I was introduced to this little program not long ago - PeerGuardian. In short, it’s a little program that sits in your system tray, and prevents communication with any hosts that happen to be on certain blocklists.

You define which blocklists are used - you can select from blocklist.org’s plethora, including lists of known “bad” IPs from P2P networks, government IP space, music industry IP space and so on. You can also create your own lists.

The idea behind the program is to offer a little more protection to net users, more specifically P2P network users, from evilly-inclined P2P users, spyware servers, the RIAA, The Man, etc. No substitute for a proper firewall/AV setup, but a helpful tool nonetheless.

I’ve been using it for a few days, using only the “Spyware”, “P2P” and “Government” blocklists, and it seems to perform pretty well. On Limewire I got a bunch of hits listed as “Fake file sharer,” a file from which did indeed turn out to be several minutes of silence, and it does pick up the odd BitTorrent hit even when my client isn’t running.

For the truly paranoid, an extended blocklist has been compiled which purports to block “74% of the Internet” - I tried it out, and while it did leave me with a lovely fuzzy feeling of being cut off, I found that MSN wouldn’t connect, and so on, so I stopped using it.

Overall it’s a pleasing application. Auto-updates, unobtrusive operation, pretty icons. And geek power.