For years now, Anti-P2P organizations have been polluting BitTorrent with fake peers and bogus torrent files, which send out fake or corrupt data in order to slow down file transfers and/or log the IP addresses of users who ’share’ the torrent. This is typically rampant on a communal BitTorrent level through publicly-accessible torrents from popular sites such as ThePirateBay, mininova, Isohunt, et al. Consequences range from those laughable (but sometimes scary) DMCA notices sent from your ISP; cease-and-desist letters; and even worse, pre-litigation letters from any company under the RIAA / MPAA / IFPI “umbrella”.
To significantly reduce your chances of connecting with malicious peers, the integration of IP Blocking is crucial to P2P safety. This can be approached through third-party software, including PeerGuardian2 or Blocklist Manager - but it can also be handled client-side through IP blocklists. µTorrent supports IP blocking at the BitTorrent protocol level - and it’s a great solution for Vista users who don’t yet have the option of using an external program such as PeerGuardian2.
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For those of you who incorporate IP Blocking into µTorrent, you may have noticed that when you upgraded to v1.8, the ipfilter.dat addon doesn’t seem to be blocking anything. Rest assured, it is working. If you use µTorrent v1.7.7 with ipfilter.dat and click on the Logger tab at the bottom, blocked IPs are automatically shown (and logged). This is not the case for v1.8, and you’ll need to manually enable the log to get it to display the blocked peers. 
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