uTorrent Adds "Featured Torrents" Ads — With No Opt Out (Yet)

wrekkuh writes "BitTorrent, Inc, the company who owns the freeware (but closed-source) BitTorrent client uTorrent, has announced that it will be updating its popular client with 'Featured Torrents.' In a post on uTorrent's forum, the company explained, 'This featured torrent space will be used to offer a variety of different types of content. We are working towards bringing you offers that are relevant to you. This means films, games, music, software ... basically anything that you will find interesting.' In the Q&A portion of their announcement, the company adds 'There is no way to turn in-client offers off.* We will pay attention to feedback, and may change this in the future.' (*The Plus version of the BitTorrent client does not include these ads)."

Comments

Not surprised

[nanoflower]

This isn't really surprising. It's one reason I never upgraded to the latest version when they started tossing in the kitchen sink instead of sticking with just being a great bittorrent client.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

I love Slashdot, but all the comments below are pretty standard bashing we've come to expect. My first thought was actually another direction: This could actually provide more legitimacy to the protocol. Any company showing you can use the medium for legal, profit-generating activities is a Good Thing in my book. Doubly so if if it's the founders.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't really surprising. It's one reason I never upgraded to the latest version when they started tossing in the kitchen sink instead of sticking with just being a great bittorrent client.

I'm happy with utorrent 2.2.1. No bullshit adds, no nothing. Just a freaking kick ass torrent client.

Re:Not surprised

[I(rispee_I(reme]

Running 2.2.1 here, also.

It can be found here, if anyone is seeking it.

Fair warning: Versions prior to 1.8 don't support magnet links.

Re:Not surprised

[nashv]

Exactly. The very day they made a bog box appear in the UI advertising their premium 'Plus' version, I guessed the route it was going and ditched it for : Deluge.

Re:Not surprised

[Fishead]

Thanks! Up... er... Downgraded.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome, thanks. I've got version 1.8.2, so it'll be nice to get the highest upgrade before the shit began. Kinda like how Winamp was good at version 3, but not so much anywhere after that.

Re:Not surprised

[Samantha Wright]

You're misremembering a little—Winamp 3 was the disastrous release that brought in the new skin system, Wasabi. Everyone stuck to 2.95 or so for years and years until Winamp 5 came out, which had support for both skinning systems—but by then the media library was so mediocre, hobbyists had switched to Foobar. AOL mucking things up (WA5 introduced the 'pro' version, I think) didn't help either.

Re:Not surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Deluge has absolutely horrible performance, seeing as it's written in Python.

Transmission, written in C, and the standard issue BT client in Ubuntu is much lighter.

Re:Not surprised

[fast turtle]

In my case, it's why I've never upgraded beyond the 1.84.1644 version. Does exactly what I need w/o all the crap being added to all the other clients. So Sorry but I don't need my bt client also working as a media player, irc client, skype client or anything more then a bt client and it's that reason I don't use Opera.

Re:Not surprised

[geminidomino]

That's where I ended up when I got sick of uTorrent turning itself into the next Azureus/Vuze. It really doesn't handle magnet links very well, though. For some reason, you can't change the base download location on a magnet, you have to "add torrent in paused mode," then manually change the location.

Seems very strange to me but it's still better than the mess that uTorrent is.

Re:Not surprised

[lister king of smeg]

you mean like any of a dozen of the free open source torrent clients already available

Re:Not surprised

[Reziac]

Does 2.2x fix the problem with the little bitty .dat files growing into 50mb monsters while chewing 100% of CPU forever?

I skipped from 1.somethingancient to 3.whatevercurrent and tho some nice features have been added, the stupid .dat bug is insane. Not to mention all the crap I have to turn off again every time I reset the .dat file (using a known-good copy resets the crap, too).

Re:Not surprised

[Blaskowicz]

I've always ignored the library. winamp always was the classic player where you drop files and folders from your file managers, not deal with a library that only takes away from your time and never works anyway when you have a lot of tunes named "Track01", duplicate artists because of spaces vs underscores, etc.

I would still use winamp, but run Audacious nowadays (have started to run the GTK UI very lately, because the winamp 2.x clone has a windows management bug that makes it almost unusable)

Re:Not surprised

[nobodie]

I agree that the protocol does need (desperately) legitimacy, but the story about the Internet Archive about to make their archives available through bit torrent is more valuable than this. Another helpful one would be Project Gutenburg, and any other important free online sites using the BT protocol to reduce their costs and legitimize the use of BT for everyone on the net. How about a bit torrent search algorithm that helps create crowd sourced search?

Another thing to consider is what happened with Vuze and Azureus. They also went in the direction of providing a place for content producers to have a way to get their content out to more people, but the result was Vuze, which became so slow and unweildy that I left it long ago for Qbittorrent which had good search features. I still miss some aspects of Vuze/Azureus, but not enough to keep two clients active.

What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowadays?

[Anonymous Coward]

I dropped Azererus and Ares like a ton of bricks when they pulled this. Sad, because uTorrent was always awesome.

What alternatives do you suggest?

fairly standard business model nowadays

[Trepidity]

They're basically copying what YouTube and Twitter are doing, selling a "featured content" slot.

Re:fairly standard business model nowadays

[penix1]

They're basically copying what YouTube and Twitter are doing, selling a "featured content" slot.

Which is one reason not to use either of those if you don't want to be profiled and have ads targeting you. From TFS...

the company explained, 'This featured torrent space will be used to offer a variety of different types of content. We are working towards bringing you offers that are relevant to you.'

The only way to do that is to record all of your activity on bittorrent. Once they record that, the next step will be to hand it over to the government / media industry attorneys for later prosecution.

I propose a new name, MAXTorrent.

[gl4ss]

MAXTorrent - for all your rss and media suggestion needs!
how can you be very tiny and have a banner fetcher/shower(I presume some html component)?

or how about very tiny something that does. sure it's tiny +, but still could just brand it as torrent plus.
"Torrent Plus
Play it Safe. Play it Now. Play it Anywhere.
        Protect your computer with integrated antivirus
        Get the codecs you need to enjoy HD video
        Easily move files to your favorite devices
"

Re:I propose a new name, MAXTorrent.

