The Return of PG Beta 2
p2pnet.net News:- PeerGuardian Beta 2 crashed almost as soon as it was launched.
Why?
“The first version of pg2 beta didn’t have any controls on how many people were connecting to our website, so we were receiving in excess of 2,000 queries a minute,” Joseph Farthing told p2pnet.
“This equals one very dead web server.”
But the servers are back and working again, but you need to download the new February 25 Beta2 here.
You might also want to delete the old .conf file.
In the meanwhile, “http://methlabs.org/sync/ now has the pg2 format lists for anyone who wants to look at them by hand, but pg2 will automatically update itself,” says Farthing, adding, “We’ve had some advice and ideas given to us, so you may well see improvements in the next proper release.”
On other things, why use PG2? We don’t have a special brief for it. But we’ve know the original developer, Tim Leonard, virtually since Day One and he speaks with a straight tongue. And, we’ve been using PG in its various versions for the same amount of time and apart from the fact early PGs ate cpu like it was going out of style, it’s worked fine for us : )
For now, there’s an interesting debate on dslreports which kicks off with joebear29’s, “I use PG… And I also do a anti-RIAA ritual dance before engaging in questionable activity. I can’t decide which is more effective.”
Markjcj asks, “Does anybody actually think that the **AA are going to stick to known address ranges? They can log in from anywhere, anytime they want. With any form of P2P sharing files that are copyrighted, you rolls the dice and takes your chances.”
“I completely agree,” says Murray. “They probably have many locations and many ‘investigators’ working from many different places. And what’s to say they couldn’t use proxies too…”
Farthing says: “- its all a matter of relative security, there is not 100% security from using blocklists, simply because we cannot be 100% sure where BayTSP (and it is usually them) are connecting from.
“However, they AREN’T connecting from home DSL addresses, this has been proven countless times. how? well when BayTSP or someone send you a letter they are required to give a time that the infringement occured. now all you have to do is compare your firewall logs with the time on the letter and whois the ranges within a reasonable range of this and…. wow! its a range labled ‘BayTSP’!
“People don’t believe it’s that easy, but it really is – the companies are NOT trying to catch PeerGuardian users, they are trying to catch less experienced users and make an example of them. Going to extreme lengths to capture 0.01% of people (pg users) simply is not feasible, and BayTSP are a COMMERCIAL ‘detective’ company – they’re going to do things as cheaply as possible to keep their profits high.
“Now others have said ‘but it’s easy to get your IP off the tracker or some website logs (eg lokitorrent)’
“This [sic] data would not stand up in court – logs can be faked, and walking into a court and saying ‘we have his ip address’ is not sufficiant proof of anything! To successfully sue you must receive data from the person and prove that it is copyright infringing
“This means that if you can block the IP address of the corp trying to get data from you then they have no proof. The system is 99% automated anyway, so it will just go and try someone else if it can’t get anything from you – the cheapest way, remember?
“Other ways of getting the evil ppl are to scan for popular songs etc and find the fake files. What RIAA do other than try to capture people is that they attempt to flood p2p networks with fake files.
“Blocking a few IP ranges with PeerGuardian can massively reduce the amount of fake files you find on some networks.”
Farthing concludes, “Now the final point is that the blocklist is a bit messy at the moment, we haven’t been maintaining it for a while (other people have) and we think it needs a cleanup. This is why we made blocklist.org, still under construction to let people view the database and report bad and erroneous ranges, and submit new ones that they may have found
“We never said it was 100% but 75% + (we’ve improved a lot since 2003) reduction is pretty good, no? If anyone has any problems please come on IRC and myself or someone else will be glad to talk to you!”
irc.methlabs.org (port 6667) #methlabs
Something you think we should know? tips[at]p2pnet..net
February 26th, 2005 at 7:20 pm
Yeah and the other people [ http://www.bluetack.co.uk/ ] that have been maintaining the blocklists that you use do a damn good job , while you people at methlabs sit on your ass and complain about it.
February 26th, 2005 at 8:31 pm
there are a LOT of bad ranges in the bluetack lists, currently including entire residential ISPs for no good reason
February 26th, 2005 at 9:04 pm
So why don’t you report that at bluetack, so they sort it out, it usually takes just a few hours to fix… or are you too lame to do that ..
February 26th, 2005 at 10:52 pm
hey lets not start fussing about this. I haven’t reported personaly any bad ranges to BlueTack but I have heard that it can be a bit of a pain. Like I said I never have and thats all I heard. I’m personaly using PG2 just simply b/c its an awesome program. I just can’t belive that people are acting like little kids fussing about this.
February 27th, 2005 at 12:07 am
hear hear…
at methlabs we’re trying to improve our blocklist system by making the blocklist open to moderations etc
we’re still coding the backend but blocklist.org is coming along nicely
we did approach other ip groups (not just bluetack) to see if they wanted to work together, but no one seemed interested…
ho hum, if anyone is they can contact us at the forums… we’ll need a lot of moderators
Joseph Farthing
Methlabs.org
February 27th, 2005 at 9:44 am
Actually, the people at Methlabs have been adding ranges and filtering them. However, they don’t add every range that is reported to them, like Bluetack does. The Bluetack theory is that every range should be blocked, and it will be unblocked when someone complains about it.
