There i am being 'a law abiding citizen' browsing around the interwebs a few minutes ago when i get a message:
"PeerGuardian has encountered an error and needs to close"
Fine, i click 'don't send', use the 'Recover Peerguardian" tool to unload the driver, restart peerguardian and continue about my business. 30 seconds later it does it again. this time i close Firefox, uTorrent and anything else that's using my connection, disconnect, recover Peerguardian, reconnect, re-start peerguardian and restart everything else. as soon, though as i opened uTorrent it crashed again. I've rebooted and re-installed peerguardian but its still playing up.
any ideas anyone? i don't particularly like using the internet without peerguardian as I'm a tad paranoid (for no reason of course. its not as if I'm breaking multiple international copyright laws is it?)
Spoiler for this post won't actually help, it's more of my rant:
Well, personally, I'd say don't bother with PeerGuardian.
It's completely useless in my opinion, here's why:
Firstly, let's assume that PG's protection is *perfect* (a big assumption) - ie, that it has every single law enforcement agency's IP and can block it. Problem is, it can't protect you from a lot of your P2P activities. For torrents, this is how it works:
Your PC sends request to tracker --» Tracker broadcasts your IP to everyone «-- law enforcement agency grabs list of IPs from tracker
As you can see, they won't even target your machine - your IP is being broadcast by the tracker, so PeerGuardian can't do poo poo to protect you, since it's the tracker which dobs you in (has nothing to do with your computer). Once they have your IP, a simple lookup will reveal your ISP (again, has nothing to do with your computer, the IP is owned by the ISP).
Then secondly, obviously it's impossible for it to have a list of all agencies, in fact, I wonder how they'd even get close to a reasonable list... If I could easily bypass it, why would an agency have an issues with it?
after reading that i realise that peerguardian really is useless. to be honest i don't think I'll bother trying to get it to work. i just had a go at protowall but that doesn't want to install. I've had a look at the FAQ on their website but it doesn't help.
What I'm currently downloading isn't really that incriminating. (Ax Men to be precise. I like documentaries like that. Ice Road Truckers is another favourite). theres nothing wrong with me having a copy of it, i think, as i could have simply recorded it from TV.
Speaking of PeerGuardian, mine hasn't opened since about a week ago, just noticed that
By the way can't legally have that unless you pay for the copy rights i believe
there's nothing wrong with recording off the TV. That's what Sky+ or Teevo (is that what its called?) is for. I'm therefore assuming (probably contestable in a court of law) that its fine for me to download it. I'm getting exacly the same thing in the end, no one is worse off except for me who has to pay for the bandwidth used.
Dunno how your TV stations over there are like. It is technically illegal (at least over here). As for why they'd be interested in you watching it off TV than download, could be so that they can bombard you with ads, stick their ugly logo on the video etc...