[Samantha Wright]

I think Vuze would challenge that title. It comes with a DLNA media server turned on out of the box. (FWIW, uTorrent is also called just "BitTorrent" these days, to be annoying and namespace-polluting.)

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Anonymous Coward]

Use rtorrent in linux. It is a terminal torrent program that has long since been the best torrent client, but it has no pretty GUI for people who think you have to click on things.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Anonymous Coward]

Transmission is my current torrent client. I love it. It runs on my server and uses a simple web interface.

I'm not sure if it has a Windows port if that's what you run though.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[darkHanzz]

Transmission is nice for small servers (it has a web-interface) qBittorrent is good for the laptop/desktops

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK Transmission (transmissionbt.com) provides all the same torrent functionality as utorrent and it's open source and cross-platform. It's also got a remote-api and loads of clients, integrated web server etc. I quit using utorrent a few years ago and never looked back..

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Showing ads to thieves

[gatkinso]

Interesting business model.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[markdavis]

Exactly. I was going to post the exact same thing. Too bad I don't have mod points right now.

I find it very ironic that BitTorrent Inc wants to make money using ads off essentially being an illegal distributor of mostly copyrighted content to those mostly illegally downloading copyrighted content, much of which are shows in which ads have been stripped out of them.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure if funny or sarcastic, but there is merit behind it.

Most people who do pirate things only do it simply because it is a better service than paid models. They hate being shafted, or told what they can do with their content.
They hate having to buy 1500 copies of the same thing because they do anything and everything to try and prevent you from consuming your own content.

And since the more vocal media companies "have no plans to ever support internet distribution" (their words, paraphrased), it'll continue to happen.
Those who take advantage of the internet are going to win out in the end since they are the ones who will be respected more. And it shows even now, never mind some time in the future.
Most people who pirate would be converted easily to purchasing if there was a better service involved. Dealing with pirate copies of things isn't always easy or worth it either. (especially when it comes to games or subbed copies where the subbers were absolutely awful)
Obviously not the angry bunch on here who hate anything and everything to do with advertising in some seriously childish / paranoid way (as if anyone cares about your boring lives, you're a number), but the general public yes.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[jones_supa]

That's not the only example of how downloading pirated content has started to show various perverted business models. When first TPB blocks were put into action here in Finland, many people started paying for a cheap VPN to circumvent the block, thus paying again for the pirated material.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[fustakrakich]

Yeah, I would love to see the ??AAs advertise here.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[Stirling Newberry]

Cracking down on copyvio downloads works about as well as cracking down on underage smoking, the real problem with smoking isn't who does it, it is the product itself and the society that people live in. Smoking and capital culture are both ways of making unhappy lives slightly less unbearable for the duration of consumption.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[kthreadd]

Except they don't distribute anything but their own client. It's the users that do all of the distribution.

That's like saying you find it odd that Google advertises through Chrome because Chrome can be used for illegal purposes.

In theory yes but lets face it, it is likely that most uTorrent users use the program for a slightly illegal purpose.
It's a difference between "can be used for" and "is mostly used for", Chrome is the first and uTorrent the latter.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[Nyder]

Interesting business model.

Okay, first off, downloading copyrighted material isn't stealing.

Second, while a lot of piracy happens using bittorrent, a LOT of legal businesses use it also. For example, The Internet Archive is now online via Bit Torrent. http://bt1.archive.org/hotlist.php

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[kthreadd]

Considering that there is more that uses Bit torrent (WoW, Linux distributions, etc...) that is not infringing (Hint: It is a different crime on the books...it is not theft...) calling this that is a big fat line of BS.

And do you honestly think that WoW and Linux distributions is what most uTorrent users use that program for?

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[kthreadd]

File sharers tend to spend a lot of money on legal content as well actually. There are other reasons for pirating (eg, LAN play in SC II) and avoiding viruses, rootkits and malware packaged with legal copies of modern games.

So pirated material doesn't include viruses, rootkits or malware?

As to your misuse of the word "theft" to refer to sharing, see this handy guide: http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/imagebuzz/2008/8/27/12/27311d2d7c84e8f3e3f5036ed08d198b.jpg

Sure but that doesn't make it OK.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[Havenwar]

Might also want to mention WoW patches, which is probably one of the largest legitimate uses of bit-torrent today. Well, aside perhaps from linux-isos, but the most WELL KNOWN legitimate use.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[Hatta]

Pirates spend more on media than non-pirates.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[markdavis]

Indeed there are legit uses for torrents. But if you add it all up, I bet 99.5+% of torrent traffic is the [illegal] exchange of copyrighted, commercial video, music, and software (and in that order, by volume).

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[Pi Is A Rational]

I do pirate software, I won't lie. Not as much these days since I'm not a 16 year old boy any more. But, I have used it to legitimately re-download copyrighted games where I can't be assed to find the CD or want to deal with copy protection for those games.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[webmistressrachel]

Yes. I concur. I spend loads on media, blank Ibm-Formatted floppies, DVD+R, CDs... Pirates definitely buy more media...

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[cheekyjohnson]

In theory yes but lets face it, it is likely that most uTorrent users use the program for a slightly illegal purpose.

Well, that's the users' fault, not theirs.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[cheekyjohnson]

That doesn't make it OK.

What makes it "OK" is possibly someone's personal opinion.

But is that really what most uTorrent users use it for?

That doesn't matter at all.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[cheekyjohnson]

Not all uses of it infringe upon copyright, and they can't help that their software is sometimes 'misused.' Honestly, I guess no one can ever have advertisements simply because something that their users do might be illegal.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[kthreadd]

Which is why "Showing ads to thieves" still holds.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[kthreadd]

What makes it "OK" is possibly someone's personal opinion.

Well, either that or the law.

That doesn't matter at all.

It does if the argument is about "Showing ads to thieves".

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[cheekyjohnson]

Well, either that or the law.

The legality of something usually tells you nothing about whether it's moral or not. Well, unless you choose to base your morals entirely on whether something is legal or not, but in that case, I'd say your moral code is pretty fickle (as laws change).

