Hacksar

If you’ve always wanted to use torrents, but are absolutely TERRIFIED by the prospect of opening your mailbox to find a Cease & Desist, or worse yet, the FBI (they can mail anything nowadays), then you should check out PeerGuardian2.

PeerGuardian2 is a free, open-source program that runs in the background of your system and blocks IP addresses based on an IP blacklist. Generally, this IP blacklist is automatically downloaded and contains multitudes of government IPs. So, you can torrent with the safety of not accidentally connecting to a government facility and possibly incriminating yourself. It self updates, and runs with minimal system performance impact, so it’s easily the best choice for an additional layer for you security-conscious folks. Keep reading for a simple step-by-step guide on how to get PeerGuardian2 up and running.

1. Go to the PeerGuardian2 website and download the latest release that is appropriate for your operating system.
2. Install the program, and run it.
3. If this is your first time running, it will ask you for some configurations as well as what list you want to use. Choose the list that applies to p2p (peer2peer, i.e. BitTorrent) and also that applies to any other needs you may have.
4. Now, it will download the list.
5. After downloading the list, it will continue downloading all the lists you have specified (since you can specify multiple lists as well as custom lists). After downloading the list, it will generate the list cache (fancy lingo for just looking through the list so that it can match IPs faster). Once it completes all of these tasks, the actual PeerGuardian2 window will open.
6. Once PeerGuardian2 has opened, you no longer need to look at it. It is completely independent and can be minimized to the taskbar and run in the background. It will run, blocking all the scary people while you’re torrenting.

You’re done. Now, you won’t accidentally download anything from known government IP addresses. However, there’s ALWAYS the chance that a government IP is NOT on the PG2 blacklist (even though it’s updated virtually every day), so you should still be cautious when downloading anything. PeerGuardian2 is not a panacea, nor is it perfect, but every little bit of protection helps.

Disclaimer: Downloading copyrighted material is illegal and Hacksar.com does not advocate it in any way.

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