Download PeerBlock 1.1 r518

Version 1.1 of PeerBlock has been released. PeerBlock is the successor to PeerGuardian 2 and is intended to keep unwanted network traffic at bay. 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. So the program sits, as it were, between, for example, a p2p program and the internet. The release notes for this version are as follows:

What’s New?

Here are the most important changes present in this new Stable Release, as compared to our previous Stable Release PeerBlock 1.0 (r181).

• 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.