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BitTorrent Tries To Appease Users By Making Torrent Ads Optional
hypnosec writes "BitTorrent has backtracked on their stance that uTorrent ads cannot be 'turned off,' following a user revolt. They announced that users can opt-out of sponsored torrents if they don't wish to see them. Last weekend BitTorrent announced it would make uTorrent ad-enabled and that it would have a 'sponsored torrents' feature which couldn't be disabled. As one would have imagined, this didn't go over well with many users, and they let out their anger on the uTorrent forums. 'You seriously think that uTorrent is going to survive now? The Admin/Devs are seriously deluded. Pure greed has turned your once loved app into a bloated and buggy cash cow,' said one user."
Torrents users are spoiled and ungrateful. News at eleven.
A better approach would be to set up a Kickstarter campaign outlining all the work that needs to be done and who needs to be paid for their efforts, and how much money it will take to support this for 6 months or 12 months or something. They would sail past their reqested amount long before the deadline. Vaguely similar to the humble bundle approach in a way.
They could make a big deal out of how this approach means they avoid needing advertising sponsors.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Or use any of the multitude of other clients.
It's not like BitTorrent is a widely-known standardized protocol with a handful of existing open-source clients...
...Oh. Wait.
We refuse to be appeased under any circumstances. We will stand aloof and BitTorrent must grovel.
*continues seeding the ArchLinux iso*
Pay for your what now?
cat
..."bloated and buggy cash cow"
as
bloated and buggy CRASH cow.
A crash cow is a great new name for a buggy piece of software.
nowadays "free" all too often means you are the product being sold.
*continues seeding the ArchLinux iso*
You goddam thief. You've not just stolen a stolen a sale from an honest hard working corporation, but you've probably enabled the theft of thoudands of sales. I don't know how you can sleep at night when you steal so much from honest corportations working hard to make quality proprietary operating systems. I know your type. Next you'll be killing babies.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Besides the increasingly intrusive ads, uTorrent 3.x.x just sucks. It randomly consumes 100% of one cpu core and is highly unpredictable on bandwidth usage when downloading. I'm sticking with 2.2.1 until hell freezes over.
It's pretty nice. You setup a master somewhere in your house and then you slave your other computers to it. Then you can access the files via Windows shares on the master box.
Next you'll be killing babies
or puppies:
# rm -f puppylinux.iso
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I feel bad about pirating some software and music, but it seems much less bad to pirate some BitTorrent code, right? And by pirate, I mean installing some ad-blocking software so I don't need to watch their crazy ads and waste some bandwidth on the ads when that bandwidth could be torrenting even more content.
I'll happily pay the original creators and people who worked on something for their efforts
But I won't pay any IP "owners" who aren't the original creators
And I won't pay for marketing since I can find out about stuff myself
And I won't pay the compensation of executives or board members or investors or dividends for stockholders since they had nothing to do with the creation process
And I won't pay for packaging, distribution, or retail markup since duplicating and transporting the data is effectively a cost-free process
And I won't pay for anything older than ~10 years since if the original creator hasn't made their money in 10 years they never will (the exception being games older than 10 years which are updated to run on newer hardware without emulation, but not for the original 10 year old game)
And I won't pay for anything that I already purchased
Now looks like a good time to reflect on the options. What are the good torrent options on windows?
Even better what are the best OSS ones?
Seriously, who torrents without using a blacklisting program like PeerBlock, anyway? Yes, I know it's not perfect, but it helps, and guess what? It can block ad servers, too! If I hadn't read about this here, they probably could have implemented the ads, and I wouldn't have known about it at all!
qTorrent was suggested on other tech community web sites as an alternative to uTorrent when this story broke. It's open-source, multi-platform and looks polished and is ad-free. Like uTorrent, it claims a small footprint. Is anyone already using it?
http://www.qbittorrent.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QBittorrent
Remember Azereus? That was a popular platform until its owners bloated it with crap that no one wanted. They could now serve as that demotivational poster of a wrecked ship with the byline: "It may be your purpose in life is to act as a warning to others." uTorrent were going down that path, so it's encouraging to see them realise playing chicken with a lighthouse is not a wise surivival strategy. I never understood the point of 'apps' in uTorrent. What's next: 'apps' for Microsoft Word? 'apps' for 'apps'?
Let's see, what have I used bittorent for lately?
Archlinux ISO
Ubuntu ISO
Overgrowth Alpha
Oh yea, ALL OF THE HUMBLE INDIE BUNDLE GAMES
... because I've checked repeatedly for the latest version and there are no updates (v3.1.3 build 27220), yet there are simply no 'sponsored torrents' nor any advertising of any sort to see. As far as I can tell this is vaporware and much ado about something that hasn't actually happened. Did they somehow selectively roll it out to a certain demographic group, like maybe people whose default browser is Internet Explorer or whose browser isn't configured to request do-not-track?
Or maybe... my cranial powers and dislike of hard-sell advertising are both so staggering that I'm simply subconsciously willing these sponsored torrents not to appear? Yeah, that must be it....
I've also torrented libreoffice,
and my ratio for the last few releases of eclipse is over 200/1
As long as ads are discreet (no "punch the monkey" stunts, no attention-killing animations) and don't waste too much bandwidth, I'm fine with them.
I don't use AdBlock. I want the sites I love to be economically viable.
