Geeks At Large

So anyone who knows me, knows I’m a huge Revision3 fan. Diggnation, The Totally Rad Show, Systm, I watch every single show they have.

So imagine my chagrin when suddenly, their site no longer loads in my browser on my Windows machine. For a while, I thought that maybe it was a DNS issue, so I checked OpenDNS using their Cache Check page. All reports were in the green there, so I figured maybe they were just having some issues of their own…Until one day, while trying to browse the forums, PeerGuardian began flashing at me….I opened it up to see what it had blocked…lo and behold, Revision3 was inexplicably on that list! For a minute I thought maybe I was just seeing things…but I re-enabled PG and tried to browse the site again….boom, blocked again!

Now not to drop names or make myself seem like some important person, but I run an IRC network for fans of Rev3, it’s not official or anything, but we do, from time to time, get some of the show hosts and other Rev3 staffers dropping by to chat. On this occasion, thankfully, one such person was in the popSiren chat room. Mauricio Balvinera (aka maubrowncow), one of Revision3’s editors, had stopped by like he does every couple days or so, and I mentioned this to him. He told the head of their IT staff, Chuck Siu, who then provided the picture seen below from a Flickr photostream he googled.

I decided that something really should be done about this, besides just writing a disgruntled blog post and submitting the photo to digg. So I logged onto PhoenixLabs’ IRC Chatroom on Freenode to see if I could get some answers. Here’s a log of my conversation with them.

Apr 10 16:43:53 <TuxOtaku>      hey guys…I have a question about the PeerGuardian Blocklists
Apr 10 16:45:12 <TuxOtaku>      are they user-compiled? or are they something that are maintained internally?
Apr 10 16:45:37 <TuxOtaku>      the reason I’m asking is that certain legitimate sites I frequent are on the blocklists
Apr 10 16:45:43 <TuxOtaku>      namely Revision3.com
Apr 10 16:46:44 <siofwolves>    TuxOtaku, we use the lists that bluetack.co.uk create, as we don’t have our own.
Apr 10 16:46:54 <K`Tetch>       forget it, bluetack runs the lists, and they add stuff and random and NEVER take it off
Apr 10 16:47:52 <TuxOtaku>      damn
Apr 10 16:48:11 <K`Tetch>       they got 1/3 of the net on those lists
Apr 10 16:48:18 <K`Tetch>       they’re meaningless
Apr 10 16:49:21 <TuxOtaku>      meaningless??
Apr 10 16:49:43 <TuxOtaku>      whenever I have PG running and try to browse Rev3’s site, it gets blocked
Apr 10 16:49:44 <K`Tetch>       theres no way to tell who’s anti-p2p, and they mostly use home connections to just LOG
Apr 10 16:50:03 <K`Tetch>       so using bluetack’s lists to try and make you safe during p2p doesn’t work
Apr 10 16:50:15 <K`Tetch>       because the people they’re trying to block, they can’t identify
Apr 10 16:51:50 <TuxOtaku>      sooo, if that’s the case….are there any other lists that PG can use??
Apr 10 16:52:04 <K`Tetch>       not really, you torrent?
Apr 10 16:52:04 <TuxOtaku>      because clearly, that’s bad practise
Apr 10 16:52:26 <K`Tetch>       who can you complain to, complain to bluetack they’ll just ban you

So, not only do PhoenixLabs acknowledge that their software is inherently flawed, they have no means or even motivation (it would seem) to correct the problem.

Bearing that in mind, I no longer use PeerGuardian, and I would advise against installing this program unless you want to see similar issues to what I have experience. If this is how they plan to run things, I’m sure there are better alternatives out there. Also, I would encourage people to speak out against Bluetack and their extremely flawed service, and just generally help get the word out that this is not a product that will aid those in the filesharing and internet privacy communities.