PeerGuardian

PeerGuardian is an IP blocking firewall that can prevent both from as well as incoming connections numerous IP addresses on the basis of party lists (English blacklists ). PeerGuardian is available as open source and freely available as free software.

Features

PeerGuardian has been specially designed spying organizations such as the RIAA, MPAA, Media Force, Media Defender, BayTSP, Ranger, Over Peer and NetPD to block while you are in, for example, peer-to -peer programs such as FastTrack, BitTorrent, IRC, etc. so as to minimize the " risk " in file sharing networks. However, it is also the normal internet surfing numerous IP addresses are blocked, which do not belong directly to the site displayed, including advertising providers but also Spyware and companies that collect private data.

History

PeerGuardian 1 was programmed in Visual Basic and required a relatively large amount of memory and computing power, when it was used for example in peer-to -peer networks. Moreover, a spectacular block only the conventional TCP protocol. PeerGuardian 2 is written in the programming languages ​​C and C and on the other hand requires virtually no system resources. Even loading the blocklist and so the program is very much faster. Furthermore, the new version is designed so that virtually all Internet protocols and most ports can be locked.

On the list of blocked IP addresses used in PeerGuardian that he draws from sharing programs such as Kazaa Lite and eMule.

Disadvantages

The filter lists contain more than half of the entire IP address range and thus in addition to potentially hazardous addresses certainly also a large number of false positives.

PeerGuardian blocked, for example, the entire IP ranges from the Chaos Computer Club, so one of the largest German XMPP server jabber.ccc.de of PeerGuardian users no longer used, unless the user removes the affected IP ranges manually from the respective blacklists.

Since the blocked IP ranges and the relevant organizations as well as the music and film industry are known, of course, undisturbed copyright infringements are simply not possible. Especially against dynamic IP addresses a block list is useless. For static IP addresses at a current block list, but for some time quite a protective effect to be expected.

Under the Windows operating system, the operation of PeerGuardian is possible only with administrator privileges. The program is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 ( including Server versions), in the 32 - and 64 -bit version.

PeerBlock

PeerBlock is a fork of PeerGuardian 2, which mainly takes care of the blocking of IP blocks under Windows. The objective remains the prevention of compounds with computers ( servers) that are listed on a blacklist.

MoBlock

MoBlock is an open source console program that serves to block certain IPs or entire IP ranges. It uses the definition of the areas to be blocked lists in PeerGuardian format.

It's practically the Linux equivalent of PeerGuardian. Therefore, there is between the developers of the software also plans MoBlock for Linux version of PeerGuardian to make. Currently ( version 0.8 ) MoBlock only supports the x86 architecture ( i586 ).

IPList

IPList is similar MoBlock an alternative for PeerGuardian under the Linux operating system. It is open source and has a graphical user interface called ipblock, similar to the with which the program can be configured and monitored from PeerGuardian. Also IPList supports block lists in PeerGuardian format.

On the official website there are matching package versions for many Linux distributions available for download, including Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE.