Increasing the safety of your peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing

Well, given the fact that Comcast, my ISP, has stepped across the line and violated the Net Neutrality principle, I feel I should spread a little news about how to keep Comcast’s nose out of your business in the first place.

What you need to do is get your hands on a copy of Peerguardian 2.

First, remember that what Comcast is going after is basically Bittorrent. With a vengeance. Other P2P programs don’t offer the kind of power that Bittorrent does, and that scares the crap out of Comcast.

Now, the bad news. Peerguardian 2 does not support Winodows Vista yet. So if you got Vista, I’m sorry, but you’re shit out of luck for the moment.

What Peerguardian does — for everyone who can use it — is update itself with lists (which you can customize, add to, remove, etc.) of known IPs that are out there to scam, hamper, or eavesdrop on P2P transfers. You turn it on, it tunes out the bad IPs. This makes the problem of fake files a lot less of an issue, but it also gives you a degree of anonymity.

Now, if you use Comcast, they’re your ISP, so they may be able to get around Peerguardian problems. But it would take some serious work, and, in my experience, the one thing any Comcast employee is strictly against is any form of hard work.

So download Peerguardian at http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/. Follow the instructions. Add the main Peerguardian block list and any other good block lists you can find.

This should keep Comcast from snooping around you so badly. No guarantee, of course, they could still sneak it, but using PG2 is a big step towards making yourself truly anonymous during P2P file downloads.

Also, note: Comcast is more interested in what you’re uploading than what you’re downloading. Now, unfortunately, if it weren’t for people who uploaded files, using the honor system of P2P, they’re be nothing to download at all. So share if you can, don’t leech. That’s all I ask.

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