Do you use P2P applications? If you do, do you use some form of blocklist protection? If not, you might wanna check out this article from Ars Technica, which summarizes a study conducted by three researchers at the University of California, Riverside.
In a nutshell, the researchers discovered that NOT using a blocklist while using P2P apps leads to a 100% chance of connecting with a rogue computer – one run by Big Media (or, more likely, one of the third-parties hired by Big Media) for the purposes of tracking the trade in illegal files. Let me repeat – if you don’t use a blocklist, your chances of connecting to an illicit tracker or peer are 100%. Simply connecting to a rogue computer doesn’t mean that there will be an lawsuit against you in the near future, but it’s not good. It’s a list of “who’s being naughty” that most of us do not want to be on.
The good news is that using blocklists is pretty easy. If you’re running Windows 2000 or XP, Linux or OS X (but not Windows Vista), head on over to Phoenix Labs and download the latest version of PeerGuardian, a simple to use “P2P firewall” for Windows. Just install it, tell setup what you want to block (P2P, spyware adware) and you’re in the blocklist business. Although PeerGuardian isn’t a magic bullet, it is amazingly effective. As the blocklist study noted, “avoiding just the top 5 blocklisted IPs reduces the chance of being tracked to about 1 percent”.
There are other blocklist managers out there. BlockList Manager from B.I.S.S. is one. The popular Bittorrent program Azureus has one built-in. Whatever app you want to use, make sure that you start using one today. After all, although these blocklists might not be perfect, they’re far, far better than nothing at all. And the study (linked in the Ars article) proves it!