Tuesday 29 November 2011

Peer Blocker

Since the new laws in New Zealand regarding peer-to-peer have come into play, torrenting has become a little bit trickier. Basically, if a copyright holder thinks you have been using peer-to-peer to download and share content illegally, you can be charged. Gone are the ways of innocent until proven guilty. While the most effective way to prevent getting a fine is to not download illegal content, the phrase "You only have to run faster than the other guy" comes to mind. That being said PeerBlock is an effective way to remove yourself from the grid.



That's a wallpaper by the way. PeerBlock allows you to restrict which IP addresses your computer will communicate directly with. This is by no means a perfect system. Without the knowledge of which IP addresses to block it is pointless. PeerBlock comes with a decent set of default options that include government agencies and related companies, which will help a lot. Fortunately for anything missing iBlockList has a large list of well lists of IP addresses for various things. Definately worth checking that one out. But, if you want to be even more cautious, I have found a list of every large IP address block allocated to New Zealand. Beautiful isn't it. Copy the page into a file and rename it NZipRanges.p2p then add it to PeerBlock using the List Manager. Simple.

PeerBlock is not only a good thing for blocking peer-to-peer tracking, but also for blocking ads and spyware. So regardless of what you are planning on doing, you should get this.

DOWNLOAD LINK - not spam.

As a side note, you may find you cannot connect to some of your favourite websites or game servers. You can see which IP is being blocked by PeerBlock and then add it to the white list. Planning a future post about Tor to help further protect your anonymity.

Cheers,
Milk

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