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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: 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.