PeerBlock goes out of beta

30 September, 2009

peerblock1.0final-01

The excellent piece of software PeerBlock, that came as an alternative to PeerGuardian is finally out of the beta stage. The 1.0 final version is available from the PeerBlock website. Since I have told you most about what PeerBlock is and its functionality, here I will only mention the changes and new features of the final version.

Feature list

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.

PeerBlock new list manager