It does if the argument is about "Showing ads to thieves".

They're shown to everyone. I don't even see why it matters, or why anyone would care. They have no way to magically know who they're showing ads to, nor do I believe it should be their responsibility. If someone doesn't like it, they can take it up with the so-called 'thieves'.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[cheekyjohnson]

And I don't try to push the copying vs. stealing debate

It's a meaningful distinction, I think. On one hand, you take something away from something else (which inflicts actual harm upon them), and on the other, you're simply getting a copy. And if what he is true, then he already paid for it. What's your problem?

it's generally not acceptable to break the law because you forgot were you put your game.

Again, I don't know where your moral code comes from, but mine certainly doesn't come from the law.

Beside, you shouldn't pirate games anyway, you never know what malware you may get.

I suspect that only happens if you don't know what you're doing (you know, like downloading virtually any software from the internet). In that case, it's probably better not to.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[markdavis]

It is obviously speculation and I didn't claim otherwise. But if you think it is wrong, you are welcome to provide a counter speculation or perhaps even a "source".

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[webmistressrachel]

Do you still look like a giant wart, or is there another reason you're still stalking me, HOSTS troll?

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[markdavis]

Yeah, right :)

We only wish that were true!

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[geminidomino]

Ah, the entitled. ...Weak willed individuals unable to deny themselves something and entitlements speak volumes.

"Entitlements" like being paid for the rest of their lives PLUS four more generations, for work completed once.

"Entitlements" like the power to punish suspected infringers without any interference from?

"Entitlements" such as not even being financially responsible for the exercise of the above, instead putting that off on the ISP and their workforces, without compensation?

Talk some more about "entitlements", you shilling ballsack.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[geminidomino]

Hm. Cut off my line for some reason, and I didn't even use any angle-brackets. The second line should read

"...without any interference from those pesky courts, much less an actual trial"

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[Galestar]

Making a copy of something you already have a license for is not illegal. You are making a false analogy by comparing it to stealing from a store since you are not only taking the bits, but you are taking the physical media/box/materials.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[Kalriath]

What you purchase when you buy a music CD or a game is a license to the product, and physical media containing a copy of the licensed material. Since you've paid for a license, acquiring another copy of it is not an unauthorised activity. Rightsholders cannot have their cake and eat it too.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[Kalriath]

That's not APK. You can tell APK because he has a lot of bold in his posts, and always - and I mean always - changes the subject line of his post. He never replies with the default subject.

Unless there's someone else who also goes on about hosts files a lot?

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[TranquilVoid]

Well, what does your intuition tell you from the circles in which you associate?

From a quick Google search 2010 appears to have been the year for these studies. There are two major ones sumarised here.

Princeton (USA): 99% illegal
Ballarat (Australia): 99.7% illegal (89% definitely, 10.7% likely)

One possible flaw is that these studies aimed at trackers, and I'm guessing Blizzard use their own tracker for Warcraft patches.

On the other hand, a Warcraft patch can be considered a single torrent and so would not affect these statistics greatly as they counted torrent files, not traffic. There is some mention of traffic but it is not clearly analysed into illegal/legal in the summary.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[Lando]

While Markdavis's numbers are extremely unlikely to be correct, I know that 96.8% legal use of bittorrent protocol is definitely incorrect. Just to make a note, illegal doesn't mean immoral. Actually, I have no problems illegally downloading information off the web, but that is based on my own morals and not what is legal or illegal.

That being said, I think the number of illegal downloads is around 95%, not quite as bad as 99.5%, but still pretty high. It could be lower, but the problem is that it is hard to track without specifically looking at the packets going in and out of a large number of computers and determining whether each packet is legal or illegal, but doing this would remove network neutrality provisions for the isp that did it and open them to being sued by users and copyright owners, some of which might even be both.

I maintain a torrent server to trade my personal files and photos with friends, family and various business files, but most of my information is just downloaded from either my server or from some website or file server. I like having the torrent server, but frankly not enough people are interested in my files to make it of much use. I do see bittorrent used by several companies to distribute patches and the like and there is definitely a legitimate use for the protocol. That being said, it's the manner in which it is used, not the tool itself that makes it legal/illegal. Using a hammer to hammer in a nail, fine, using a hammer to break into a car and steal stuff, not such a good idea. If you get caught illegally downloading material, it's your choice and you will have to bare the consequences. I'm more than happy to have my day in court if I'm caught.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[webmistressrachel]

Lol, this idiot has been trolling me about my gender (yes, you heard that right, my gender; his issues!) ever since I got into an epic flamewar with the HOSTS troll and someone who is actually transgendered, and has been trolled for it.

I assumed it was him. It's been going on a while, now.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[Kalriath]

Ah, I see. It's not the hosts guy though - you'd know if it was him.

Re:Showing ads to thieves

[geminidomino]

I don't recall advocating that in my post and according to your hilarious baseless claim that my opinion is entirely dependent upon being paid by these media companies

You accuse downloaders of being "entitled" while ignoring the abusive behavior of those their downloading in spite of. That's drooling ignorance, at best, and outright hypocrisy, at worst.

Though if you want it couched in logical and ethical terms, I can do that. The "right" of monopoly over a creation, especially one that has no material components to express ownership of (you can't own electrons) is granted by law, not inherent in its creation. Those laws were created with consideration given to both sides of the transaction: the creator gets a limited monopoly on reproduction, and after that time is up, it enters the public domain as a societal cultural good.

They broke their side of the bargain with endless extensions, long before the internet came into play. So, while they may still be in the right, legally (not surprising with our court system so firmly nestled in the corporate colon), it's not unreasonable (nor is it universal, so don't bother telling me that you disagree) to make the ethical argument that the agreement has been invalidated by the content creators failing to upkeep their end of the bargain.

Why do you believe you have a right to someone else's work you ballsack?

Um... because I paid for it, whether or not their idiotic schizoid DRM system believes it or not?

News Flash....

[Lumpy]

You know they dont point a gun at you and force you to upgrade to get the ad's. I'm still running the ad-free older version and it works great.
If you dont like ad's dont upgrade.

Re:News Flash....