Saw this coming a mile away. I haven't upgraded my utorrent in a while and now have a real reason to not upgrade.
They already have a tab called Featured Content (I think since version 3.x.x) . I always though they were planning to make it more prominent and sort of must view thing.
I don't understand why people get all PMSey over advertising. It's easy enough to ignore (go get a drink, go pee, go update your facebook status, glance at your magazine, et cetera). I'd sooner ignore an ad then have to pay ~$250 a year per network (example: BBC) or per program (~$70 for LimeWire). Advertising gives me 40+ channels of freetoair TV, plus thousands of free websites and dozens of programs.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Yes. Things that are free are magically exempt from criticism. People's negative feelings about free things simply don't exist, and so they're unable to express them.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
So is that all it is, then? I've had that tab/feature disabled in Options for so long that I'd forgotten about it. I also disabled the Apps section and even the sidebar, since it's not relevant to the way I use it.
No matter. If they do decide to take a hard sell approach I'll find a way to mitigate it or find another app to do the job. I'm willing to pay/donate a bit for what the software does for me, but I'm not willing to tolerate blatant advertising. (Reminds me of some episodes of the past season of the reimagined Hawaii Five-O series, wherein some of the "product placement" was so excessive it made me throw up in my mouth a little every time.)
You have utorrent for a Mac (as do I).
I understand utorrent for Windows has the "download from beginning" which is a pretty killer feature. On my Windows machine with BitComet (don't laught) it means I can start watching after 15 seconds instead of having to wait a whole 5-15 minutes.
Windows version probably works for WINE, maybe I should use that instead.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
The bit torrent software.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
uTorrent is given away although you have the option of paying. If you are given something for free (as in a gift from someone else) you have zero room for bitching. Now had you paid $10 that's a different story.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
No, I don't have uTorrent for OSX. I have it installed natively in Windows 7 x64, no VMs or bootcamps anywhere in sight. I don't know what I said that provoked that conclusion, but you concluded incorrectly. I've never even bothered trying any of the streaming features and don't know much of anything about them, other than the barest knowledge that they exist. For me they're not a killer feature; I do a real good impression of a person demonstrating infinite patience.
I've started using Deluge (http://deluge-torrent.org/) as an alternative. The reason I like it is because it has a very similar GUI to uTorrent and mostly the same functionality (including full .magnet support), plus they've finally got a good Windows installer that isn't too large and doesn't install as much cruft as it used to. Plus since it's open source and cross platform it means that once I give up Windows for good (given the way the platform is headed), I'll have gained enough familiarity with it that the full transition to Linux will hopefully be less painful. I'd transition now except that their desktop situation is still in a bit of a flux and I'm waiting for some stability in what people end up using.
A nice thing about the Windows build of Deluge is that unlike uTorrent, it's a clean, quick and painless install. Tthey don't even try to trick you into installing ads or WinZip I think it was recently, and it doesn't come up with some shit-for-brains neutered interface by default you have to disable to get some control over your torrents.
Most people on Slashdot are fucking idiots.
Didn't you get the memo? Greed is a terrible, terrible thing when other people are doing it.
First, I pay for netflix, and normally watch stuff on there. However, I'd say that netflix still has a ways to go on things like subtitling, alternate languages, and seeking. While I don't play entire episodes at 1.5X like Celebi, I have the opposite problem - I fairly frequently have a 'what was that' reaction and want to go back 10-15 seconds, which means I have to wait 10-15 seconds while netflix tosses it's cache and redownloads the past minute or so. With a downloaded movie, that's a button click away.
While I have to wait for a torrent to finish downloading, that can be done in the background. The final product is typically superior to watching it on netflix, and often better than DVD. Blueray - depends on how annoying they made the disc; I've had a few that takes me 5+ minutes to get to what I paid for. Every time I put the disc in. I've heard of some that are more like 15 minutes.
For the record, I don't mind you putting advertising in the free space on the disc. What I mind is you setting it to play automatically before the menu comes up, as unskippably as you can make it, every time the disc goes in. Put it in the extra features. I'll actually look at that stuff on occasion(and that's all you need when it's a purchased disk). I especially love it(sarc) when it's for an older disc and I already own what they're advertising.
I don't read AC A human right
qBittorrent is certainly not a bad client but I find it lacking in a very critical security function - blocklists/IPFilters. Unlike many other open source clients like Transmission, Deluge, and (I believe, I haven't used it for awhile) KTorrent, qBT does NOT 1) Allow you to enter the URL of a blocklist file and 2) Automatically update from said blocklist at intervals. Instead, you have to have to download a proper file to a local machine and then manually hit the key to reload/update the blocklist filter. This is cumbersome and often defeats the purpose of blocklists, which are updated swiftly to ensure that anti-P2P organization address blocks are rejected. If anyone is up to the task and wishes to contribute to qBT I'd really suggest adding this functionality to bring it in line with the best of open source clients. Until then, I'll have to give qBittorrent a pass.
Loads of stuff uses bit torrent, sure it's mainly used for piracy but that just speaks to how great the protocol is. You could say the very same thing about TCP.
Or... just keep using the old uTorrent. It's got the basic and advanced feature set nailed down just fine. There's not a whole lot that needs done to it.
Fear is the mind killer.
How can the above comment be described as against Slashdot comment guidelines?
This is moderation abuse. People who disagree with me should reply, instead of down-modding.