PeerGuardian and PeerGuardian 2 are free and open source programs developed by Phoenix Labs. They are capable of blocking incoming and outgoing connections based on IP blocklists. The system is also capable of blocking advertising, spyware, government and educational ranges, depending upon user preferences.

The original PeerGuardian (1.0, led by programmer Tim Leonard) was programmed in Visual Basic and quickly became popular among more knowledgeable P2P users despite blocking only the common TCP protocol and being known for high RAM and CPU usage when connected to P2P networks. The original version was made open source, and development began on a new version (2.0, led by programmer Cory Nelson) to resolve the shortcomings of the original. The latest version, PeerGuardian 2, is coded in C and C++. It can block all IPv4 protocols and ports. Windows Vista and IPv6 are currently unsupported but there is a test version that does work with them.

Although IP addresses of government and business entities are easily added to a list of IP addresses to be blocked, there is no means for PeerGuardian to block access by a government or business using an undocumented IP address to identify people engaged in software piracy or other criminal misconduct.

PeerGuardian 2 does not support Windows Vista at the moment.

We and the PeerGuardian team do not condone copyright infringement. There are many legal uses of P2P and we are sick of being treated like criminals! We want to keep organizations and individuals from collecting data about us without our consent

PeerGuardian 2 for Windows 98/ME

PeerGuardian 2 for Windows 2000/XP/2003

PeerGuardian 2 for Windows XP/2003 x64 Edition

PeerGuardian 2 source code (for programmers)

PeerGuardian Website