[nurb432]

New users will end up with the new version. Also they can, via EULA, forbid you to use older versions. Or even make them stop working.

Re:News Flash....

[Lumpy]

"forbid you to use older versions."
EULAS have no power at all. Who cares. I'll be giving out the older version to friends and you can find the old versions all over the place. in fact it's easier now because of their tactics.

Re:News Flash....

[nurb432]

no, you could be in violation of the old version's eula. It can be changed at the whim of the owner of the software.( its not you ).

Like it or not, it's still a contract.

If i ever publish something again, the EULA will include some rather nasty options granted to me if its violated. AND will require physical registration with concrete acceptance of the contract before it will run so the 'nasties' will stand in court, as i realize the 'blind' acceptance of EULAs is a little shaky. ( talking the ones where by opening the box you agree, even before you see it )

Re:News Flash....

[Richy_T]

Like it or not, it's still a contract.

No, it's not.

Surprise

[Mike Mentalist]

I had an odd experience on the uTorrent forums recently.

I uploaded my own books to some torrent sites, and posted links to them. From the people on Demonoid, Pirate Bay, ISOHunt, and 4Chan, I got friendly and encouraging replies.

The admins on the uTorrent forum deleted the thread, and banned my account, saying that they didn't want spamming scum like me.

Re:Surprise

[Gordonjcp]

When you say "your own books", do you mean books you wrote yourself, that you hold copyright on?

This sounds like a good story worth an article.

Re:Surprise

[Mike Mentalist]

Yup, I'm an indie author, and I uploaded my own books to the torrent sites.

Before I made the post, I read the uTorrent forum rules, and made sure the images were small, etc.

I was quite shocked when I saw the message saying the thread was deleted!

Re:Surprise

[Mike Mentalist]

Hmmm, I guess that explains why there isn't much in the way of discussion there...!

Re:Surprise

[The Mighty Buzzard]

That's pretty much expected given that the uTorrent forums aren't for file sharing but for discussion of the client. By strict definition, you were spamming.

Re:Surprise

[jones_supa]

Maybe I'm old school, but in my books spamming means posting unwanted advertisements. By my definition, he possibly was sending an offtopic message.

Re:Surprise

[Drathos]

unwanted advertisement

To the uTorrent forums, that's exactly what it was.

Re:Surprise

[ThePhilips]

Yes. When uTorrent auto-update broke my installation, the most informative posts I could find on the forums were "yeah, there were discussions about the auto-update problem, but they were all deleted by the admins."

I had impression, it is only allowed to discuss PEBKAC or ID10T type of problems. But something what might make uTorrent look bad is highly likely forbidden.

Also, in all my digging I pretty much never seen any response from developers or people in the know. Only the same clueless users like me, with lots of conjectures of why they might experience the problem, without any light in the end of the tunnel.

Re:Surprise

[wild_quinine]

I had an odd experience on the uTorrent forums recently.

I uploaded my own books to some torrent sites, and posted links to them. From the people on Demonoid, Pirate Bay, ISOHunt, and 4Chan, I got friendly and encouraging replies.

When I finally got around to uploading my Creative Commons licensed book to usenet, and then noted this on a popular usenet index, it was also deleted as spam.

Apparently, this was because it was a dupe. Sure enough I did a search and there it was. The previous poster beat me to it by several weeks. The best part was that the copy that was already uploaded was better than mine. It included additional information and metadata (including a blurb!) that made it more useful to import into ebook libraries.

Fucking pirates, and their continually superior products.

Re:Surprise

[The Mighty Buzzard]

Advertising is promoting a product, yeah? Sounds pretty much exactly like what he did, even if said product was at the price of $0.

Re:Surprise

[The Mighty Buzzard]

And still, spamming is not allowed. Note the severe lack of viagra ads.

If he'd had a question about something relating to distributing his book with bittorrent, fine. If he was ranting about how tracker.foo.se was giving him grief and asking for suggestions, fine. If he was talking about how it was cool that an author that wasn't him released his shat as a torrent, peachy.

But he wasn't. He was promoting his content. That is advertising. Nobody asked him to, so it was also unsolicited. Unsolicited advertising is spam.

Halite

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want a client that doesn't rely on Python or Java.

Why not ?

[Yvanhoe]

Why not ? Bittorrent is a great company, I am grateful to them for creating and opening their protocol. Obviously, I won't use their official client as I am allergic to advertisement, but if they manage to find clients for this kind of things and have a cash flow to finance R&D in bittorrent, kudos to them !

Re:Why not ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're grateful to Bram Cohen. He designed the protocol and created the original client in 2001, and formed BitTorrent, Inc. with two other people in 2004. (They presumably wanted to monetise it.) The protocol has not really changed much since 2003, apart from some extensions such as DHT trackers and peer exchange for more reliable swarming. And neither of them originated from that company.

The company AFAIK hasn't done pretty much anything noteworthy apart from purchasing uTorrent in 2007 and rebranding it.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Shikaku]

Deluge or (Mac/Linux/BSD only) Transmission

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Lumpy]

have they fixed the RSS feed filtering? because uTorrent was the ultimate killer for that one feature for ever.

I can point at an RSS feed and give it a list of filters to match, then it only downloads those in the filter stream PLUS checks to see if it already downloaded that file and skips it if it did.

Another act which shows the difference

[Stirling Newberry]

between free as in beer, and free as in speech.

You don't know what's actually in the free beer, and by the time you get it, you can't take the mouse droppings out.

Re:Another act which shows the difference

[Stirling Newberry]

The kind I brew, or the kind that charges me for the beer as opposed to the Swedish Bikini team advertising campaign.

If you aren't paying the natural cost of the thing, you aren't the customer, you are the product. This insight occurred to Carlo Lorenzini in 1883.

Re:Another act which shows the difference

[VortexCortex]

You have to pay for everything in one way or another.

It must suck to get taxed for breathing air. Maybe you shouldn't have taken the advice to "Get your ass to Mars".

Re:Another act which shows the difference

[fatphil]

How did the UK go from the 1900s smogs to the cleaner breathable air it has today? Thanks to government intervention and legislation. How did the government finance what it did? Through taxes.

