Firewall question

[chrisjones]

Hi - Ive heard a lot of people talking about Peer Guardian, whats the +'s next to the likes of Zone Alarm.

Thanks in advance

[Gareth]

AFAIK, Peer Guardian is primarily targetted to P2P applications, especially bit torrent applications. Its primary purpose is to block incoming and outgoing traffic based on IP blocklists, ie it purports to know the IP addresses of the RIAA, MPAA, etc... and won't allow connections to and/or from those known addresses.

Traditional firewalls, on the other hand, tend to work mostly on the application-based rule, ie the firewall asks you if a particular application is permitted access to t'internet. It is possible to restrict at the IP address level, but most users don't use this functionality, so that if you allow an application to access the web, it will be allowed to access any target on the web.

That's a real quick 'n' dirty overview... I can go into more detail if you like.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerGuardian

is quite informative

[grubbymitts]

PeerGuardian can only ever work on a temporary basis. What's to stop copyright enforcers from swapping IP ranges every so often to get around it?