“Good” peers on P2P networks are also said to get blocked frequently, so that users actually loose speed and potential sharing partners, and even the game servers from Battlefield 2, Blizzard, Steeam and ArenaNet get blocked, causing serious trouble for many gamers. What about the efficiency of the underlying principle: Is this program able to replace other protection such as VPNs? Critics point out that someone seriously trying to track you won’t use any IPs listed on PeerBlocks lists or any other list, and that the lists can’t always be up-to-date. Critics speak up: Can PeerBlock protect you from lawsuits and copyright warnings? So, from the technical side, everything seems fine and dandy, and the blocking of advertising is definitely a nice add-on. Our computer didn’t seem to slow down much either, with the task manager reporting almost no RAM and only 0-1% CPU usage, so it doesn’t seem like modern computers have any problems with it, which was definitely not the case on older systems. Just look at the screenshot: Doesn’t that look impressive? It certainly helps to feel protected, and on top of that, PeerBlock also blocked uTorrent from displaying annoying ads. For our testing, we fired up uTorrent and selected a torrent for Ubuntu, a common, free Linux distribution, and within seconds the list started filling up like crazy. It’s been a long time since the first release, and around 6 years ago, this little Windows-only program (Windows 7 is also supported by PeerBlock) was running on a lot of computers, particularly from people interested in data exchange, eDonkey2000, torrents – you name it, so it was interesting to see how little had changed since then.Īfter running the installer (download PeerBlock from the official website), we were asked to select some categories to filter (we choose P2P, spyware and advertising, resulting in an impressive list of 769,389,130 IPs), if we want to block HTTP for these IPs (if you decide to allow this, you’ll still be able to visit websites hosted on them or see ads from them) which is recommended, and after a brief update, the interface popped up.Įverything is easy enough to understand: along with some settings a list of blocked connections is displayed and updated in realtime, along with the alleged reason for it.
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