What's new in Portable PeerBlock 1.2.0 R693
Jan 16, 2014
- Port Allow List - The new "Port Settings" tab allows you to unblock ports (incoming and/or outgoing). This means that PeerBlock will not filter any connections from/to those ports. This can for example be used if you're running PeerBlock on a public FTP server, or if you want to ensure that outgoing SMTP mail communications are never blocked. Many thanks to night_stalker_z for his hard work on this feature!
- First-run Update Message - When you first run PeerBlock after upgrading, you will see a notice explaining why lists are only updating once per week. Hopefully this will help to alleviate people's confusion about this.
- Better Weekly List-Updating - We've made some improvements that should help ensure that free users continue to get their free weekly list-updates.
- I-Blocklist Subscription Settings - To make it easier for you to configure PeerBlock to use an I-Blocklist Subscription, new I-Blocklist Username/PIN fields have been added to the bottom of the "Settings 1" tab.
- Separate Settings Tabs - Instead of having one Settings tab with those silly "Next" and "Prev" buttons on it, we've broken that out into two separate "Settings 1" and "Settings 2" tabs.
- Improved List-Update Error Handling - We've worked with I-Blocklist, who hosts the vast majority of the lists people use, to create improved error messaging for the various problems that may occur when updating lists. If something occurs during update-checking, the error message displayed should be much more meaningful.
- Improved List-update Error Window - Should you hit any errors while updating your lists - 429 or otherwise - we will now pop up a more informative error window, along with a button you can click to jump straight to our site to check for more information.
- Updated Error Windows - If you encounter a catastrophic error, the message that appears will now tell you to go visit peerblock.com/errors. This will redirect you to a forum-post on which the most common error-messages are displayed, to help you figure out what has gone wrong, and what can be done to fix it.
- (Re)Load Previously Downloaded Lists - Previously, there was a problem where if you disabled and then re-enabled a list in the List Manager, that list wouldn't be reloaded until it successfully downloaded an update. Now, if it can't update that list it will still load the last version you did successfully download.
- Removal of Windows 2000 Support - Windows 2000 is quite old by now, we hope that nobody's still running it; if you are, you can continue using the previous PeerBlock version. This release does support all Windows variants from Windows XP through to Windows 8.1, including server variants. (But not Windows RT.)
New in Portable PeerBlock 1.1+ R691 Beta (Jan 10, 2014)
- Better Weekly List-Updating - Some improvements that should help ensure that free users continue to get their free weekly list-updates.
- First-run Update Message - When you first run PeerBlock after upgrading, you will see a notice explaining why lists are only updating once per week. Hopefully this will help to alleviate people's confusion about this.
- Improved List-update Error Window - Should you hit any errors while updating your lists - 429 or otherwise - You will get a more informative error window, along with a button you can click to jump straight to our site to check for more information.
- Re)Load Previously Downloaded Lists - Previously, there was a problem where if you disabled and then re-enabled a list in the List Manager, that list wouldn't be reloaded until it successfully downloaded an update. Now, if it can't update that list it will still load the last version you did successfully download.
New in Portable PeerBlock 1.1+ R677 Beta (Dec 12, 2013)
- Port Allow List - The new "Port Settings" tab allows you to unblock ports (incoming and/or outgoing). This means that PeerBlock will not filter any connections from/to those ports. This can for example be used if you're running PeerBlock on a public FTP server, or if you want to ensure that outgoing SMTP mail communications are never blocked. Many thanks to night_stalker_z for his hard work on this feature!
- Separate Settings Tabs - Instead of having one Settings tab with those silly "Next" and "Prev" buttons on it, we've broken that out into two separate "Settings 1" and "Settings 2" tabs.
- I-Blocklist Subscription Settings - To make it easier for you to configure PeerBlock to use an I-Blocklist Subscription, new I-Blocklist Username/PIN fields have been added to the bottom of the "Settings 1" tab.
- Improved List-Update Error Handling - We've worked with I-Blocklist, who hosts the vast majority of the lists people use, to create improved error messaging for the various problems that may occur when updating lists. If something occurs during update-checking, the error message displayed should be much more meaningful.
- Removal of Windows 2000 Support - Windows 2000 is quite old by now, we hope that nobody's still running it; if you are, you can continue using the previous PeerBlock version. This release does support all Windows variants from Windows XP through to Windows 8.1, including server variants. (But not Windows RT.)
- Updated Error Windows - If you encounter a catastrophic error, the message that appears will now tell you to go visit peerblock.com/errors. This will redirect you to a forum-post on which the most common error-messages are displayed, to help you figure out what has gone wrong, and what can be done to fix it.
