uTorrent Quietly Installs Cryptocurrency Miner

New submitter Eloking sends news that uTorrent, a popular BitTorrent client, is silently installing cryptocurrency mining software for many users. [uTorrent] brings in revenue through in-app advertising and also presents users with “offers” to try out third-party software when installed or updated. These offers are usually not placed on users’ machines without consent, but this week many users began complaining about a “rogue” offer being silently installed. The complaints mention the Epic Scale tool, a piece of software that generates revenue through cryptocurrency mining. To do so, it uses the host computer’s CPU cycles. ... The sudden increase in complaints over the past two days suggests that something went wrong with the install and update process. Several users specifically say that they were vigilant, but instead of a popup asking for permission the Epic Scale offer was added silently.

Comments

Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

For something as important and risky as BitTorrent, why would you use a proprietary client?

Re:Why uTorrent?

[greenwow]

It used to be great. It did exactly what you needed it to do and no more. Now it is a bloated mess like Azureus/Vuse. Now when I load UTorrent, my Windows machine slows down so much it is unusable. It loads gigabytes of ads per day. I have ISDN at home right now, and if you let it run 24/7, you can still download a surprising amount of files. That is except with the new version of uTorrent. It makes the ads a higher priority than BitTorrent so your files take days or weeks longer than they should.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[JMJimmy]

For something as important and risky as BitTorrent, why would you use a proprietary client?

Glad I ditched it in favour of Tixati months ago.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. It was great but not anymore. Either use an old version that had no advertising or switch to something else like qBittorent.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Mister Transistor]

Exactly this. The best version was the last one before they were bought out. I still use 2.2, that version had NO advertising, and was written well before the cryptocurrencies came around.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are all proprietary.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[MrBigInThePants]

I switched to http://www.qbittorrent.org/ a while ago.

Kicks uTorrent's butt in every way.

If you are too lazy to switch to a better client after it becomes rubbish then YOU are the problem, not them.

Choice is only meaningful if you can and will exercise it....

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

...What?
transmission, qbittorrent, and deluge are all FOSS.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to use uTorrent. Now I prefer Deluge running on a seedbox for nearly instant transfer of torrents. Downloading the completed torrent from my seedbox takes longer than the torrent process in most cases.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[elfprince13]

Transmission is where it's at. It's everything I used to love about uTorrent: small, fast, and unobtrusive.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Lumpy]

Why are you using any version above 2.2.1?

That was the last real version.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[ckatko]

Yeah, people forget the 'u' really stood for "micro" torrent. It was tiny, it did what it was supposed to, and that's it. It's slowly become more and more of a monster, but you could at least disable the ad bars in the advanced settings. I refused to upgrade to the newer versions, and it looks like that was a good thing.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[MagicM]

Ads? What ads? Am I the only one who messes with settings?

Options->Preferences->Advanced
offers.left_rail_offer_enabled=false
offers.sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled=false

I'm sure you should change these settings at your own risk. But it was worth the risk to me.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[MrBigInThePants]

Nah. Its probably a lot better but I am just too fat and lazy to move clients...

JK. ;)

Re:Why uTorrent?

[kurkosdr]

And you can get it from the oldversion site.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[nmb3000]

Why are you using any version above 2.2.1?

Came here to say exactly this.

After seeing what version 3 looked like on a friend's computer (code isn't the only thing that got bloated with crap) and reading about the hassle people were having with advertising, user-hostile admins, and finally seeing uTorrent get bought out, I'm glad I never bothered to update past 2.2.1. Some private trackers even block 3.x.

I've also heard good things about Deluge, so if I'm ever forced into updating I'll probably give that a try.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[BlackHawk-666]

I run transmission on my WD MyBook Live hard drive (it's got a linux variant on it), and connect to it using the desktop client. I cue up whatever I want it to DL, then I can power off my desktop, and let the hard drive (network attached) DL the torrents. My XBMC client(s) just serve the content up from there. No bloatware, no ads, no hassles.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I was a little skeptical, but my download speed nearly doubled after downgrading to 2.2.
http://www.oldversion.com/windows/download/utorrent-2-2-23071

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

you have isdn and are torrenting?

idiot meet idiot

Re:Why uTorrent?

[RedShoeRider]

I don't know why ISDN has such a bad rap.

It's stable as hell, offers a guaranteed bit rate (albeit not that fast by modern standards), and is available just about anywhere in the USA. Mind you, what's a full T1: One form of it is 24(?) ISDN lines bonded together. I was on a 128k ISDN when I lived with the 'folks, as there was no DSL/Cable/Whatever. I torrented the hell out of that connection. Sure, it took some serious time to pull down a .iso of a movie. But it worked. It *always* worked.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your torrents are taking weeks, then you are not doing it right.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

Yes, I adjusted those settings a while ago, after uTorrent started showing video ads with audio. However, in light of this recent news about a silent install of Cryptocurrency miner, maybe its time for me to switch to something like Qtorrent.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Ads? What ads? Am I the only one who messes with settings?

