How to Use Blocklists for Increased Security and Privacy
A blocklist (aka IP blocklists) prevent or block harmful IP addresses from accessing your computers and devices. Technically, the blocklist is a database of blacklisted IP addresses from which data is not accepted from or sent to your computer or device.
Being connected to the Internet is now indispensable for the most basic of our everyday communication, entertainment and activities. But our reliance on the Internet and especially being connected 24/7 opens our computers and mobile devices to a Pandora’s Box of serious security vulnerabilities and threats.
Blocklists have a wide variety of uses from spammers, hackers, malwares and botnets. Blocklists are also especially relevant to help protect peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing by BitTorrent users.
Blocklists help protect you from the many organizations that have infested BitTorrent swarms to monitor and collect the IP addresses of torrent users.
Privacy enthusiasts including dedicated p2p torrent file sharers maintain blocklists by continually discovering and adding the IP addresses of unfriendly or malicious parties. Some of these lists are available for free while others are based on a premium subscription model.
Best Blocklists
I-Blocklist and Squidblacklists are the leading blocklist subscription services.
- I-Blocklist is a dedicated service which maintains and enforces Internet Protocol blocklists. It provides blocklists which are compatible with the following software Transmission, PeerGuardian, Vuze, iplist, PeerBlock, and uTorrent. I-Blocklist also provides standard format blocklists including those in DAT, P2P, and CIDR formats. The lists provided by iblocklist may be viewed in their lists directory.
- Squidblacklists.org’s blocklists are provided in multiple compatible formats which are suitable for most web filtering platforms including DansGuardian, Mikrotik Web Proxy, SquidGuard, Squid Proxy Native ACL, as well as many others.
Other names you will come across often in the blocklist world are PeerBlock and Bluetack. PeerBlock is a popular open-source blocklist app for Windows you can still find online. Bluetack is a “brand” of blocklist you will also see mentioned including on i-Blocklist.
What is a Blocklist Wrapup
Using a Blocklist is not foolproof. However, given the ever increasing dangers online the more precautions you can put in place the better.
Implementing a good quality, updated blocklist is yet one more security step you can take. Furthermore, if you are a fan of p2p torrent file-sharing or Popcorn Time streaming, it would be very wise to look into blocklists. You should also a trusted, premium VPN, virtual private network to give yourself as much protection as possible.
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