Peer Block Continues Where Peer Guardian Left Off

Martin Brinkmann — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 17:45:34 +0000

Peer Guardian is without doubt a popular security software that uses blacklists to block connection attempts to a computer system. Various blacklists are provided including those listing IPs of anti-p2p organizations, government and educational IPs but also adware and spyware servers. A problem that users of Peer Guardian experience are crashes and several other issues which can be mainly attributed to the fact that the security software has not been updated in the last two years.

Peer Block is a fork of Peer Guardian that tries to address these issues. It is actively developed and provides the same functionality (but with less problems) than Peer Guardian.

Users can download Peer Block from the official website. It offers a selection of IP blacklists that can be subscribed to. By default only the P2P blacklist is selected during setup. It is possible to select other blacklists which will then be updated at the first startup of the application.

Regular updates of the blacklists are configured automatically with the option to change the frequency in the settings. The interface itself looks like the Peer Guardian interface.

Peer Block supports all popular Microsoft Windows operating systems including Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP. It is the perfect alternative for users who are experiencing problems with Peer Guardian or prefer a software that gets updated regularly.

Block IP addresses with Peer Guardian

Martin Brinkmann — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 07:55:01 +0000

Why would you need another program to block IP addresses if you already have a firewall ? A good question that can be answered easily. Peer Guardian uses a database of bad IP addresses and blocks them automatically as soon as the IP is added to the database of blocklist. A single user would have to know that a new IP (range) poses a thread and add it manually to his firewall.

Peer Guardian already has many IP addresses blocked that are used by the MPAA to spread fake torrents and to record IP addresses of the peers that download the torrents. Blocklist distinguishes the following categories: ads, bogon, edu,game,gov, p2p,phishing, spam and spy. The most important category for most users will be p2p of course and a installed Peer Guardian client will make sure that your client will not connect to the fake torrent clients and IPs. (if they are in the range that is blocked)

You do not need to configure your file sharing application to work with Peer Guardian, everything is done automatically. You can add sites that you definitely need to the allow list to make sure that they will never be blocked by Peer Guardian.

Update:

The Peer Guardian website is currently returning a 404 not found error. It is unclear at this point in time if this is due to technical difficulties or because the project has been canceled. We have uploaded the latest working version of Peer Guardian 2, PeerGuardian 2.0 RC1 Test 2, to our servers.

The blocklist website that is used to manage the blocked IP addresses is not reachable as well currently. This highly suggests that the PeerGuardian 2 project is dead. Still, if you want to download the latest version you can do so by clicking on the following link: Peer Guardian 2 (206)

An alternative is Peer Block

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Peer Block Continues Where Peer Guardian Left Off

Block IP addresses with Peer Guardian