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PeerBlock r162: Includes signed driver!

Earlier we posted about a Peerguardian alternative that works with Vista and Windows 7, well here it is again only this time its better than ever. PeerBlock succeeded what Peerguardian started years ago and now has a signed driver. So what does the signed driver do??.. What it does is now there won’t be anymore issues getting PeerBlock to work in Windows 7 and Vista x64 systems.  This version of PeerBlock named r162 as an “Interim Release” is probably going to be the last RC version as the next is going to be the final. Also it has to be mentioned that r162 has lots of bugfixes(according to its developers all the “show stopping bugs” have been fixed) and new features have been added.

The change log is pretty big so to put it in brief the main improvements are:

• Automatic Run As Admin in Win7 and Vista.
• Signed driver
• Switch to iblocklist lists
• Tweaked List Manager Interface
• Verification of Block lists after download

For the full list of changes see below or check out the PeerBlock Developer site.

• Signed Driver!! – We’re now signing pbfilter.sys, peerblock.exe, and the installer-package itself. So those of you running on 64-bit Vista/Win7 systems should no longer need to test-sign the driver or hit F8 while rebooting or anything. (Woo-hoo!!) For people running on Vista/Win7 with UAC enabled, instead of having it popup a "scary" yellow warning-prompt asking if you want to run peerblock (or the installer) it should instead show a nice calming blue box as well. Ahhh, isn’t it nice?

• Display Warning if PG2 is Running – We’ll now display a warning message if PG2 is detected running, instead of merely attempting to bring up its UI if we detect it. Side-effects of this change include us considering older versions of PeerBlock as PG2, and the Installer not noticing if older versions of PeerBlock are running when you try to install this one.

• Default "Show Allowed" to False – On fresh installs, the "Show allowed connections" option will default to false. To keep people from thinking that PeerBlock isn’t working if they don’t see it doing anything, We’re now automatically logging the first 9 or 10 Allowed packets regardless of your ShowAllowed setting, and after that logging a message explaining why we’ve stopped blocking them (presuming you have ShowAllowed set to false that is, of course).

• Migrate Lists to IBlocklist Lists – We’ll check your list of lists to see if you have any old peerguardian.sourceforge.net list URLs in there. If so we’ll switch them over to iblocklist.com hosted URLs instead, and remove the "Gov" list if you had it set.

• Run As Admin on 32-bit Vista/Win7 – We apparently accidentally removed the "requires admin" stuff from the 32-bit Vista/Win7 version at some point, probably back around r5. It should now automatically run as Admin, popping up a UAC prompt if you have UAC enabled, without you needing to set that Compatibility setting on peerblock.exe

• Updated List Manager UI – Updated the "List Manager" window, to make it easier to find the list of lists that the Startup Wizard originally presented to you.

• Startup Wizard Cleanup – Realigned things a bit so that this window layout is a bit cleaner.

• Auto-Update now Works – Previously, auto-update wouldn’t end up generating the list cache, so none of the list updates it would automagically download for you actually ended up being used until you manually updated.

• Fixed Hang while Enabling Blocking – There was an occasional hang some people had encountered, which would cause PeerBlock to become unresponsive e.g. to mouse clicks. This would sometimes occur during times of heavy stress (i.e. lots of network traffic going on), and could be manually caused by clicking the Enable/Disable button too quickly after list-update, or enablig/disabling PeerBlock while a list-update was underway.

• Tray Icon Issues – If you ticked and then unticked the "Always hide tray icon" option in Settings, right-clicking on the tray icon would do nothing. The same thing would happen if explorer.exe crashed and restarted (e.g. by you restarting it via the Task Manager). Both of these problems seem to be resolved now.

• "Save" Button on Settings Panel – The Settings panel now has a Save button on the bottom left of it. Clicking this button will immediately write your config out to peerblock.conf, instead of you having to wait for a successful close of the program. PeerBlock will still save your settings when it successfully terminates – this button is really just to make people feel better, and to save your settings in case PeerBlock crashes.

• XP UI Issue – Fixed the UI so that on XP the "URL List" dropdown on the Add List window (from the List Manager) isn’t "squashed".

• Improved Error Reporting for Failed List Updates – We now display more information in the Updates window if you encounter a problem while downloading a list update; not just the generic "Error contacting url" message.

• Verify Downloaded Lists Before Using – After downloading a list-update, we will now verify that we can open and parse that file before overwriting the old one. Basically so long as we can find at least one range in it, we’ll assume it’s good.

• Archive History Every N Days – The history-archiving stuff should now work as it should, archiving and/or deleting every N days as you’ve specified (instead of every 10 minutes, regardless of your timeframe).

• Possible Fix for Crash on Install – A few people have reported OS crashes on their first PeerBlock run after installation. Originally I thought they were just random crashes, but the stack traces in the dumps are all very similar (though not specifically pointing a finger of blame at anyplace in pbfilter.sys). After noticing that one recent reporter of the bug was running PG2 beforehand, I’m theorizing that the problem may be caused by Windows experiencing conflicts because the PG2 driver never finished cleaning up after itself, and we are loading with some of the same identifiers. Hopefully this change will differentiate ourselves enough that we won’t be taken out by the lingering effects of PG2.

• New Installer Image – We changed the picture that is displayed on the first page of the Installer. If you’re wondering about the design inspiration behind the image, it was apparently "a drop of PeerGuardian in every download". =;)

• Installer Removes Shortcuts if Not Specified – When you install PeerBlock on top of a pre-existing installation, if you unselect e.g. the "Add Desktop Icon" option it will delete those files for you.

• Installer Copies PG2 Lists – If you elect to transfer your old PG2 settings over to PeerBlock during a fresh install, the Installer should now transfer over your permallow and permblocks list, along with any custom lists you’ve created (so long as you stored them as .p2p files in the PeerGuardian or PeerGuardian\lists directories, at least…).

• Don’t Update Twice after Install – After you first install PeerBlock (i.e. not upgrading a previous release), we used to update our lists and regenerate the list-cache. And then we’d start PeerBlock, and update our lists and regenerate the list-cache. That was just silly.

Download PeerBlock r162 Installer

Mirror

also available as portable packages:

For Win 2000 and XP 32bit

XP 64bit

Vista/Windows 7- 32bit | 64bit

You can still download the stable (r86) release from their site. And please donate if you can… They deserve it.

 

Note: Version r62 will show only the first 10 allowed connections. It will show the blocked connections as usual. This is a feature and not an error. You can enable PeerBlock to show all allowed connections by checking “show allowed connections”  from its settings tab