So yes, if you're in a built up area, you do pay taxes for your air.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[NemosomeN]

Ditch torrents entirely. Usenet is much, much better, faster, and is really quite cheap. It is also completely legal for the downloader, though the moral implications are identical to torrenting. SABnzbd+ is fantastic.

Re:hmm

[maxwell demon]

A pirate version of torrent? Is there a torrent for this? :-)

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[vlm]

What alternatives do you suggest?

Since the very first time I downloaded a torrent I've always used a command line downloader in a screen session. Now I use bittornado. I tried torrentflux but it seemed clunky compared to my screen solution. GUI seems a weird way to do it... your desktop has to stay logged in and powered up for days, maybe weeks, or you have to VNC to your server?

A quick apt-cache search torrent results in :
bittornado
ctorrent
deluge
ktorrent
rtorrent
torrentflux
unworkable

torrent clients seem to be in the position where mp3 players used to be a decade ago... a large selection of "different" programs that basically do everything the same.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[TheStonepedo]

Since rtorrent is a CLI program it can be run unattended in a screen instance instead of cluttering your taskbar/tray/what-have-you.
rtorrent also has Windows binaries available for download and can be installed on OS X via MacPorts.

Wayne?

[allo]

slow news day?

Re:Wayne?

[Stirling Newberry]

All the fast news is recuperating after being in the olympics.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[allo]

bitflu is nice.

Re:hmm

[gl4ss]

A pirate version of torrent? Is there a torrent for this? :-)

http://www.unblockedpiratebay.com/index.php?loadurl=/search/utorrent/0/7/0#.UCeqAaOupVM

yeah.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Gaygirlie]

What alternatives do you suggest?

I'm interested in this, too. Sure, I could just continue using uTorrent without updating it, nor would the ads really bother me anyways since I don't keep the window open, but if there's anything leaner than uTorrent then I see no reason to keep using it. My needs are as follow: must run on Windows, must support IP-blocklists, must allow me to force encryption on and reject all unencrypted connections, and must allow me to quickly adjust speed limits. So far all the commenters are only suggesting Linux-clients.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Anonymous Coward]

Deluge

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Hadlock]

Azureus still has the "classic interface"
 
...it's just buried... deeply. Very deeply. As in, I have to google to figure out how to turn it on because it's not immediately obvious how to do it from the GUI. Once you turn off all the "Vuze" cruft, Azureus still makes for a very good client.
 
I'm using Deluge to great effect, moreso since I finally setup an atom-based file server and you can log in to it remotely from another pc/laptop, either through the binary client, or the web interface. deluge-torrent.org

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[number11]

What alternatives do you suggest?

I'm interested in this, too. Sure, I could just continue using uTorrent without updating it, nor would the ads really bother me anyways since I don't keep the window open, but if there's anything leaner than uTorrent then I see no reason to keep using it. My needs are as follow: must run on Windows, must support IP-blocklists, must allow me to force encryption on and reject all unencrypted connections, and must allow me to quickly adjust speed limits.

qBittorrent. I switched to that when uTorrent started getting funky. It's the closest one I could find to what uTorrent used to be. It's cross-platform (Win/Linux/OSX/OS2/BSD), OSS, and meets all your criteria. (Until I started looking, I hadn't realized that it had native support for blocklists, I've been using PeerBlock for that.)

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[amiga3D]

I'm also loving Transmission. It functions great on my linux and mac computers. Occasionally a pop up appears asking for a donation but that's about it for annoyances. I don't see a problem with uTorrent running ads or a program occasionally asking for a donation. It's free and if you don't like it you can always use an alternative.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[CrashandDie]

I'll recommend ruTorrent, a web frontend for rTorrent. I've been using it as the main interface for my seedbox. No database, no bullshit, just a nice, clean, user interface with great plugins available.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Dunbal]

Yeah this. Better yet if you're a windows user, get some virtualization software - virtual box and the like. Make yourself a linux virtual machine, download your stuff there using rtorrent, swap your stuff over to windows to use it...

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[nashv]

Since I use Windows and Linux, I prefer Deluge.

More legitimate use

[dirk]

I see this as a good thing. First, as long as the ads aren't obnoxious, it will get a little money for the uTorrent team. Second, it will help encourage legitimate use of torrents. One of the knock on torrents and why they are so often throttled and blocked is that they are a tool for piracy. While there are currently legitimate uses, I would suspect that 95% or more of usage is for piracy. If these ads expose more people to legitimate torrent content and help get the legitimate use up, that is a good thing all around.

Re:More legitimate use

[Nyder]

I see this as a good thing. First, as long as the ads aren't obnoxious, it will get a little money for the uTorrent team. Second, it will help encourage legitimate use of torrents. One of the knock on torrents and why they are so often throttled and blocked is that they are a tool for piracy. While there are currently legitimate uses, I would suspect that 95% or more of usage is for piracy. If these ads expose more people to legitimate torrent content and help get the legitimate use up, that is a good thing all around.

First off, how do the Ads make them money? click thru or by people viewing them?

And um, I'm 100% sure you are just throwing out 95% like you are an expert. Are you? No?

STFU.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Psicopatico]

It's nearly ten years I use MLDonkey which - despite the name - supports the bittorrent protocol.
It has a server-client architecture, you can put the server remotely and access it via CLI or web interface or via some third party front-ends.

So far it served me very well.

Elseway for the quick download Opera's integrated client works. It's rudimetary and very basic, but it works.

Re:post here

[Mike Mentalist]

Well, I already have a website/blog - http://michaelcargill.wordpress.com/

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it's the ACT of downloading pirated material that is illegal in many (most of those that have laws regarding it, afaik) countries, not the source, your statement deserves today's award for unintentionally leading people into ignorance. If it's illegal to download by any other means you can bet your ass it is illegal to get off usenet as well.

Surprise, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to exercise some basic common sense. The uTorrent forums are only for discussion of, and assistance with, uTorrent. There is nothing remotely like a section for content releases.

Torrent (for Windows)
Torrent Plus
Developers
Torrent Mac
Torrent Linux
Apps
Non-English Torrent

I find it hard to believe that a legitimate author would consider posting their work in any of these let alone think that they're doing anything other than leaving a stinking pile of spam.

