or vpn that won’t log any activity at all
Impossible to prove that they don’t log anything. Onion routing comes close to “true privacy”, but “true privacy” is given only to dead people, or ones who never existed.
1. Install\Update to latest µTorrent build.. (1.8.* or 1.9*) ((µTorrent 2.0 optional))
2. Ensure ports are forwarded for bit torrent.. (non standard port recommended)
3. Options >> Preferences >> Advanced >> bt.transp_disposition set to 255
4. >> Bit Torrent > Protocol Encryption > Outgoing: Forced >> Check Allow Legacy Connections..
5. >> Connection >> Set µTorrent forwarded port..
6. >> General >> Associate µTorrent associations >> Install IPV6
7. Click OK..
8. Go to speed guide >> Set you speed profile appropriately..
9. Vista \ Windows 7 – Start > Run *(win-r)* = services.msc
10. Set IP Helper Service to Automatic and ensure it is started..
11. Restart µtorrent.. Ensure port is forwarded and enjoy..
-OPTIONAL SECURITY-
Highly recommended for security.
sites.google.c0m-site-whitehat2k9-Home-my-programs-utorrent-ipfilter-updater (Easy To Use!)
Utilize an ipfilter.dat or program to limit who can connect to your computer!..
—
And\Or
http://www.peerblock.com/
New fork of the PeerGuardian2 project.. ** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!**
PeerBlock lets you control who your computer “talks to” on the Internet. By selecting appropriate lists of “known bad” computers, you can block communication with advertising or spyware oriented servers, computers monitoring your p2p activities, computers which have been “hacked”, even entire countries! They can’t get in to your computer, and your computer won’t try to send them anything either.
And best of all, it’s free!
[BJ - I removed the false and misleading info about hacking the half-open connections, it's not needed (and has never been needed to be done) and only destabilizes the stack]
Just to confirm I am using ipfilter and peerblock at the same time.. They do pick up alot of different hits etc.. Well worth running both.. I haven’t checked the lists though to see what overlaps etc.. I’ve only ever received one warning in my lifetime and while not running PG2 years back..
I use it, and no it doesn’t provide 100% protection, but it’s better than nothing! i like the umbrella analogy – it will keep most of you dry, but your feet might still get a few drops of rain.
Peerblock will never be 100% effective, but it might be 95% effective… which is better than nothign!
Good stuff Yatti420.
Peerblock is great, I have been using it since it was a month old…
It updates much better than PG2 and definitely has NOT been as buggy even in its beta form..
Mark is doing a great job with it..
As for you that say it isnt effective, or it isnt 100%..
Niether are condoms, but if you dont at least make an effort then you are tempting your own fate…
Whatever it takes Ppl, do your ISP’s a favor and limit your visibility…
@ anon 26
“How do people make those lists any ways?”
The lists are made up (an appropriate way to refer to it) by, it seems, adding random IPs, plus some reverse DNS lookups.
If ranges are persistent swarm-pollutors, they will be added. This is the only kind of antiP2P activity that can detected, and thus sourced.
For the logging peers, that collect data for letters and/or lawsuits, there is no way to detect them. These are not added to lists.
The rest of the list comes from (in bluetacks case) any company that makes any software (they ‘have an interest in copyright enforcement’), any (and I do mean ANY) government IP, be it the FBI cybercrimes division, or an african tribe’s government network; and any IP one of their ‘hunters’ doesn’t like the look of (usually misconfigured clients); oh, and TOR, and many seedbox/hosting/VPN providers (because they might be hired for antip2p usage)
It is also trivially easy to tell if someone is running a blocklist, providing you have access to one of the blocked IPs. connect from an unblocked IP, and then attempt from the blocked IP. if you can’t, it’s pretty certain they’re running a blocklist.
Regardles though, Peerguardian and Protowall and Peerblock are all basically the same product. They are all IP blockers that use the exact same lists as each other, so the only thing that changes is the stability and resource usage of the client. The actual effectiveness is still near zero.
Guys.. how smart is it to depend on a tool like this? Not smart at all. No matter how many IP’s it blocks, if some company is hired to catch pirates, they will have little problem doing so, because they will likely be smart enough to use dynamic IPs. And if they aren’t smart enough, then the next people will.
