Battleangel

It never gets old to look at PeerGuardian block lists … though one can wonder if the software does in fact do more harm than good in that it also blocks a lot of legitimate peers. Never having used PG before yesterday I thought I would finally give it a try with new regulations looming and all. It’s a nice compliment to a router and a software firewall (and Azureus’s built-in IP blocker). And it is a piece of software that presumably handles large IP lists better than any software firewall, which normally isn’t designed to handle that amount of data. And with PeerGuardian 2 in beta development there is much to look forward to.

After 24 hours using the Government and anti-P2P lists the following entities have been repeatedly turned down: IBM Global Network Europe, Opera Software, Advanced Technology Manufacturing Inc (ATM S.A.), Universidad Nacional Autonoma De Mexico, Hollywood Interactive, Inc, Helsinki Televisio Oy and something called the Naval Weapons Center. The problem being of course that most of them are surely harmless and potential peers. You could tweak it I am sure, but with the size of the databases, it seems futile. And really, who knows what kind of flakey methods they use to collect these IPs and how reliable they are over time.