A good protection program if you download stuff

I recommend an interesting program named Peer Guardian
especially if you are doing any P@P downloading and sharing.
I installed this last evening and have been running it.
It has shown me, and blocked access to my computer downloads, by a most interesting group
of organizations. I was really surprised who was curious about my internet activity.

The program is free and doesn’t seem to use much in the way of resources.

Once you install it, look at the “Log check” section and click on the “Blocked tab.”
This will show you who has been trying to see what you’re dl’ing.
Also, be sure to do an “update” several times. It sometimes takes more than 1 try.
I set mine to update everyday - but I still do it manually just out of curiosity.

Keep in mind that the Peer Guardian block lists are often hilariously aggressive in determining who might be a risk. At one point they blocked all of the So-Net Taiwan ISP because it is a ‘Sony Entertainment’ network. You’re just as likely to slow down your downloads through these false positives than to hide from anyone tracking your downloads.

JLick -
I have not noticed any slow down caused by running Peer Guardian. As the blocked sites are not in the P2P ‘network,’ as far as I can determine, I have no problem with the apparent aggressive blockage. Granted, there may be someone in the Hdqtrs, 5th Signal Command sharing files, but I feel OK excluding that dude/dudette. Likewise re:Nova Scotia Department of Economic Development.
Its a trade-off. I’ll take the privacy; especially with the increased actions of late.
Just thought it might help some folks. Thanks for the input, this stuff is pretty new to me and I appreciate hearing the comments of others who know more about it.

I like the link
net for beginners…

I have come to the personal conclusion that the ‘Azureus Ultra Accelerator’ prog doesn’t do much, if anything, for my dl’s.

Hey Cowboy,

if you are using bittorrent for your downloads, PeerGuardian will not give you any protection… It will just decrease your number of possible peers and seeds.

As the bittorrent protocol is unencrypted and open, the bad guys (MPAA etc.) can just connect to the tracker, and get the list of all connected peers and seeds, its the same thing your bt-client does when you start the torrent… Everybody can connect to the tracker and see which IP is downloading and seeding which files…
PeerGuardian will only prevent the bad IPs from making a direct connection to you (and only if they would really use a blacklisted IP for this kind of research)…

If you really want anonymous downloading, have a look at TOR
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor_%28ano … network%29
Which is still too slow for using, in my opinion…

Cheers,
Mr. Rice

Mr. Rice -
Thanks for the info.
Speed is very important.