Re:Surprise, really?

[Mike Mentalist]

Yes, surprise.

There's also a 'Chat' section, which contains non-uTorrent related threads such as 'AntiVirus Of Choice?'

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Teun]

As far as I know downloading is at least in most of Europe not illegal, it's the sharing or making available that infringes IP rights.

Because the usenet server is usually seen like a proxy they are generally left alone.

(Beware of the words most of, usual and general)

Another step away from the roots as "Torrent"

[Havenwar]

Torrent it used to be called, lightweight and fast and non-intrusive. That's why I started using it, and probably many others as well. As it got more bloated I could have abandoned it, but then I've got more than a few extra gigabytes of ram these days and my cpu doesn't exactly hiccup at any extra work it does, so... I don't really care it's grown a bit. It's still within my comfort zone just for being simple and doing what I need done.

So they're going to start showing sponsored content now? Fine with me. I have never, ever used the search function in their client. I always find my torrents on third party sites, and they are either sent by magnet link directly to the client, or torrent files put in a folder that the client is watching. I only ever directly interact with the client once every now and then when I open it up to check on the progress on something, and clear out any completed downloads from the last week while I'm there. Ads won't be in my view for long enough to disturb me. I am not sure i'll even notice them.

That being said, I'd consider moving to another client... if there was really any serious competitors for windows that did things better. Not as good, better. I have tried a few, seems to be six of one, half a dozen of the other. They get the job done, and any particular bells and whistles they offer, I don't need. All I need is a download queue, good connection settings to work around my crap router, and the ability to keep scanning a folder for new torrent files. If it's got that, I'm golden. But that doesn't mean I'll do actual work to switch to such a client unless uTorrent fucks up completely... and they'd have to get pretty annoying to do that. Popups, or some such, or degrading the actual basic functionality of the program.

I bet most users feel pretty much the same... a few people on here shout loudly about change, maybe a few people will try something else out, but if it's work, it's not worth it. Not for something that spends most of its time working in the background, unseen, anyway.

Re:Another step away from the roots as "Torrent"

[Havenwar]

And of course slashdot can't handle the letter "mju", so woooo for slashdot!

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Hatta]

Rtorrent can be controlled by XMLRPC, so people have written web front ends to it. So if you like a clicky GUI, you can use your browser. RUTorrent is probably the best one going.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[dcherryholmes]

There is also http://code.google.com/p/rtgui/, which is what I use.

It is always the same story

[Golden_Rider]

Devs create small, easy to use program which does the one job it was designed to do very well.
Lots of people start using the program because it is good and lightweight and not annoying.
Devs think "oh, our program is very good, but we cannot simply leave it as it is, we need to have MORE FEATURES".
More features get put in, making users angry, because they use the program for its ONE job it initially was designed to do, not for anything else, because they already have OTHER programs which do those jobs better anyway.
Devs think "oh, time to make some money".
Ads get put in, plus "oh you can buy the premium version".
Users leave.

First Azureus, which transformed from a simple bittorrent client to a "your personal multimedia database/video streaming/community" monstrosity called "Vuze". Now uTorrent goes down the same road, from a small, lightweight "I can only download and nothing else and that is my whole selling point" bittorrent client to a "you can stream video and organize your multimedia experience for all your mobile gadgets" monster and now they add advertising on top of it, but oh, you can buy the premium version without advertising.

Thanks, but no. I'll just move on to another free and lightweight bittorrent client, because that's why I came from Azureus(Vuze) to uTorrent in the first place. But now you turned into Vuze, too. It's not as if there aren't any other clients around, uTorrent really does not have any distinguishing features, so I just kept using it our of pure laziness to install something else and put up with the added bloat instead. But when devs really think their bittorrent client is awesome enough to make users put up with advertising, it's time to move on.

Re:It is always the same story

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes the developers want to move out the the parents basement, sometime the parents want them out. They have devoted a considerable amount of time developing a product and so attempt to monetize it. Seems reasonable to me.

The lazy will stay, those willing to pay will stay and although you don't want extra services that have to be paid for the existing services are quite poor and so success in that market is quite possible and those that want that will stay.

I'm thinking they might not miss you when you go.

ps. I left long since, but it doesn't preclude understanding.

Re:It is always the same story

[Golden_Rider]

Sometimes the developers want to move out the the parents basement, sometime the parents want them out. They have devoted a considerable amount of time developing a product and so attempt to monetize it. Seems reasonable to me.

I only have problems when devs write a small lightweight program for one specific function (downloading files) and then, when the program does that job perfectly fine and does not really need improvement except for bugfixes, they add on function after function, hire another dev or two to write more bloat and then one day they post on their website "sorry people, writing all that stuff costs money, so we now have to put advertising into our program". The program was fine, there was no need to add more functions nobody is interested in, especially if doing so costs so much time/money that you need advertising.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[bjourne]

Come on.. Do you really think it is so bad that they are asking for some compension for, in your own words, their "awesome" software? If you can't stomach the ads, the premium version retails for $24.95. Damn cheapskates.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[porjo]

qBittorrent - open source, regular updates, Win/Mac/Linux

Re:Try Qbittorrent

[ThePhilips]

[...] actively updated and no bullshit

No B.S - 100% yes.

Actively updated - only on *NIX, because there is a lack of Windows developers. Recently there were even discussions about dropping Windows version because there were nobody who can make a Windows build. They found who can build, but Windows specific issues often remain unresolved due to lack of developers.

Shameless plug from an unaffiliated /. user: Windows developers with Qt experience, please help improve the qBittorent!

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Nimey]

As an old Usenetter, fuck you.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[jftitan]

I do nearly exactly what you recommend.

  I have VMWare workstations running RHEL, all running SMBs so files can be shared across the networks. I eventually ended up customizing my favorite VM RHEL, running rtorrent, shared the files and torrents folders over the network, and whenever I want to download anything, I save the torrent to the network folder.

basic, and I don't need no stinking features. I accidently updated my utorrent in a Win7 to utorrent 3.1.x, while I do like it, and I can configure out everything down to just basics, I still don't enjoy the idea of ads (whether related or not ads of torrents) I already filter ALL ad content from the websites I frequent. I don't need another aspect to filter.