New in Portable PeerBlock 1.1.0 R518 (Nov 23, 2010)
- Signed Driver - We now have a signed driver! If you're using a 64-bit version of Windows Vista or 7, you will no longer need to test-sign the driver, or hit F8 during boot, or anything else. It should all just work!
- iBlocklist Lists - We've updated our standard list URLs to point at iblocklist.com lists instead of the original peerguardian.sourceforge.net ones. They are faster, and are much more reliable - no more "Error contacting URL" messages! We will also upgrade your pre-existing lists from sourceforge.net hosted ones to iblocklist.com ones. Also note that the "Gov" list has been removed, since its contents were merged with the "P2P" list long ago.
- Installer Rewrite - Our newest Dev Team member, XhmikosR, has pretty much completely rewritten the installer from scratch. Most importantly, it should actually work now, even during uninstall! (Not that you'll ever want to uninstall PeerBlock, of course, but just in case...)
- Updated List Manager - Reworked this window a bit, to make it easier to get back to the lists originally presented to you in the Startup Wizard.
- Allowed Connections Displayed - By default, the "Show allowed connections" option will be disabled. (This is due to performance reasons, as the tool will consume considerably more CPU if displaying of allowed connections is enabled.) We are still logging the first 9 allowed packets though, so that you know that we're actually working!
- Save Settings - We've added a "Save" button to the settings panel, so that you can be sure your settings updates have been saved.
- List Verification - After downloading an updated list, we'll now make sure that the file contains at least one ip-address range before we'll overwrite your old list. This way you will be protected against your lists being corrupted while downloading them.
New in Portable PeerBlock 1.0+ (r484) Beta (Oct 26, 2010)
- Delete gargantuan history.db - If your history.db file is larger than 1.5 times the configured MaxHistorySize value, we'll delete the history.db file instead of attempting to truncate it down to size. This we believe is the cause of some people's issues with PeerBlock "hanging" after first upgrading to e.g. r404; it can take awhile to cut a multi-gigabyte history.db down to size.
- Migrate from discontinued lists - The Bluetack Webexploit/Forumspam list has been split into two separate lists, with the original "merged" list no longer being updated; also the CompleteWhois Bogon list was abandoned about a year ago. For each of these lists, if you have one of them configured you'll get a "notification message" on your first run after installing the new version, telling you that we're updating your config to the two new Bluetack Webexploit & Forumspam lists, or from the cw_bogon list to the cidr_bogon list (the most-frequently updated Bogon list, and the one that Bluetack's appears to be based upon).
- Better handling of list downloads - We now trap more errors, log more information, change visible status from "Downloading" to "Verifying" when we're checking to make sure a valid list was downloaded, and make a copy of failed-to-load-file type lists to .failed.
- Improved error tracing - We now have better tracing of errors in our driver, and added additional code to log info about errors loading them. Hopefully this should mean better debugging output, particularly for XP/2000 driver issues.
New in Portable PeerBlock 1.0+ (r320) Beta / 1.0.0 R181 (Apr 12, 2010)
- Major Changes:
- Fix for List-Download Crash - This should resolve the "PeerBlock randomly crashes / disappears overnight" problems. It had been crashing occasionally, on some people's computers, while checking for updatedlists.
- Save Failed Lists - If a newly downloaded list fails verification, we'll now save that file as "...\lists\numnumnum.list.failed".
- Warn if Exit While Blocking Recently - When you attempt to exit PeerBlock, if we've blocked some non-HTTP packet recently (i.e. within the past 60 seconds), we will pop up a warning message. This 60 second value is configurable by hand-editing peerblock.conf via Notepad - change the RecentBlockWarntime setting from 60 to however many seconds you'd like; 0 disables this feature.
- Force PeerBlock to Start Enabled - If PeerBlock was disabled when you last exited it, it will now start as Enabled the next time you restart it.
- Allow HTTP for X minutes - The systray right-click menu has two new options: "Allow HTTP for 15 minutes" and "...for 60 minutes". After the specified amount of time has passed, PeerBlock will revert to Blocking HTTP again.
- Click on tray icon to minimize window - Previously, left-clicking on the systray icon would merely display the PeerBlock window . . . even if it was previously displayed. Now, if the window is currently displayed left-clicking on the tray-icon will minimize it; and if the window is currently minimized, it will restore it.
- Minor Changes:
- Updated Libs - Updated libcurl and boost to new versions.
- Added additional Atma list URLs for dupe-checking - Some of the additional URLs from which the Atma list could be downloaded weren't present in our duplicates-checking code, so we wouldn't previously have added these URLs.
