The last couple of months have seen the vulnerability to your privacy dramatically increase. Anti P2P laws, the government, the police, spyware servers... Everyone wants to know more about your activities on the Internet. Everyone wants to know what you have on your pc.

What sites you visit on the Internet, how often, how long you have been using it, what programs you use etc etc... They are trying to make laws in Europe to allow the government to sniff into your e-mails, listen to your phone calls, and thanks to other recent laws your ISP must keep all logs of your online activity...

Your privacy is being threatened on all fronts.

One of the latest programs that helps you protect yourself against "privacy sniffers hordes" is PeerGuardian2 released by Phoenixlabs on http://wwww.phoenixlabs.org/. At this moment the latest version of PeerGuardian is 2.0 Beta 6b. I'll skip the boring installation instructions and just give some advice regarding effective use of PeerGuardian mainly on sharing programs such as Kazaa, Edonkey, Shareaza, DC...

You can use it in combination with socksifying (explained at http://www.proxyblind.org/tut.shtml ). Which should increase your privacy dramatically and make it very difficult to trace you. When you open PeerGuardian you will see what a simple and effective program it is.

On left side are:

• Disable - display number of blocked IP's;
• List Manager - display number of sources used for uploading;
• Check Updates - with info about latest updating.

On right side are:

• Block HTTP - HTTP allowed or not (mean do you want to block IP during surfing through the Net or not)
• View History - Actually logs of blocked and allowed IP's
• Clear Log - Clear your logs/history

By clicking on setting you'll see another screen with:

• Auto-Update - You can set to check automatically for new release of PeerGuardian, aut. update of lists and time to check for update
• Logging - With setting how much lines to logs and enabling/disabling allowed connection with specify of days for removing
• Startup - To chose start of not with Windows, start minimized or not and displaying splash screen or not
• Optimalization - Normal to use IP ranges exactly as it is inside list or agressive that use a less CPU and block much more (it is explained by programs self how).

Now the most import parts. Click back on protection and click on list manager and you'll see oversight of your list. To create list for yourself what is strongly recommended go to this URL:
http://www.bluetack.co.uk/config/sources.txt (Bluetack sources that are updated daily.) and then added every single url that you find there to your list. How?

Click on "Add" (it is if you would to download list on daily basis from internet. Create list button is for creating your own list from local sources) and type by description name of list and check URL to specify URL which PeerGuardian should check and update your list. By type it shows wether or not that IP is blocked or allow.

Repeat the same method using other URL's, click ok and you are done. Start your sharing program (eventually socksified which should increased your privacy) and surf safe.