PeerBlock lets you control who your computer "talks to" on the Internet. By selecting appropriate lists of "known bad" computers, you can block communication with advertising or spyware oriented servers, computers monitoring your p2p activities, computers which have been "hacked", even entire countries! They can't get in to your computer, and your computer won't try to send them anything either.
And best of all, it's free!
Beta Releases contain newer fixes and features than our Stable Releases, and by definition not necessarily as stable.
What's New
Here are the major changes since the most recent Beta Release, r223:
* Switched "Additional Lists" to iBlocklist - The "additional lists" listed in the dropdown box when you add a new list used to all be www.bluetack.co.uk based ones. These are now iblocklist.com based URLs instead.
* "Friendly" URLs - PeerBlock is now using "Friendly" URLs for most lists, instead of the URLs you can find at iblocklist.com. These new URLs should actually be meaningful, instead of something like ".../?list=kpjsadfkljawjefklajwef".
* List-Add Sanity-Checking - After you've added a new URL-based list in the List Manager, PeerBlock will now perform a "sanity-check" of that URL. It checks to make sure you haven't added the iblocklist.com "Description URL" instead of the "Update URL", lets you know if you're adding one of the Default Lists, checks for duplicates, recommends iblocklist.com URLs instead of bluetack.co.uk URLs, etc. PeerBlock will also offer to fix these URLs for you when possible.
* List "Optimization" - When you first upgrade to r277, PeerBlock will ask if you will allow it to "optimize" your lists. If you let it, it will change bluetack.co.uk-hosted URLs over to iblocklist.com-hosted ones, rename list URLs to the new "Friendly" URL-names, and remove duplicated list entries.
* Saves "Last Known Good" Config - Each time PeerBlock successfully starts up, it will save aside a copy of your configuration as peerblock.conf.bak. This way if your regular config file, peerblock.conf, ever gets corrupted (or you end up with some bad settings in there) and that prevents PeerBlock from starting, it will be able to load this saved copy instead.
* Fix for "Volume externally altered" App-Crash - There was a problem in which peerblock.conf would get corrupted - this would cause PeerBlock to "crash" every time it was started. This has been fixed.
* Fixed Crash-causing Vulnerability - A malicious program running on the local machine could send an malformed IOCTL to our driver, causing the machine to crash. This is not much of a security hole - all it can do is cause the machine to crash, and it requires that a "bad" program already be running on your local machine - but it is good to defend against this condition all the same. Many thanks to Luka Milkovic (Aelthegrin) for the report!
* Multiple-select of Rows - You can now Ctrl+Click multiple lines in the main window as well as on history (and in the List Manager), to allow/block/copy multiple IP addresses at once.
Additional minor changes can be found on the
r277 Changes page.
Homepage:
http://www.peerblock.com/releases
http://code.google.com/p/peerblock/
PeerBlock 1.0+ (r277) Installer - for Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7 (all editions)
PeerBlock "Portable" Packages:
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PeerBlock 1.0+ (r277) for Windows 2000 / XP, 32-bit - .zip file, no installer
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PeerBlock 1.0+ (r277) for Windows XP, 64-bit - .zip file, no installer
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PeerBlock 1.0+ (r277) for Windows Vista / 7, 32-bit - .zip file, no installer
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PeerBlock 1.0+ (r277) for Windows Vista / 7, 64-bit - .zip file, no installer
All Files: http://code.google.com/p/peerblock/downloads/list
Download Page:
http://www.peerblock.com/releases/interim-releases/peerblock-1.0.0-r277