- Installer Changes - Increased decompression speed, added copyrights to files.
- Correctly handle \??\C:\WINDOWS\System32\DRIVERS type paths - Previously, we'd had some issues in which on some peoples' machines the path to ipfltdrv.sys (XP/2000 only) was showing up as the above.
- Prevent "Double Updates" - Previously, PeerBlock could pop up the Checking for Updates window twice when you start it. This could happen if you'd not run PeerBlock for a few days, and had the Update at Startup option selected.
- Compare URLs Against Entire String - Previously we were only checking against partial string matches, so that we were incorrectly matching URLs for certain country-codes (like Bhutan).
- Signed Uninstaller - Our uninstaller is now signed. Not that you'd ever want to uninstall PeerBlock of course, right...?
- Additional Tracing Code for Issue #183 - Added some additional tracelogging code to help chase down Issue #183, in which PeerBlock hangs while "deleting tray icons" during exit. If you are one of the "lucky few" who have encountered this issue in the past (I don't believe anyone on the Test Team has however), please attempt to repro this problem and post your logs!
- Don't blink on UDP port 80/443 blocks - Previously, some people had noticed that the systray icon would start blocking as if it had blocked an HTTP packet . . . except that HTTP was allowed. Turns out the problem was that Allow HTTP only allows TCP connections on ports 80 or 443, while the Blink code was also being triggered by UDP connections on ports 80 or 443.
- Don't display Update Window if neither Update Lists nor Update PeerBlock is selected - Previously, if you had both Update Lists and Update PeerBlock deselected, when you clicked "Check Updates" an empty window would appear for a split second.
- Added TBG list URLs to list-add sanity-check - The URLs from the main TBG site had not previously been added to PeerBlock, so we wouldn't have caught e.g. duplicate list additions had those URLs been used. If you add these URLs, they will now be flagged as "Not iblocklist.com URLs". (We had to pick something, and this seemed to make the most sense...)
New in Portable PeerBlock 1.0+ (r277) Beta (Feb 11, 2010)
- Switched "Additional Lists" to iBlocklist - The "additional lists" listed in the dropdown box when you add a new list used to all be www.bluetack.co.uk based ones. These are now iblocklist.com based URLs instead.
- "Friendly" URLs - PeerBlock is now using "Friendly" URLs for most lists, instead of the URLs you can find at iblocklist.com. These new URLs should actually be meaningful, instead of something like ".../?list=kpjsadfkljawjefklajwef".
- List-Add Sanity-Checking - After you've added a new URL-based list in the List Manager, PeerBlock will now perform a "sanity-check" of that URL. It checks to make sure you haven't added the iblocklist.com "Description URL" instead of the "Update URL", lets you know if you're adding one of the Default Lists, checks for duplicates, recommends iblocklist.com URLs instead of bluetack.co.uk URLs, etc. PeerBlock will also offer to fix these URLs for you when possible.
- List "Optimization" - When you first upgrade to r277, PeerBlock will ask if you will allow it to "optimize" your lists. If you let it, it will change bluetack.co.uk-hosted URLs over to iblocklist.com-hosted ones, rename list URLs to the new "Friendly" URL-names, and remove duplicated list entries.
- Saves "Last Known Good" Config - Each time PeerBlock successfully starts up, it will save aside a copy of your configuration as peerblock.conf.bak. This way if your regular config file, peerblock.conf, ever gets corrupted (or you end up with some bad settings in there) and that prevents PeerBlock from starting, it will be able to load this saved copy instead.
- Fix for "Volume externally altered" App-Crash - There was a problem in which peerblock.conf would get corrupted - this would cause PeerBlock to "crash" every time it was started. This has been fixed.
- Fixed Crash-causing Vulnerability - A malicious program running on the local machine could send an malformed IOCTL to our driver, causing the machine to crash. This is not much of a security hole - all it can do is cause the machine to crash, and it requires that a "bad" program already be running on your local machine - but it is good to defend against this condition all the same. Many thanks to Luka Milkovic (Aelthegrin) for the report!
- Multiple-select of Rows - You can now Ctrl+Click multiple lines in the main window as well as on history (and in the List Manager), to allow/block/copy multiple IP addresses at once.
New in Portable PeerBlock 1.0+ (r223) Beta (Nov 24, 2009)
- Fixed "PeerBlock doesn't block unless update at startup" - Thanks to a code contribution by one of our users, "wopeg", we now have a fix for this problem. Many thanks wopeg!!
- Enabled "Update at Startup" - We've re-enabled that as an option, so you can now select or deselect that option at will (in the second settings panel). This setting had been hardcoded to True due to the above bug.
