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: 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!