It's also worth noting a couple of oddities specific to the blocking of : In any event, I seem to be seeing apparent false positives more frequently these days, so unless large swathes of the www have covertly gone on an antiP2P warpath, it looks like QA at Peerblock is declining of late, to the point of becoming a substantial inconvenience for its users. On the one hand, perhaps they just err on the side of overblocking on the other, though, perhaps they just err a great deal.
One also must wonder, given the high rate of false positives it seems to generate lately, whether Peerblock is also generating many false negatives. Regardless, among the numerous errors in Peerblock's block list, this one is both ironic and particularly egregious (as in this instance the site not only isn't antiP2P, it isn't even neutral, making it a clear case of a friendly-fire casualty). On the other hand, if for some reason Peerblock is going to continue to regard as for some reason being antiP2P, then it is people here that will probably have to deal with that by moving the connection test to a server that isn't blocked (and updating Shareaza so the Help menu item points to the new location). I thought here might be the biggest concentration of people that might know what's causing the overblocking and might even be able to fix it. However, I was given to understand that many of the main people contributing to Peerblock also hang out here, and it is here that I was originally linked to it. and there are a few other groupings like that as well). Often the block message in Peerblock's log is either generic ("Savvis" is a common and cryptic one that appears with a wide variety of seemingly-unrelated sites) or outright erroneous (for instance, Peerblock seems to think that a substantial proportion of the web is bookseller, which, obviously, is a company hostile to filesharing and therefore blocked it also seems to think that a lot of unrelated sites actually belonging to disparate companies, nonprofits, and individuals all belong to some company called Liteup, Inc.
An awful lot of random blogs and other sites that have no obvious reason to be either pro- or antiP2P are blocked. Ultimately, the problem may really be Peerblock, though. They will unblock HTTP, get the connection test page to load, and then assume the results indicate a connection problem with Shareaza that may not actually exist. This is likely to cause problems for users checking their connection, using Peerblock, and not especially technically knowledgeable. Annoying, but fixable, right? Just "enable HTTP" in Peerblock and try again.īut because Peerblock thinks (erroneously) that is antiP2P, it will also block the (non-port-80) connection test traffic itself, resulting in a spurious failure. Specifically, anyone using Shareaza's Help menu's Connection Test item will get a "connection reset" error in their browser. For some reason, Peerblock (with only the antiP2P blocklist enabled) blocks (about as anti-antiP2P as a site can get, I imagine).