  Thanks to suggestions above, I can downgrade.

 

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Emetophobe]

I switched to qBittorrent. It's open source, uses Qt4, and it looks similar to older versions of uTorrent.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[webheaded]

Usenet doesn't always have everything. Torrents are more diverse than Usenet and you occasionally have to resort to them to get what you want. So while you're entirely right that Usenet is better in almost all aspects, you will have to use torrents occasionally.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[NemosomeN]

Nope. It's not even illegal in the US. Almost all methods of distributing copyrighted material require downloaders to upload, but not usenet. You can leech to your heart's content, and you are breaking no laws. Copyright infringement is not legally theft, and there is no equivalent (yet) of "receiving stolen property." Infringing on copyright is providing someone a copy they are not entitled to. There is only one criminal in that transaction, not two.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[NemosomeN]

Anyone who subscribes to a usenet provider because of my comment is likely to never post a single thing, and therefore not impact you one bit.

uTorrent is the new Winamp.

[Emetophobe]

I love Slashdot, but all the comments below are pretty standard bashing we've come to expect.

Have you even used uTorrent recently? 5 years ago you didn't even need to install uTorrent, the executable was the entire program. It was extremely lightweight and fast.
Now they display ads everywhere, you have to uncheck multiple toolbars and crapware in the installer, and its bloated (I don't need a media player built into my torrent client).

This could actually provide more legitimacy to the protocol.

How does putting toolbars in the installer and displaying ads all over your product provide legitimacy? It's just developers trying to cash in.

It's Winamp all over again. The developers made a product that people liked, got bought out, and the new overlords monetised it and ruined it.

Re:uTorrent is the new Winamp.

[djnforce9]

To be fair, Winamp at lets you cut out pretty much all the bloat during the install process (most of which is related to the media library). Not only that but the Pro features are redundant. You can rip CD's using the disk writer plugin (assuming you have the proper codec) and play all types of videos through Directshow (again, assuming you have the codec installed).

uTorrent 3.0 unfortunately does not let you skip installing all the uneeded extras although you can hide most of them once in the application.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[NemosomeN]

I'll take 95% of the variety and 0% of the liability, seems an apt tradeoff. And at least with Usenet, it's either there or it's not. I don't have to deal with 1 seed on an obscure movie that started seeding two years ago. I get full speed.

TIXATI

[Swarley]

The Tixati bittorrent client is excellent. Free, no ads or tool bars. Definitely worth checking out.

qBittorrent

[Gravis Zero]

get it: "The qBittorrent project aims to provide a Free Software alternative to torrent."

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[knifeyspooney]

Deluge is available for Windows.

Results not relevant

[dave562]

Unless they have categories for "warez" and "pr0n", I can guarantee that the feature results are completely irrelevant for what 95% of the world uses bitTorrent for.

Re:Results not relevant

[Krneki]

Unless they have categories for "warez" and "pr0n", I can guarantee that the feature results are completely irrelevant for what 95% of the world uses bitTorrent for.

And this is different from the rest of Internet in what way? Warez, pron, spam and viruses are 95% of the Internet traffic.

Thank you

[dell623]

Disabled automatic updates. Not sure what the point is anyway, the last few updates seem to have added useless bloat, all the important functions have been around a while: scheduling, bandwidth controls, downloading individual files etc.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[ScottyKUtah]

I use kTorrent in Kubuntu. A couple of my favorite features incudes bandwidth scheduling, automatic updating of my blocklist, and no crapware or installing of other programs.

I've run into a couple of private torrent sites that didn't work with kTorrent, so I switched over to Transmission for those. Everything else I run kTorrent.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[ScottyKUtah]

Usenet is great for just browsing the various binaries if you are not sure what you looking for. I've found more obscure albums because of usenet. The news provider I use is $10 for 25GB, and I have as much time as I want to burn through the 25 GB. Works for me. Some weeks I'll burn through it, other times a month will go by without downloading anything. I run newsrover (windows program) using WINE on Kubuntu & opensuse. That way I can take advantage of SSH encryption, and still take advantage of the built in graphics viewer.

The cure: The Original Bittorrent client

[Cinnaman]

uTorrent just seems to have become a clone of "BitTorrent" somewhere along the line. BitTorrent looks and works identically except it's bug and ad-free. Problem solved.

Going back to the version 2.x uTorrents is the other fix.

Re:The cure: The Original Bittorrent client

[mister_playboy]

No, it's the other way around. Bittorrent became a clone of uTorrent when BT.inc bought the uTorrent program.

BT was originally an open source program and the last version from that lineage was v5.2

BT.inc has talked about splitting BT and uTorrent apart again, having BT aimed at new users with a simplified interface.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[bluegreen997]

Not saying this is not a valid option, but it is a lot of overhead just to get a decent torrent client.

Re:farewell

[progician]

I guess you aren't the sharpest tool in the box... As with most network related software, bug fixes are necessary part of the life cycle. If you stuck with an older version with a well-known bug that exposes your system, there's a growing chance in time that your system will be hacked and used for purposes other than yours.

Thus, you want to have fixes for your system. uTorrent is a secretive sourced product, thus the users supposed to get their security patches through the regular update channel of the software, which is now includes a shit load of bloatware, which also produces security risk, especially when a software start to act as an other software which the user don't need. In this case, displaying images all over the place, which has no structural role, like the elements of the GUI, but some shit pictures, that qualify as garbage in any honest computer user's house. So, problem can only be solved by leaving this software behind and find an other, regularly maintained software that does what it is expected to do by the user. Downloading and uploading the specified items that the user intends to.

It is also a self-conscious step to not use uTorrent at all: it's a showcase of what's wrong with the commercial attitudes in software production: making money from things that the user don't want to have on their system is not simply a morally wrong thing to do, but also distorts the whole industry, and set it on the path of self-sabotage. Since the PC became a world-wide phenomenon software and content development companies reinvent the wheel every half a year, making the same shit with different logos, wasting millions of hours of development in the name of secrecy in the software production, not to mention the zombified user base tied in to a brand-based consumer indoctrination.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Lumpy]

So that means they have NOT fixed that glaring omission. That makes transmission pretty useless in comparison.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[progician]

I find those who sling GUI around like it is an insult to be pathetically entrenched fan-boys who refuse to admit their choice of computing has been vastly outpaced.

