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μTorrent (often referred to as uTorrent or MTorrent by people too lazy to look up how to type in a "μ" character) is reportedly silently shipping a bitcoin miner with its default install. While you can opt out during the installation process, the mining software, called "EpicScale", is apparently installed automatically and silently when updating an existing μTorrent install.
It seems that the developers are aware of this, but the only official response that was given by an administrator on the forum is that " it's easy to uninstall the software via Add/Remove Programs".
From the experience of several users, the installation process still leaves .dll's and executables behind once completed.
More detail can be found on this thread on the official forums.
Are any SoylentNews user affected by this? What alternative torrent clients do you use?
[Editor's Note: The official forums are down at time of editing. The topic has also been discussed on Reddit which includes an Imgur link with the forum thread.]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:25AM
Deluge 1.3.11
(Score: 2) by deimios on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:07AM
Deluge is Good Enough(tm). While it's ugly (blame GTK on windows) it gets the job done.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:01PM
Deluge is Good Enough(tm). While it's ugly (blame GTK on windows) it gets the job done.
try qBittorrent. it's a good client, cross-platform and Qt uses native platform widgets so it's not ugly like GTK.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Techwolf on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:32PM
Same here. I switch to it years ago when azureus got to be a real resource hog. qBittorrent has a remote mode that comes in handy on server with a huge pipe to the net. I managed to saturate a 100mb/s link. Those huge .ISOs download in minutes when speed is literally 8Mb/s plus. Then can use wget to transfer it at max speed on my less then ideal link to my local computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @06:39PM
I use qbittorrent too.
It even has a sort of "anonymous mode" [github.com] where it tries hard to make itself less "visible" - like minimizing DHT, only accepts incoming connections via socks5 or i2p proxy, and zeroes out the Peer-ID which is otherwise be a unique client identifier that could track you across proxies (or if you forgot to proxy). I just wish the Peer-ID thing was available outside of anonymous mode so I could use it with a VPN instead of a proxy.
(Score: 2) by TLA on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:53PM
'tis a nice client until you try and restart it. Then it just sits there eating CPU and "Not responding".
Use case: 7600 torrents which utorrent handles QUITE HAPPILY.
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Kunasou on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:15PM
transmission-gtk 2.84 (14307)
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 08 2015, @02:30AM
Did uTorrent ever fix the bug where settings.dat would grow huge and make uT stall?? This was still a problem as of v3.2. Got to where I keep a known-good copy to replace it -- and do so every time I use it.
I've tried others but I'm afraid uTorrent's interface kinda ruined me.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by TLA on Sunday March 08 2015, @06:26AM
yeah that is fixed now it appears, since 3.3. I noticed that, too, in 3.2, thought it was just me... one thing I don't like about qbittorrent is the fact that it doesn't *move* torrents or folders for completed downloads, it only *copies* the torrents. Back to utorrent for me.
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 08 2015, @07:31AM
Sounds like I need to update a notch. Any bad habits in 3.3 that I should beware of?
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by TLA on Sunday March 08 2015, @09:07AM
we're on 3.4.2 now, everything seems to be behaving. I've not had any issues with unwanted BHOs or Litecoin miners or any of that junk, but there again I'm paranoid to begin with (helps having a background in MI and later CI), knowing what vectors are available to snoopers is a good start to mitigating them.
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 2) by TLA on Sunday March 08 2015, @09:09AM
ooh, one thing to note though, turn off automatic updating in the client under advanced options. That apparently is where if you leave it as is, the coin miner installs silently on the next update...
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday March 08 2015, @02:04PM
Yeah, turn off auto-updates is the first thing I do with *all* software!! Hieing from the era of chronic "driver update broke everything" as I do, I'm a fanatic proponent of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
But I'm gonna be trying Deluge. Interface looks decent in screenshots and it doesn't have all this, uh, negativity going on.
I did try qTorrent (and a couple others I forget which) but found it kinda irritating. uTorrent sure as hell got the GUI right, plus it still doesn't eat much, and that's what's kept me using it for so long.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:56AM
Deluge, exclusively!
The GUI is pretty much exactly what uTorrent used to look like (as far as I remember) back when it was actually usable, except that it includes a lot more features.
I also run it on headless server remotely and just use its web UI (and very rarely its CLI server interface thing).
My brother says it looks ugly in Windows, but I can't figure out why. I'm not used to Windows tho.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @01:46PM
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by isostatic on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:13PM
I don't use BitTorrent. Haven't for about 10 years. Why would I? Sell it to me.
