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μTorrent, Now Shipped With a Bitcoin Miner

posted by n1 on Saturday March 07 2015, @08:18AM   Printer-friendly
from the read-the-small-print dept.

Marneus68 writes:

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.]

 
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  • (Score: 1, Offtopic) by isostatic on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:13PM

    by isostatic (365) on Saturday March 07 2015, @02:13PM (#154120) Journal

    I don't use BitTorrent. Haven't for about 10 years. Why would I? Sell it to me.

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  • (Score: 3, Touché) by TLA on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:57PM

    by TLA (5128) on Saturday March 07 2015, @07:57PM (#154198) Journal

    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

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @09:02PM (#154223)

    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.