Aside from the peer-to-peer (P2P) clients themselves, there are a host of tools you’ll likely find useful when you’re downloading from P2P networks. There are tools that create a virtual sandbox, block suspect IP addresses, access your P2P client remotely, stream video and audio, protect against viruses and more. Here’s our pick of the five best P2P helper tools.
Sandboxie
Sandboxie (www.sandboxie.com) is a great little tool that runs any program you specify in a virtual sandbox. This means the application can’t make any changes to your system, can’t modify memory or hard disk space outside its sandbox, and can’t affect any other programs in memory or on the hard disk. In short, it’s a secure way to run suspect programs. This makes it great for P2P networks, where just about any program you download might be suspect. It can also run your web browser in a sandbox, so any sites with malicious content you visit can’t affect your system (and a lot of P2P sites qualify as malicious). It’s a tad unintuitive to use, though. You first have to create a sandbox — there’s one created during initial setup (called DefaultBox) and you can add others. Then you have to manually run programs inside that sandbox. To do that, you click on the Sandbox menu, select which sandbox you want to run the program in, select ‘Run Sandboxed’ and then choose which program to run. The sandboxed program itself will open up and run as normal, but it can’t affect the rest of the system and can be terminated within the ‘Sandbox Control’ window. The program isn’t much good for applications you want to permanently install, of course, but for apps you just want to check out or think are suspect, it works great.
PeerBlock
The successor to PeerGuardian, PeerBlock (www.peerblock.com) is an IP blacklist and blocking tool. It comes with a database of known ‘bad’ internet addresses and it prevents computers at those addresses from talking to your computer. The IP addresses on the PeerBlock blacklist include known spammers, copyright agencies, advertising hosts and malicious file sharers. PeerBlock does a very good job of blocking sites on its list, but we should warn you that it’s hardly a panacea against malicious sites and copyright monitors. The blacklist itself is public, so anybody on it can just acquire a new IP address and do their work. Given that, it’s very likely that copyright monitoring agencies have agents that aren’t on the blacklist. However, it remains useful for stopping malicious sites from accessing your PC and it also does some pretty good work against spammers (P2P and email) and ad agencies. It may cause problems in some online games, although you can always switch it off when gaming.
µTorrent Remote for Android
We talked about µTorrent Remote for Android last month and the more we use it, the more we love it. Available from www.utorrent.com, it’s an Android application, running on your smartphone or tablet, which allows you to remotely control your µTorrent client. You can add and remove torrents, monitor the progress of downloads and view RSS feeds. Now that µTorrent 3.0 is official, everybody can easily access it. You can download it from the Android Market right now. Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent for iOS, since Apple doesn’t permit anything BitTorrent related on the iTunes App Store, though we suppose a version for jailbroken devices might become available.
TVersity or another UPnP server
Let’s face it: if you’re a heavy P2P user, most of what you download is probably some form of media content and playing/viewing/listening to your media is much better on your home AV equipment than on your PC. This is where TVersity (www.tversity.com) comes in. TVersity is a free UPnP audio-visual server that’s designed to allow you to stream your downloaded content from your PC to a network media player, which can then output it to your big-screen TV. That player could be a PlayStation 3, an Xbox 360, a DLNA-capable TV set or a dedicated set-top box like the Western Digital WD TV Live. To use it, you need to add items (directories) to your TVersity library. TVersity will monitor those directories and add any new items it finds to its list of shared content. Then you just go to your media player/console/TV set and fire it up. TVersity should be automatically detected on your network and selecting it as a source will allow you to play any of your shared media.
TVersity isn’t the only UPnP AV server around, though. XBMC (http://xbmc.org) can serve as one, as can the Vuze BitTorrent client (www.vuze.com). There’s also Twonky (www.twonkymedia.com). Windows has a UPnP Server built into Windows Media Player through its media sharing function, but that one is so bad we never recommend that anybody use it.
An antivirus program
If you don’t have one installed, go and install one right now. It’s OK, we’ll wait. So much of what you’ll download from P2P networks will prove to be dodgy, infected or just plain dangerous, and it’s imperative that you have a last line of defence against it. An antivirus tool is just that. Most of the top names in AV have good tools available: Symantec, McAfee, BitDefender, Kaspersky and others. You can even get free antivirus from avast!, AVG and Microsoft (Security Essentials), so there’s really no excuse.
there is iTransmission for iDevices, i have tested it out on iOS 5.0.0, with an iPhone 4 on Telstra NextG.... Works fine down here in Esperance..... The only catch for iTransmission is that your iDevice has to be jailbroken. Jailbreaking is fine on iOS 5, but it is a Tethered Jailbreak. Google Should be help you with this issue. To view files downloaded with iTransmission on a Windows PC, i recommend DiskAid for Students with a valid .edu account or iPhoneBrowser for everyone else :)