- Fixed XP "Only Works on First Start" Problem - This fixes one of the most annoying recent problems, the one in which on some XP systems PeerBlock would fail to load the driver after the first start of a boot.
- Limit Max Size of History.db - In the Settings panel, there will be a new option "History Size", defaulting to 0. Setting this to a non-zero value should cause the history.db to be pruned/archived once it reaches this size.
- Systray "Allow HTTP" instead of "Block HTTP" - In the menu that appears when you right-click on the PeerBlock systray icon, the "Block HTTP" item has been renamed to "Allow HTTP". The thinking behind this is that blocking HTTP should be the default state, with Allow HTTP being the exception. So this should simply make more sense.
- New Splashscreen! - I know, everybody hates the Splashscreens. And no, we're not re-enabling them by default. However, one user (Mourad) sent in a new splashscreen for us that I think is too good to let fall completely by the wayside, so we're including it as our sole splashscreen pic . . . if you choose to manually enable it.
- Changed Error Text - The messages that show up for Exceptions have been changed to not say "This information has been automagically sent to Phoenix Labs, thanks for helping improve PeerGuardian!". Also, changed the "unable to load packet filtering driver" message, to something more meaningful.
- Installer Changes: "Reset PeerBlock settings" should always be deselected - "Reset PeerBlock Settings" should always start deselected even if you'd previously selected it. Same thing with the "Uninstall PG2" task. Archived files are only removed if you tell it to remove PeerBlock settings.
New in Portable PeerBlock 1.0+ (r202) Beta (Oct 30, 2009)
- Display Yellow Icon if HTTP is Allowed - While HTTP Blocking is disabled, the PeerBlock tray icon will turn yellow to warn you that your system isn't as safe as it could be.
- Save Window Positions - If you move around windows after opening them, their positions should now be saved.
- Save Column Positions - We now save the placement of the columns in e.g. our Blocked/Allowed Connections list on the main UI window.
- Default to "Delete History every 2 Days" on Fresh Install - On new installations, we now default to deleting your history every two days. This should strike a nice balance between not wasting disk space and keeping around enough information that we can troubleshoot your problems if/when they arise.
- Sort History Window with Most Recent First - The "View History" window should now show the most recent entries at the top of the list.
- Installer Tweaks - The installer should now have a PeerBlock icon. Also, the license shortcut has been removed from Start Menu.
- Fix for "StartService, 2, file not found" Error - Some XP users have experienced problems getting PeerBlock to start, in which PeerBlock would complain that it can't load the packet filtering driver, with the aforementioned error information. This should be resolved now. If not, please let us know!
- Fix for History Search by Protocol - Previously, PeerBlock would crash if you searched the History for e.g. TCP protocol packets.
- Updated Exception Handling - If PeerBlock crashes, it should be more likely to take a dump. Previously, there were some classes of crash that it wouldn't catch.
- Cleanly Terminates upon Windows Shutdown - Previously, we still weren't shutting down cleanly if we were running when the user logged off or shutdown/restarted Windows. This was possibly implicated in one or two rare problems reported.
New in Portable PeerBlock 1.0.0 R181 (Oct 5, 2009)
- Signed Driver - We now have a signed driver! If you're using a 64-bit version of Windows Vista or 7, you will no longer need to test-sign the driver, or hit F8 during boot, or anything else. It should all just work!
- iBlocklist Lists - We've updated our standard list URLs to point at iblocklist.com lists instead of the original peerguardian.sourceforge.net ones. They are faster, and are much more reliable - no more "Error contacting URL" messages! We will also upgrade your pre-existing lists from sourceforge.net hosted ones to iblocklist.com ones. Also note that the "Gov" list has been removed, since its contents were merged with the "P2P" list long ago.
- Installer Rewrite - Our newest Dev Team member, XhmikosR, has pretty much completely rewritten the installer from scratch. Most importantly, it should actually work now, even during uninstall! (Not that you'll ever want to uninstall PeerBlock, of course, but just in case...)
- Updated List Manager - Reworked this window a bit, to make it easier to get back to the lists originally presented to you in the Startup Wizard.
- Allowed Connections Displayed - By default, the "Show allowed connections" option will be disabled. (This is due to performance reasons, as the tool will consume considerably more CPU if displaying of allowed connections is enabled.) We are still logging the first 9 allowed packets though, so that you know that we're actually working!
- Save Settings - We've added a "Save" button to the settings panel, so that you can be sure your settings updates have been saved.
- List Verification - After downloading an updated list, we'll now make sure that the file contains at least one ip-address range before we'll overwrite your old list. This way you will be protected against your lists being corrupted while downloading them.