Been using Peerblock 1.0 for about a month now, and was previously using PeerGuardian2….I’ve found that in the month I’ve switched to peerblock 1.0, it’s only slightly glitched out ONCE, meaning it crashed on update but when I opened it immediately after the crash, it opened up no problems…. whereas PG2 might have crashed 2 or 3 times in a month randomly and at points I even had to use the “restore PG” feature of PG2 just to get it running again. But thanks again to the guys at Pheonix Labs for making Peer Guardian 2 in giving it away free in the first place. Hats off to those guys…….. And thanks also to Mark who took the Peerguardian code and updated it and fixed the bugs and turned it into my favorite new program, PEERBLOCK!!!!
@41
Thank you.
I wonder if the article title was “[company name here] is trying to block the internet” if those people who say that it works would be posting things like “idiots!”, “No one can stop the internet!” and things like that.
It would be funny to see the same people who defend this approach saying the exact opposite LoL
The interwebz is funny :)
Very nice! I use PeerBlock (actually, it’s the only blocking software I’ve ever used, because I only started using any in mid-October), and it’s extremely easy to use, with a very intuitive interface and easily added/updated lists. I like.
@44 Unlike other companies, though, these guys aren’t making it mandatory. ;)
wow it blocks valve (steam) piece of shit…
Too bad none of the pros are sharing their advice on how not to get caught. The rest of us are stuck using blacklists.
too bad peerblock doesn’t work for jack shit on x64 systems with custom block lists. Works fine with the default lists, however manually adding sites to the allow list is a pain the ass. Hence, the purpose of custom tailored block lists. Check the bug tracker.
It doesn’t work at all on windows 7 anymore.
Dating site: MixedConnect………….
PB and PG are worthless
data mining never leads to convictions, faggot europeans who talk about how much lewt they have in a non-encrypted drive does
I mentioned peerblock to torrentfreak back when it was first released at the end of september cause I use windows 7 x64 and its great.I wanted to help spread the word but they told me they dont do articles on ip blockers because they provide a false sense of security…looks whos doing an article on it now :/
Why hide yourself anyways it usally means your up to no good as they say. People who share via p2p arnt theives its try before you buy if u dont like you dont buy simple and as statistics seem to prove since p2p came about sales of movies music games etc have gone up.
The music video and game industry complain that downloading is bad as they claim there losing money.
If nobody downloaded they actually probably would lose a lot of money because nobody would be trying the new stuff for example I like stargate I watch it on my computer from the internet and I dont mind admitting that this means that when they release in a box set SGU the new one.
I probably be one of those buying it all because I enjoyed the tv rips with the annoying television network symbol in the corner of picture so I would want a quality mint immaculate box set of what is shaping upto be a fantastic problem so there more download more sales overall now SHUTUP COPYRIGHT IDIOT’S who havent got a clue that torrenting actually is increasing there profits.
@46…you need to add the steam list as an allowed list. iblocklist.com provides lists that you want to use as allowed such as steam and pandora.
Now if we could just get some software to block all the idiots and trolls and cup cakes out there! Now that would be software worth having.
Edit fantastic Program not problem see above
@ 44
you’re welcome.
I have also heard rumours floating around over the last year or two that Bluetack (the main list creator used in peerguardian and peerblock) may even be part of an antiP2P company. It would explain some of their actions (such as deleting+banning people that post in their forums about getting a letter while running the list, or that no-one, not even the people behind peerguardian, know who is behind bluetack.
I’d ask them, but they don’t like me – something to do with a writeup I did of their blocking of utorrent.com a few years back, perhaps.
it’s sweet. can’t work 100% but still better than nothing. works on my vista x32 and win7×64 comps
Peerblock is a piece of software which lets you control who your computer communicates with on the Internet. Funny my firewall does the same thing just add the ip and bang doesnt connect to me.. @52 your the idiot torrents don’t increase the sales of every single thing there is to pls STFU and get a clue just because 1 or 2 indie films did good because of torrents doesnt mean that game devs dont loose 100’s of 1000’s along with software companies like Microsoft with XP Vista and Windows 7 i mean shit I use torrents Im running a legit version of win 7 but as soon as this rc build is done with I will download it for free from torrents so explain how torrents is increasing the sale huh its not. It occasionally increases sales for movies games software, but more often than not it decreases sales because why the fuck buy when you dont have to I dont and i use torrents
@45:
Does it matter?
It still doesn’t work for security purposes does it?
Collection of IP’s is a passive work it doesn’t have any need to expose anything how one will know who is collecting what?