Options->Preferences->Advanced
offers.left_rail_offer_enabled=false
offers.sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled=false

I'm sure you should change these settings at your own risk. But it was worth the risk to me.

Ads I could deal with (disabling). The problem is going to upgrade to a new version (when offered), you have to be extremely careful when installing to disable all the shitware. What broke it for me was missing the checkbox for conduit once. Conduit hijacks your home page and search engine, and is very difficult to remove. That was it. I stopped using uTorrent after that. Currently I use qBittorrent.

It's irritating enough to deal with the useless bundled shitware during installation, it's even more irritating to have to carefully opt out of everything when installing an upgrade. Adobe Flash / Reader, and Java are bad at that as well.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

I switched to qBittorent a couple years ago. When uTorrent started bundling Conduit (which hijacks browser homepages and search engines) that was it, I was done. You shouldn't have to carefully examine every page of the install dialog to make sure you're not accidentally installing malware. Adobe falls in this category trying to install McAfee shit when you're just trying to update their unsecure Flash plugin.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Hadlock]

It has a fantastic web front end and you can run it as a service in windows, I'm not sure how else you would accomplish this in the windows world.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Bacon Bits]

I saw the writing on the wall years back. I posted an bug in the official bug forum, and the thread got locked in less than 5 minutes with a complaint that I didn't search. Except I did search. The first line of my post was even, "I searched, and while I found a similar bug, this one is actually different," and went on to explain why. Mine dealt with default column sorting (column A ascending, column B descending), theirs dealt with default column order (changing columns A, B, C to B, A, C). There was no similar request. It was locked so fast, the mod couldn't have actually paid attention to it. Alright, that's kind of stupid, but whatever.

About half an hour later, I was in a post and made a comment on a different bug. This one was about interface layout, but it seemed to me like there was confusion going on about what the bug was, so I made an image with arrows describing the issue rather well (IMO) since I was able to replicate it. 5 minutes later, my post was deleted and my account was banned. No reason given.

Contribute to community? Get told to fuck off. I've never encountered such blatant hostility to your own community before, and knew immediately that whatever uTorrent was doing wasn't worth my time. I was so irritated that I uninstalled uTorrent immediately and a found another client even though at the time they were all significantly worse (I started with Transmission, when was just getting popular on OS X, then Deluge, still in beta, then eventually qBittorrent where I've stayed since 1.x days). I didn't even wait for my current torrents to finish downloading or seeding. I have never and will never use any software from that company ever again under any circumstances. They're below Oracle. They're below Symantec. They're below Pearson. I'd install BonziBuddy before uTorrent. It's been a secret pleasure of mine watching those fuckers crash and burn over the last several years.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your torrents are taking weeks, then you are not doing it right.

That's a load of BS. I live in downtown Seattle so dial-up is the fastest connection I can get. I just finished downloading a 2 Gbyte movie that took three weeks. Had I left uTorrent on 24/7, at best case with my 45 kbps down, it would have taken 4.1 days (((2*10^9*8)/45000)/86400). Many people speed a week or more downloading a single file. I don't know anyone here with faster than 1.5 Mbps so I would guess the rest of the country is even worse off since it can't be better than the tech hub of the world.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[fuzzywig]

I think I switched to Deluge about five years ago. It was originally started as an open source Torrent clone, and, well, it's now basically an open source clone of Torrent as it was then. Mission successful I guess.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[rs79]

I just noticed it's faster to download a large file than copy it from a second drive on the same machine. Why am I Saving these files?

Re:Why uTorrent?

[rs79]

>I live in downtown Seattle so dial-up is the fastest connection I can get.

WOT?

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Kjella]

I don't know why ISDN has such a bad rap.

Mainly that it was big in Europe and they used pay per minute to bleed you dry. Nothing wrong with the technology as such, then again I've been on dial-up, ISDN, DSL, cable and fiber with roughly the same stability assuming you had a properly buried copper/coax/fiber line. That said these days I'd say 10 Mbit is the least I'd want.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

> you are not doing it right.

