for the occasional public tracker taken torrent, PG is a must, and its not a waste of resources anymore than Azureus itself. Sometime you just have to look "elsewhere" for something particular and PG gives you a little comfort in doing so.
And well, if you hang out in discussion forums and irc chans for such public trackers and what have you, you'll encounter a fair number of people who used PG that got mafiaa letters anyway. And people who never used PG that got them. And people who used PG but never got them. And people who never used PG that never got them.
PG just blocks known IP addresses, like the one time utorrent.com's IP was blocked cause of some trivial deal with another company. Nothing's stopping MediaSentry from using a "residential" or some other non-blocked IP address. Hey, for all you know, my home IP address or the IP of two of my servers could be snooping for your IP on some random torrent. That's on top of whether or not you trust the blacklist maintainer. Which uh, given the utorrent incident, shows some obvious issues. And obviously the blacklists would have to be public, in which case nothing is stopping MediaSentry et al from also obtaining the same blacklists and using an IP that isn't there.
Two great ways not to get a mafiaa letter:
1. Don't download copyrighted material.
2. Block all IPs 0.0.0.0 through 255.255.255.255. And appropriately for ipv6.
Hence, PG is a waste of resources.
I don't deny blocklists do good particularly when some peer is sending you trash data, or for certain other protocols. But for "protecting" yourself? Not really. You don't need PG to block bad peers, Azureus and other clients have that built in.
bold part: um what? Azureus under v3.0? yes, no brainer. who uses 3 anyway?
I know a fair number of people using azureus 3.0. It's gross