I could collect thousands of IP’s right now, everyone can. Want to do it?
netstat -ab >> ipgathering.txt (win)
I could even sort it out by program:
netstat -abn | find “pid” >> ipgathering.txt
My pg2 won’t update in a week or so.
Good timing on this article.
Worth a try.
ty enigmax
So kinda on the topic how reliable is peer guardian? I’ve been using it for a while now. Is Peerblock better?
with the price of a good vpn being so low now, it seems utterly crazy to depend on one of these for your protection!
Love this new program. Got it installed on a Windows 7 machine w/o problems. Auto updates, can add more black lists and being open source, I trust it more for another layer on the comp.
Ya it’s 90-99% effective, still 90-99% more then I started /w.
Has white list options (perm allows). Has great potential to go even further with features.
Always hated the “allow perm” but only one at a time on Peer Guardian.
Peer Guardian worked well for XP time, didn’t work in Windows 7 for me so found this online bit before the article.
Congrats on it’s success. This should be checked off in install options of Windows installs (if ever possible, Ubuntu Linux sure has a nice, Internet live, add/remove programs to install nice software, love to see an idiot proof version for Ubuntu users who don’t sp34k proper engrish. :D)
Great program to go along /w uTorrent. Least until proper encryption can be used for everyone’s computers. Abusing Internet people’s rights to privacy is complete bs.
Peerblock and peergaurdian are cool ,, i don’t use im but instead i add iblocklist to the ipfilter in my azureus and in my opinion is still not enough ,, drop 10 bucks a month on a good vpn and now ur cookin ;)
http://torrentfreak.com/get-free-anonymous-bittorrent-with-itshidden-090726/
the more u do to protect yourself ,, the safer u will be ;)
I don’t believe you get enough protection from these IP blocking programs or from proxies or VPNs. I only download using a “public” connection like a library or coffee shop. Who are they gonna send the letter to? The coffee shop? Hah! Good luck with that you anti-P2Pers. I’ll start a D/L at one location and finish it at one or two others.
Mobility = Anonymity. Fortunately, I live in a city with LOTS of places that have free Wi-Fi.
Good program… for assholes. Only good thing about it is that when some1 says to me they use PB… then I know, right there and then, that I’m talking to a asshole.
why try to hide. it’s not like it’s a party of 10 in the basement. do your research and pay for the good stuff
I_Believe_In_Fairies_Too
good point
while these ipfilters block a few things, they are hardly enough protection
How is this different that the built in IP filtering in Transmission?
PB protects me, my family, my home and my car. I have never once had my car stolen by the RIAA since I started using PB. And I don’t get flu as much now either. Great program. I recommend it to everyone who has a car, or who get’s flu… especially at this time of year!!!!
Since I started using PB I have been a lot more successful with the ladies. PB blocks all lesbians and frigid women. It also cleared up a wart on my toe. Great program for pretend people who don’t exist.
PB helped me when I was down and had no friends. Thanks to PB I got a job……. and a table lamp that was on sale!!!!
THANKS PB YOU’RE A TRUE FRIEND!
PB CURED MY CANCER !!!!
If everyone used PB then who would work the internet? Somebody has too, it’s not going to just run itself now, is it?
Yeah, think about THAT!!
WTF…. PB blocked my wages this month. I can’t find the option in the settings. Anyone help? Pls help, I’m dying for a snickers.
i had to stop reading when i saw micro$oft reference. please
I see somebody has a lot of time on his hands, posting 6 times.
But no skills, otherwise maybe you’d have made something useful.
@js: Ah talking to yourself now eh? Like the saying: the perpetrator always returns to the scene of the crime.
Behold the awesome power of the placebo and humankind’s never ending capacity for wishful thinking. The power of the black list compels you! The power of the black list compels you! Hallelujah, praise be to the almighty PeerBlock! ;)
Mmm, peanut butter…
I use 6 copies of PB in RAID 5 array – just in case one PB breaks. If you do this and keep a four-leaf clover under your mousemat you will never, NEVER, be caught doing anything online. Trust me. I KNOW. *taps nose*
They can see you, but you can’t see them. One of the first things an anti-piracy operation does each week is check the publicly available P2P blacklist against all the IP addresses they own, specifically cross referencing the ones used for investigatory purposes. While the address of their business site and all affiliations will more than likely be on such lists, the private IP addresses used for tracking infringers very rarely are. Come on, did you honestly think they were stupid enough to not understand how reverse DNS lookups work? Using IP addresses that can be easily attributed to them would be like law enforcement putting up a big neon sign that flashes the words “We’re watching you!” above themselves while on a stakeout. Blacklists are about as effective as airbags in an fighter jet would be.
