There are a few things to keep in mind with regard to using blocklists to avoid detection on p2p networks.
First
Peer Guardian is defunct and has been superseded by
Peer Block
PeerGuardian 2 users should check out
PeerBlock, which just released version 1.0. It is a continuation from where PeerGuardian 2 development left off, with many bug fixes and support for Windows Vista and Windows 7.
Second the blocklist program is only as good as the blocklist(s) it uses. [Bluetrak has been the defacto standard since blocklists got popular for bittorrent]
Third they are far from 100% effective considering most anti-piracy groups only contact the tracker for a list of peers without ever actually trying to connect to the peers. (If they have changed their behavior as suggested in the following paper I am unaware of it. I highly doubt it considering their history of employing dubious tactics)
Challenges and Directions for Monitoring P2P File Sharing Networks –or– Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice
The popularity of blacklists is, in retrospect, perhaps a bit surprising given our discovery (Section 4) that monitoring agents are issuing DMCA takedown notices to IP addresses without ever exchanging data with those IPs. Nevertheless, blacklists—if populated correctly—might be effective in protecting against direct monitoring techniques that involve actual data exchange between monitoring agents and P2P clients. Since we expect that enforcement agencies will soon shift to more conclusive methods of identifying users, we revisit the issue of blacklists and ask: if enforcement depended on direct observation, are current blacklists likely to inhibit monitoring? We find that the answer to this question is likely no; current IP blacklists do not cover many suspicious BitTorrent peers. In this section, we describe the trace analysis supporting this conclusion.
While I do not discourage the use of blocklists (quite the contrary I recommend it) I can not stress enough that they cannot protect you against all cases of anti-piracy group extortion.
I highly recommend using either a trusted VPN or a program that obfuscates your identity by routing through multiple nodes.
I have discussed i2p however tor is another option that has been discussed elsewhere.
OneSwarm is a cross-platform p2p program that allows you to control who you share individual files with and obfuscates the source and destination of communications by routing through multiple nodes. It claims superior performance to freenet and tor. The source is available from
github and you can read more at their
homepage.
Another option is to rent access to a Virtual Private Network (VPN) however you have to trust that they are not keeping logs and don't even bother with the free ones. Be ready to pay a hefty price (remember your not just renting a VPN your buying their silence). When considering how much a good VPN will cost remember to compare it to the cost of getting on the shit-list of lawyers who are looking for people to extort. Settling out of court will costs thousands and going to court will cost far more then that.
Some would recommend the use of public proxies I am not one of them, in my experience most public proxies would sell you out to stiff breeze. Still they could provide a novel method of avoiding detection by anti-piracy groups. Use at your own risk though.
None of these options are bulletproof but all of them will decrease the chance that you get caught up in one of these flimsy extortion schemes.
edit: crap forgot about usenet. Safer then bittorrent because only the usenet provider sees your IP, but shop around for you provider (assuming you ISP doesn't offer it) because some of them are rip-offs.