Two derivatives of the popular Kazaa peer-to-peer filesharing service now actively attempt to block scans by the RIAA and other agencies, escalating the P2P war to a new level.

Both Kazaa K++ and Kazaa Lite, two very similar modifications to the Kazaa file-sharing system by Sharman Networks, now contain hooks to the PeerGuardian database of IP addresses. Both updates were published to the Web at the end of last week.

The two versions available for download are Kazaa Lite 2.4.0, and Kazaa K++ 2.4.0. Although the version numbers are the same, the Kazaa Lite download is 2.67 Mbytes, while the K++ version is 3.11 Mbytes; both are bundled with different features and apparently contain slightly different code bases.