Download PeerBlock 1.0

PeerBlock is the continuation of PeerGuardian 2 and the software tries to block network traffic from unwanted hosts. The list of unwanted hosts includes ad and spyware distributors, as well as anti-piracy and anti-piracy agencies. All unwanted IP addresses are stored in a central database, which is then distributed among the users. The program thus works as a layer between, for example, a p2p program and the internet. A few days ago, the developers released version 1.0 with the following announcement:

Here it is, PeerBlock 1.0! This release is the first Public Release to include our signed driver, and is something we’re very proud of. It runs great on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 (plus server variants), both 32- and 64-bit versions.

What’s New?

Many, many changes are present in this release versus the most recent Public Release, PeerBlock 0.9.2 (r86). Here are the highlights, you can check out the Changes page for more details.

• Signed Driver – We now have a signed driver! If you’re using a 64-bit version of Windows Vista or 7, you will no longer need to test-sign the driver, or hit F8 during boot, or anything else. It should all just work!
• iBlocklist Lists – We’ve updated our standard list URLs to point at iblocklist.com lists instead of the original peerguardian.sourceforge.net ones. They are faster, and are much more reliable – no more “Error contacting URL” messages! We will also upgrade your pre-existing lists from sourceforge.net hosted ones to iblocklist.com ones. Also note that the “Gov” list has been removed, since its contents were merged with the “P2P” list long ago.
• Installer Rewrite – Our newest Dev Team member, XhmikosR, has pretty much completely rewritten the installer from scratch. Most importantly, it should actually work now, even during uninstall! (Not that you’ll ever want to uninstall PeerBlock, of course, but just in case…)
• Updated List Manager – Reworked this window a bit, to make it easier to get back to the lists originally presented to you in the Startup Wizard.
• Allowed Connections Displayed – By default, the “Show allowed connections” option will be disabled. (This is due to performance reasons, as the tool will consume considerably more CPU if displaying of allowed connections is enabled.) We are still logging the first 9 allowed packets though, so that you know that we’re actually working!
• Save Settings – We’ve added a “Save” button to the settings panel, so that you can be sure your settings updates have been saved.
• List Verification – After downloading an updated list, we’ll now make sure that the file contains at least one ip-address range before we’ll overwrite your old list. This way you will be protected against your lists being corrupted while downloading them.

If you’re new to PeerBlock, you should consider at least skimming through our new online User Manual, especially our Frequently Asked Questions page.

Thanks!

We’ve come a long way in just a few short months, and have many people to thank for that.

First off, thanks to the original developers of PeerGuardian, without whose open-sourced code we wouldn’t be anywhere at all!

Many thanks also to all the people on the Dev Team: night_stalker_z who’s contributed a bunch of bugfixes over the last few months; A. Jesse Harper (DarC / DisCoStu), who’s spent a bunch of time on the installer, including our custom installer graphics; XhmikosR who’s essentially completely rewritten the entire installer, beefed it up considerably, and written some custom build scripts to prevent me from brass up the Build process. To our Web Guys: Brian Quinn (ss18), who’s tirelessly worked at setting up various web apps for us; Rob Robinson (RobrPatty), our Forum Moderator and the first person to ever test one of my original PeerBlock versions out for me; Jesse Hall (Jessay) who created the HTML mockup used for this site’s template, including the nifty PeerBlock logo at the top; LANsquared, who’s graciously donated space and bandwiidth on his servers for hosting our sites. Nathan van der Velden (hoodadilly) who drafted our online User Manual, and Martin Eilbeck (Freelandr) who wrote our tutorial on getting PeerBlock to “Start with Windows” if you have UAC enabled. And of course to our official Test Team, without whom we wouldn’t have nearly as stable a project: 2Ceedz, gjp, Petri Nurmi (Keefa), opus, Praeses (PraesesZA), RavenSoft, Uzerrr, and including those others mentioned previously.

And of course an extra special thanks to all those of you who’ve donated! It truly amazes me that we were able to raise enough contributions from y’all to get this signed-driver as quickly as we did. You guys rock! We are of course still accepting contributions, as we’d like to rent a nice VPS server on which we should be able to build a “real” online-update feature, and in less than twelve months will need to purchase another $230 code- signing certificate, and will likely have additional expenses as the year goes on. So if you find PeerBlock a useful tool, please consider contributing to our cause.

Enjoy!

Thanks for reading this far, and I hope you enjoy our new stable Public Release of PeerBlock 1.0!