Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Covering Your Ass With PeerGuardian

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.