Instead of spending a life-time to attempt to update the Hostiles from Jan 8, 2016, a smaller version (used by LimeWire and WireShare) has been converted from CIDR to the Netmask format used by BearShare.

Reasons:
1. The bulk of the original BearShare hostiles is out-of-date, with most of it having been added during the first decade of this century.

2. The internet landscape has changed dramatically over the past 10 years in most countries. New ISPs (internet service providers) have appeared, some larger ISPs have taken over multiple smaller ones. These ISPs have re-allocated many ip address ranges to other purposes such as from business or government to residential. A good example is a very large range that previously belonged to the UK government (pensions dept.) has been divided with UK gov using a half & the remainder split up and shared between residential use in UK, at least 3 European countries and Saudi Arabia. ie: ipv4 ranges have also been changed since last decade with some ranges now used by different countries. Other examples: 146.198.0.0/16, 146.200.0.0/16, 165.120.0.0/16 previously owned in USA now belong to two ISP’s in the UK. ISP's also lease or purchase ip ranges from other ISP's as they need.
How many people in the world still have the same ip address to the one they used ten years ago!

3. Last decade probably over 80% of the world's internet addressing system (ip addresses) were Static (never changed.) Whereas these days probably well over 75% of the world's ip addresses are now dynamic (change from anywhere between daily to every couple of years depending on ISP policy applied. In my experience, there's highly dynamic and sticky dynamic; the latter might be based on either 3 or 6 week, 3 or 6 month, one or more years turnaround time; there's also a variable/random dynamic policy used by an ISP in Australia, Austria, Norway & Singapore & probably several others ~ these ip addresses might change from after a day (or a few times a day) up to over 6 months & the ipv4 address lifespan duration changes each time.) I'm not aware of any country that does not now use dynamic addressing for a percentage of residential purposes and that includes every continent and country large or small.

4. Question marks exist over many of the additions to the hostiles file in the first place. Last decade it was the default for most gnutella programs to immediately share downloaded files. Some people (myself included) might not check all files they downloaded for weeks or even months. I greatly suspect many additions to the hostiles file were not BOTs but accidental sharers of bad files. Do hosts accidentally sharing bad files 10+ years ago still deserve to be blocked? I doubt the hosts were really periodically re-checked and removal of hosts made on any consistent note (if at all.) It would have been far too difficult to re-check over half a million blocks representing many, many millions of individual hosts. Some of the logic (post #1 of this thread topic on page 1) about updating virus/malware scanners, etc. was barely applicable for those using MacOSX, not to mention an odd logic in any case.

5. Some organisations involved in spamming, attempted interruption or investigating the network last decade have since stopped, either replaced with new ones or never replaced.

Edit 2018-04-29: I've personally found my own unique dynamic ip address within a range block on the hostiles more than a dozen occasions over the past 15 months and more than this over past 3 years despite removing the blocked range or part of it each time.

I've also noticed with the old hostiles at least a couple of BearShare hosts would not have been able to connect to other BearShare hosts if using the original hostiles file. There's probably been at least a handful of such false-positive ('cry wolf') hostile blocks directly affecting BearShare hosts. Nothing wrong with the ip ranges these BearShare hosts are/were using in recent times. If there's doubt, the blocks remain.

The newer hostiles is smaller but no less effective. The biggest plus is now you will be able to connect to more innocent hosts (faster connecting time) and find more files. The newer hostiles is sized around 29-30,000 hosts compared to the original hostiles of 2011 of over half a million or the 2016 version of 430,000. Regular BearShare users will find the program quite noticeably starts up much faster than previously as the hostiles is loaded (previously it could take 10 to 20 seconds depending on computer.) Whilst the full-Japanese hostiles version has been retained, it is definitely not recommended. Using this will definitely slow your connections to the gnutella network, and besides, you might also be losing out on finding files. They share both local & international content.

There is also a Super-Light hostiles option. This file only contains hostiles found over the past 5 or so years & have still been active hostiles over the past year (around 1,800.) I made some effort to avoid adding hostile hosts that change their addresses frequently. The Super-Light hostiles is 6% the size of the new but larger hostiles and around 0.3% the size of the BearShare hostiles of previous years.

Although the BearShare hostiles update download links have been repeated a few times in this topic thread, I'll repeat them once more below:
via SaberCat
via MediaFire (ad-blocker advised)
via 4Shared (need to be a member of this site to download & be extremely careful of pop-up windows such as fake Flash plug-in updates not belonging to Adobe website, fake virus messages, priority download or false download buttons. The genuine button is usually next to the Share button. Then choose Free download. sighs! I'm reluctant to use 4Shared these days but the download links have been the same since early this decade.)