The Methlabs approach is that ranges should be verified first, so innocent users don’t get blocked for no reason. Let’s just block the whole Internet.
I personally like Methlabs approach. And with the start of Blocklist.org, they are going to personally go through every IP in the database and re-verify them all, adding and deleting ranges as necessary, so they will all be verified. Plus, when using P2P programs, blocking more IP’s is not as efficient. You’re really cutting down on your amount of sources you have for downloading by blocking unverified ranges.
February 27th, 2005 at 3:04 pm
I think the ppl at methlabs are on a wrong trip here, they would have had no lists for the past few years if bluetack wasn’t working on them continually… Now they are trying to badmouth bluetack and take our lists and say look how great hunters we are…. how pathetic…
Telling wrong things about bluetack will not help your course… eventually you have to get our lists again to get the baddies bluetack finds, since you have no expertise among you whatsoever concerning investigating ips…
February 27th, 2005 at 4:57 pm
you mention cause?
i am interested? what is our cause if it is any different to the cause of bluetack?
“expertise among you whatsoever concerning investigating ips… ”
where did the bluetack list come from? methlabs
we have tried, countless times, to try to get co-operation between the groups, it would be much better for the USERS if we both maintained one list in public, rather than attacking each other
we tried to do this with blocklist.org but we couldn’t achive any co-operation
can you not see that working apart helps no one?
we’ve given everything away – we WANT to stop these stupid arguments
but people wont let us, so we have to work alone
Joseph Farthing
Methlabs.org
February 27th, 2005 at 6:51 pm
you keep telling yourself that, lol
I got logs that say different.
February 27th, 2005 at 7:08 pm
Joseph , you have absolutely no idea how much work has gone into all the LISTS since they were created at Bluetack , so stop trying to comment on things you arent even involved in.
You know yourself there are lot more than the just a single anti-p2p list , there were no other lists until we made them.
I still have copies of the Anti-p2p lists in use back in 2002 , which shades in comparison to the current one in use today , and I know you sure as hell didnt help in any way to hunt the IP’s that went into them. You like to take the credit though.
So now you are saying that Methlabs built all the lists that you are using now , typical. So I guess the spyware list was all methlabs doing too .. oh and the gov mil list , thanks for making that.. You need to get a grip on reality boy.
Just another example of why no one wants to work with you.
Moore.
February 27th, 2005 at 7:20 pm
the only list that came from methlabs was the anti-p2p list, and bluetack has added many more lists and has given the antip2p list some meat. the methlabs list was pretty bare before bluetack started maintaining the lists.
ALL of methlabs current lists come from bluetack. Methlabs then takes bluetacks lists, and filters out stuff they think isn’t important and repackages them. Thats not a big deal, but don’t try to take credit where credit is not deserved. methlabs crew was a major factor in the demise of pg.net.
It would be awesome if both crews worked together, but the fact is simply that most methlabs staff refuse to work with bluetack. And also the fact that methlabs wants 90% control of any combined SQL database and only give bluetack 10% control, after bluetack has done 100% of all the list maintaining. There are logs to back all of this up, this isn’t just blowing smoke or making things up. The facts are that many methlabs staff refuse to work at all with bluetack, but then turn around and try to say “we have to work alone”
oh and just for the record, protowall and peerguardian are both 0% cpu, protowall uses more memory as it is logging granted packets which peerguardian currently does not offer as it would ruin their pitch. anyone that uses win9x/me still deserves to get hacked into and sued for using a totally worthless OS.
February 28th, 2005 at 3:11 am
What the heck. Excuse me for being blunt right now I’m going through some stuff in my life thats got me in an already pissy attitude. But I think this crap needs to stop. Were is this all going? Here is a quick answer “No Where”. Right now it sounds like your carring more about yourselfes and not the people you both supply the list for. I could care less about where I get my list from. I mean yeah I would much rather get the list from the place that I support, which I will not say if I use bluetack or methlabs, because that would only be senisble thing to do. You know what. It would be really cool though if both sites came together and worked on the list together. I think that both sites should set their difference aside and just do it. I mean yeah if I had made a blocklist and everything that was huge, yeah I would want credit for it. But if in the end it just caused problems trying to get that credit then I wouldn’t really care if I got the credit. The satifactory form knowing that thousands of people world-wide were helped out by my list would be enough credit for me, and if nobody knew it then that would be just fine by me. I think that we just need to stop worring about who deserves credit and come together to help the people that we’re trying to protect. I just wanted to say thank you for reading this long comment and if you don’t like it then well you don’t like I was just giving my opinion. I also just wanted to say thank you to both bluetack and methlabs, both have done a lot of work to help the general person that wouldn’t be protected if ya’ll didn’t provide such great services. Thank You!
March 1st, 2005 at 8:13 am
hear hear
flaming is stupid, as i said!
Joseph Farthing
Methlabs.org