Block IP addresses with Peer Guardian
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 the globally maintained blocklist.
If you were to use a firewall for that, you not only would have to become aware of new IP addresses to block, but also add them to the 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, edu,game,gov, p2p,phishing, spam and spy. The most important category for most users will be p2p of course and an installed Peer Guardian client makes 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: [Download not found]
Note: Peer Guardian is no longer developed. An alternative is Peer Block. The program too has not been updated for more than 18 months.
Tips
- When you start PeerBlock, you are asked to pick one or multiple blocklists for use in the program and define scheduling and updating preferences. You can add other lists, those from iblocklists for example, from within the program.
- You can configure the program to support http connections at all times, so that you can access websites hosted on those IP addresses even if you are blocking other access to your system.
- You can manually check updates at all times with a click on the button in the main window.
And for those looking for a decent alternative that’s free and free from ads plus other crap (though I would recommend donating), then try qBittorrent: http://www.qbittorrent.org/
Why not use the portable version of uTorrent?
Just downlad the .exe from official website into a folder, create a text file in the same folder, rename the .txt file to settings.dat and start uTorrent. You can move the folder anywhere.
^Exactly…. in fact I would recommend avoiding all versions over 2.0, the torrent portion of the program hardly changed, it’s all the ads, ratings, and possible tracking features that require all the additional installs.
And this is why I never updated in a nutshell;
“Ads
More Ads (hit decline offer)
Even more ads (hit decline)”
Nope. I donated $25 several years ago to the utorrent crew.. possibly a decade… so I refuse to accept their reasoning for selling out so much.
You can turn off the ads.
qBittorrent FTW!
Qbittorrent your way out of this piece of crap.
+1 for Qbittorrent
I’m a long long time user of Bitcomet now and forever. Never any ads, no offers, nothing to decline, no sell out… little used due to the complex nature they still scare people away with, but their new install is a simple one click solution that discovers all settings on its own except firewalls.
They follow a simple idea…’share’… if you share you can possibly go faster than those who don’t share. You can even see connections* connected to you and of them who is sharing and who isn’t… then you can boot them / ban them or ignore them selectively ‘mwahahaha…’. We can set how much we share, with who, and how fast we share.
*in my personal experience over 95% of Azures and uTorrent users do not share, I boot them.
So those who believe Bitcomet is hard to understand, they haven’t been that since version 1.09a (current public release 1.35). Also Bitcomet installs a Firefox add-on to capture media from the temp directory. You can easily unload it using Firefox’s Add-on Options page.
Bottomline, Bitcomet is faster and easier to install/use. Signing up as a registered user will allow you to join the ranks as a sharing user. The more you share, the faster you can possibly go.
utorrent installs itself in appdata folder so it can inject malware without the UAC consent. Don’t use utorrent because it’s unsafe!
The best last version of utorrent is 2.2.1 build 25534