I jumped on this as soon as saw this article & it works great,,,yhan TF !!!
I jumped on this as soon as I read the article & it works great,,,thanks TF !!!
Using this on private tracker and no effect.
I turn on a thepiratebay torrent and BOOM media sentry, spam harvester etc
it’s useful but not 100%… but i’ll be using it from now because i use public torrents sometimes and it helps a little.
great program, thanks!
“After facing troubles due to the lack of a “signed driver” for 64-bit versions of Vista (which resulted in Mark having to set up a registered company before they were allowed to buy a $230 code-signing certificate),”
230$ just to write free software …this should be a crime by microsoft
SERIOUSLY A FRAUD AND SCAM CRIME
After abandoning PG2 for a couple years, I recently started using PeerBlock, and it’s working very well, as far as what it’s designed to do. It’s stable, doesn’t hog CPU, it gets blocklists automatically, and it filters traffic from the blocked IPs, just like PG2 did. I can even run Wireshark at the same time and inspect the traffic being blocked. The effectiveness of the program, though, with respect to P2P, is measured by the effectiveness of the Bluetack anti-P2P blocklist that it uses. As others have pointed out above, there are no guarantees, and many ways such lists are ineffective. However what I’ve observed when connected to a file-sharing network is that the majority of anti-p2p traffic it blocks are SYN and RST packets, a denial-of-service attack apparently intended to result in TCP connections being held open, the result being fewer new connections can be made until a timeout of several minutes. Blocking these kind of bogus TCP/IP shenanigans seems like a good idea, so I will continue to use Peerblock, although I wish it were running on my wifi router instead…
Peerblock wont get rid of this nasty green growth i have under my forskin?
Anyone have a block list of the nasty guff thats emmitting from my knob?
Come on enigmax,
Why don’t you guys block the obvious 12 year old that is, according to your on rules, posting spam, being an oh so obvious troll and generally polluting this post. Really I would like to know.
And if people want to use this software whether its “100%” or not, let them, if it helps at all it is better than nothing and how does it hurt you if they do. What a bunch of effing a55 packers you all are!
Oh and don’t give me the usual “everybody’s entitled to an opinion”.
Yes, if its relevant.
See industry, people are INVESTING into piracy instead of YOUR REVENUE STREAM because you are shutting them out and not giving them flatrate based content subscription models.
All this crap, peer blocking soft, VPNs, etc? Money gone that you could be earning if you stopped being pricks and prosecting customers and instead made them a real DEAL.
I blame the industry for everything that happens to them, period.
arenabg.com and zamunda.net cant be closed!!
“this is the most requested request” … ummm.. how beautiful and terse are those english skills. That phrase was just “brilliantly brilliant!”
installed it…and it’s decent…small and compact and does the job…great work guys!!!
I mentioned a few days ago how i jumped on peerblock as
soon as I read this article & what’s cool about it is you
can see the names of who’s getting blocked & I mention this
because I’m uploading right now while i’m writing this &
couldn’t help but notice a certain douche-bag name come up
that alone makes PB worth donating too,,,can you say MediaSentry ?
I mentioned a few days ago how i jumped on peerblock as
soon as I read this article & what’s cool about it is you
can see the names of who’s getting blocked & I mention this
because I’m uploading right now while i’m writing this &
couldn’t help but notice a certain douche-bag name come up
that alone makes PB worth donating too,,,can you say MediaSentry ?
how nice, they sanitized my stuff using < and >
so here it comes again:
*obvious comment about the superiority of iptables*
some operating systems come with configurable built-in firewalls, so filtering is not a big issue; the real value of PeerBlock comes from the list management
I installed Peerblock and think it runs great updates everytime, unlike pg2 didn’t. One thing that irritates me is that when you exit peerblock it stays running. If you try to reboot says end program now, so its still running but not accessable. Try this and you will know what I am saying. Otherwise works Gr8t.
once visit you will like it :) this programs all fake :)
I’ve just downloaded it and will try it for awhile,it looks just like PG2
I want a peerblock that automatically blocks *all* IPs and only allows them at my permission; i.e. I want a white-list only peerblock.
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