(Score: 3, Touché) by TLA on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:57PM
why buy it? It's free.
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:02PM
It's an efficient and fault tolerant way of distributing files. Magnet links, DHT, and PEX have further decentralized BitTorrent, ensuring the availability of files. Several clients allow "torrent streaming", with the beginning of video files downloaded first so they can be watched during downloading (usually with VLC).
It's used for BOINC, updaters, large software downloads, Internet Archive files, BitTorrent Inc. "bundles".
That's all second fiddle to piracy. You can get all the movies, television, or music you can think of. Things you've never thought of on private trackers. Ebook availability varies but new releases are well represented. Terabytes and petabytes of content. If you're not into that, there's nothing else to say. You either want "illegitimate" content, only the narrower "legitimate" content, or nothing.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @02:28AM
RTorrent [wikipedia.org]. Simple ncurses UI runs nicely in a terminal (inside screen/tmux so it keeps running in the background and you can monitor it over SSH). The key commands take a bit to learn, but they're all on the man page if you forget. There's easy settings to make it watch a directory for new/deleted .torrent files for easily starting/stopping downloads without even interacting with the UI. It also supports an HTTP interface if you want a GUI, although I've never used it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:28AM
http://ugetdm.com/ [ugetdm.com]
Features list:
http://ugetdm.com/features [ugetdm.com]
==
About:
http://ugetdm.com/about [ugetdm.com]
"What is uGet?
uGet is a lightweight and full-featured Download Manager for Linux and Windows. uGet allows you to download in multiple parallel streams for download acceleration, put files in a Download Queue, Pause & Resume downloads, Advanced Category Management, Browser Integration, Clipboard Monitoring, Batch Downloads, localized into 23 Languages, and many more features.
Our Downloads page includes over 25 packages for various Linux distributions including but not limited to: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Slackware, Linux Mint, elementary OS, Mageia; and a portable app for Windows."
===
#1 Open Source Download Manager
Available for Linux, BSD, Android, and Windows.
===
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SlimmPickens on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:29AM
It's been shipping crapware for years now, and it's anything but μ...
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:57AM
It's bloat?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:13AM
macrotorrent
(Score: 4, Informative) by mtrycz on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:32AM
In the beggining it's been a very good client, parts written in assembler, with a very light footprint (hence the mu). When it got critical mass, it gold sold to someone in the ad industry (I think), and now it's bloated with ads and "features". I myself still use it on my win laptop, out of habit and laziness to install a new one.
Can't really blame the original author. But that's the nature of closed source.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:00PM
I still use it on my Windows box also. I'm on a pretty old version of it though. It still has some ads in it, but it certainly doesn't have what the article is talking about. That they would go that far kind of pisses me off.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2, Informative) by Valkor on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:38AM
http://www.oldversion.com/windows/utorrent/ [oldversion.com]
I use one of the 1.6 versions. No problems with them at all.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:41AM
I'm sure there's no security issues with 8 year old P2P software...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:28PM
You could go a little newer then that, 2.2.1 (released in 2011 compared to 2007 for 1.6.x) seems to have been the last good version before they started to sell out and go down the crapper.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @07:22AM
a lot of closed binaries provided by various people, many who are probably strangers to each other and probably no checksums from when the file(s) were released?
informative? i'd rather stick my dick in crazy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:11AM
Erm . . . azureus 2.3.0.6 (about 9 years old) for some stuff, azureus 4.5.1.0 (from fedora package manager) for seeding only (the UI for partial seeding of jumbonormously large batch torrents, is much improved compared to 2.3.0.6), and about 1/3 of my downloading is done via IRC instead of bittorrent. I used to use transmission (it was installed by default on fedora) for about 2 years, but then that machine died.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lentilla on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:35AM
Uncharitable as it may be, it's hard to feel much compassion for people who have chosen to install this software when there are alternatives available. A full 21 of the 38 BitTorrent clients listed on the Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] are libre software!
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:45PM
Same for all characters not obvious with your keyboard:
1. Search Wikipedia for mu
2. Copy μ from text
3. Paste in document, and recopy as needed
Not idea for many instances. I have also typed /mu (LaTeX) in a regular document and finished with a find and replace of all Greek lettering
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 12 2015, @04:14PM
In case you use Linux:
"Alt Gr" & "m" = "µ"
or
"Compose Key" + "m" + "u" = "µ"
You might have to bind the Compose Key; I bind it to Caps Lock since I never have any use for Caps Lock. How to bind keys is different according to desktop environment etc., search the internet for help if needed.