Dude, calm down. Listen, and maybe you can learn something. If programs (not applications, solutions and other foggy business terms) are designed to do a single business it has certain value. For example, given the diverse amount of devices floating around, if you would like to get a widely adopted software, you should implement it on the most common interface available. That's the terminal. It is available on virtually every operating system, every device. Fucking old tech, but it works and it is quick and easy to implement.

Also good stuff about the CLI interface that if you make a consistent format for your information output on the terminal, you can easily add GUI layers that uses the CLI program in/out terminals, but isn't tied to the executable thus it can be separately developed (no unintended security bug introduced, which is a good thing), can be used remotely (many torrent clients today is capable of running a simple web service for controlling the process too, but one of the most accessible remote control technology, like ssh and friends can also be used), and most importantly, it can be easily automatized for the user's own purposes. You know, if you use programs instead of application, you will realize that these programs can be used for other purposes than the usual use-case. A torrent client can be used as a content updater between creative groups used along with some basic version tracking information, let's say. The problem with "apps" (program+GUI) the problem is that the GUI is rarely and hardly customizable once it's burned in to the executable. With a good CLI support however, you can embed the program in to an entire ecosystem to your liking.

Learn and watch patiently: command line programs and remotely operated web interface/scripted GUI for fancy look is at the heart of modern computing.

So you support banning guns?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Because the majority use for guns is NOT home defence. Bring this to your local NRA meeting. Good luck surviving the hail of gunfire.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[baalzebub]

There's a Windows port. Just go to the addon section on their website. It's there and I'm running it right now. Works flawlessly.

Re:Try Qbittorrent

[Reziac]

[goes off, looks at buglist]

What a shameless lack of major known bugs, too... :D Tho seems to me if you just concentrate on doing the one job it's meant to do, you also fail to introduce weird bugs related to the added crapware. Gee, what a concept!

Not a dev, but dl'd to try... if nothing else I can apply my fearsome repute as "the beta tester who can break anything!"

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Richy_T]

My Android does have a terminal and, yes, it does improve it and I install it on each device I obtain. (ConnectBot as it happens but see also ADB shell)

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Richy_T]

Yep. RSS not built-in? Not a problem with CLI. Want to scrape a web page? Pull links from emails? There's your CLI again.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Richy_T]

My rss feed scripts are 60 lines long and that's with a lot of comments and cruft that should really be removed. For non-technical users that's not much help but it means that transmission is far from useless.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Richy_T]

I gave up on Vuze when I was still using win2k and the latest update required WinXP for the crufty interface (but not for the classic). The second time it happened, I decided to forego digging through the registry (or wherever it stores it settings) to change it back to classic and switched to transmission (which also happened to have the advantage of running on my DVR) so that I could actually turn my workstation off.

I've been through XP and 7 since then but never looked back at Vuze. Get a clue and stop ruining good software, idiots.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[Richy_T]

Forgot to include that on those upgrades, the crufty interface was enabled by default, thus breaking a perfectly functional install, not for security reasons or other benefit to myself but purely in an attempt to "monetize" the product.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[NemosomeN]

Jesus Christ that's expensive. I was going to recommend Astraweb, but it looks like you are probably using them already. You're doing yourself a disservice for not buying in bulk.

You're paying 40c per GB. 180GB at $25 is 13.4c per GB, and 1 TB at $50 is 5c per GB.

Also, I find Usenet to be terrible without binsearch.info, and amazing with nzbmatrix.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[NemosomeN]

I wasn't aware of that, if it is true. Do you have a link to back that up? I'm not being an asshole, I'm genuinely curious. It may make sense, and be a part of the reason that pirated CDs for personal use are sometimes confiscated by customs (from luggage, obviously there's good reason to confiscate from parcels).

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[ScottyKUtah]

You're correct, I'm using Astraweb. What I liked about them when I first signed up was no expiration of the GB purchased. It took me about six months to burn through the 25Gb purchased. I recently renewed for another 25 GB, and I figure when this finally runs out I'll go the 180GB route.

binsearch.info & nzbmatrix? I've not heard of these. I used to frequent newzbin, but haven’t used it for quite a while. I'll have to take at look at the sites you suggested.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[NemosomeN]

nzbmatrix is not free, but it is worth the money. I think I paid about $10? It may be cheaper now, since it's charged in GBP, and the GBP has fallen since I bought it. The $10 covers 10 years of usage (It was "forever" but their lawyers told them that was a stupid idea). You can't find everything on NZB Matrix, but what you can find is almost never spam. (I have never downloaded spam from NZB Matrix, but it's common on binsearch, which basically indexes everything). If you don't use SABnzbd+ as a client, I recommend you look into it. It's easy to install, easy to set up, and works great.

Re:$10,000 CHALLENGE to Alexander Peter Kowalski

[webmistressrachel]

Wow, mods, read it, that's not a Troll, it's Informative! I'm amused too.

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[nobodie]

I'm still laughing at the GP, I do have a tablet (WeTab, not android) and I do use cli on it. AND it is faster than click and wait and click and click. Since he obviously doesn't know how to use a cli, let him go on all he wants, relax and munch out

Re:What's available for Bitttorrent clients nowada

[djnforce9]

I have to agree that while rTorrent does seem quite nice, it also has an overly complex setup even on windows. With uTorrent, you double click the exe, run the quick installer and you're good to go. With ruTorrent, you need to first install Cygwin, libsigc++, libTorrent, and of course rTorrent itself. Add all that up, and it's likely to be even more bloated than the ad-supported uTorrent itself. One thing I've always liked about Windows applications is that they often don't need several extras to be installed first such as the above nor do you have to worry about so many dependencies and how they may even clash at times.

Now if someone can suggest an alternate Torrent client that isn't geared towards Linux and therefore doesn't require a bunch of extra libraries to be installed first, that would be wonderful.