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

[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

[Fishead]

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

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

[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).

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.

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

[darkHanzz]

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

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Showing ads to thieves

[gatkinso]

Interesting business model.

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

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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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:hmm

[maxwell demon]

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

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.

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

[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.)

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:post here

[Mike Mentalist]

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

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)

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.

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

[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.

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.

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

[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.