What a load of crap. You're assuming people only download one thing at a time. I just looked at uTorrent, and out of the nine things I'm currently downloading, the average age is about seven weeks. I have the fastest connection out of all of my friends which is a CenturyLink DSL at 160 kbps. I'm sure many of them have torrents that are much older since they're on dial-up or ISDN.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

> stable as hell,

It has an SLA so it is rock solid. If it doesn't work, then your state's PUC will come down on your local phone monopoly pretty damn hard. I live in the Pioneer Square area of Seattle, and Comcast hasn't wired most buildings here and DSL is unreliable due to the fifty+ year-old wiring. But, if you buy an ISDN line from CenturyLink then by law they must make it work. At work we have individual POTS lines for each developer, and all of them are 46 kbps or faster download. None of the lines supported greater than 26.4 kbps when we moved int until we ordered ISDN lines then dropped the ISDN lines and converted them to POTS after CenturyLink spent thousands of dollars on wiring and equipment upgrades to get ISDN to work. The installer I talked to said a lot of people in the Seattle area are using that trick to get nicer POTS lines.

Your comment about 24 is the difference between BRI and PRI. BRI is basic rate interface which has two 64 kbps channels and PRI is primary rate interface which has 24 64 kbps channels.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

> per minute to bleed you dry.

That's why you find an ISP that supports sending data over the 16 kbit/s D(delta) channel. It works great for things like downloading email, Skype, notifications for phone apps so you don't use your mobile data, etc.. Not every use case needs the higher speed of the 64 kbit/s B(bearer) channel. I'm a software developer in Seattle, and I very often don't even start my B channel many days. We use Git, and it is very efficient with bandwidth use so I can pull and push changes all day without having to pay a single per minute charge.

The only time ISDN is really painful is when download, for example, a new Java version or new Maven .jars. My ~/.m2 directory is nearly half a gigabyte.

> 10 Mbit is the least I'd want.

That's a pipedream. Other than connections like the $20k per month T3 to Sprint where I used to work, I've never personally seen a connection that fast. Most of the country is still chugging along with 1.5 Mbps DSL at the max.

Re: Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

What? How fast is your network? Or how slow is your hard disk?

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Cramer]

BRI: 2B+D (strip away the ISDN signaling and you get IDSL)
PRI: 23B+D

A sole "24 channel PRI" is 100% USELESS as there's ZERO mechanism to signal calls. Yes, you can order 24B PRI's as part of a multi-PRI bundle. (see also: "nfast group") If you can afford the PRI, CPE, and ISP account that will allow you bond 23 channels, you can afford a traditional "dedicated" T1 circuit. (hint: that T1 will be cheaper)

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Kjella]

> 10 Mbit is the least I'd want.

That's a pipedream. Other than connections like the $20k per month T3 to Sprint where I used to work, I've never personally seen a connection that fast. Most of the country is still chugging along with 1.5 Mbps DSL at the max.

My connections the last six years:
100/100 fiber
60/60 fiber
70/10(?) cable
25/5 cable

I used to envy the US unlimited dial-up. Then the cable as we were on crap ADSL. These days, not so much. Here in Norway the median broadband connection is now 20 Mbit/s and the mean 28 Mbit/s and no, we're less densely populated than the US. Over the next year there'll be major gigabit rollouts as well, we're not slowing down but rather accelerating.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, that's a lot of whining. Bottom line is you chose to use Windows, no one forced it on you. So of course you're going to be bombarded with a ton of crap hidden away in all those opaque .exes.

Buck up soldier.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

If I remember, the entire installer & program was under 64KB in early versions. It was like a demoscene art piece, but yet functional and useful.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

The last Good version of uTorrent is the 1.6 series before they added lots of crap. Since then I've switched to qbittorrent simply because it's a cross platform application and runs on Linux (don't know about *bsd) and OS-X

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have version 3.2 uTorrent and I don't have any "offers." settings, nor do I see any ads in the software. I did go ahead and disable gui.show_plus_upsell, but that didn't change anything that I noticed.

So, in which version did the ads start?

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

That link goes to the wrong version. You mistakenly sorted alphabetically instead of logically to find the version just before 3.0.

The latest version appears to be uTorrent 2.2.1 Build 25302 May 18, 2011
http://www.oldversion.com/windows/download/utorrent-2-2-1-build-25302

Re:Why uTorrent?

[sglewis100]

I'm so confused. You're on 160kbps DSL. Some guy posted above he has 128k ISDN. Is this article from the late 90's?

Re:Why uTorrent?

[captain_sweatpants]

Transmission daemon with remote control via transdroid app is nice: install transmission-daemon, set up transmission RPC, proxy pass https via apache.
Set up dynamic dns/port forwards and you can remote control your torrents from anywhere over https on your mobile. httb == http below (why no pre tags??)

RPC address is httb://server/transmission/rpc

#/etc/apache2/sites-available/ssl.conf
...
SSLEngine on
SSLProxyEngine on
ProxyPass /transmission httb://localhost:9091/transmission
ProxyPassReverse httb://localhost:9091/transmission /transmission keepalive=on
...

#/etc/transmission-daemon/settings.json:
...
"rpc-authentication-required": true,
"rpc-bind-address": "0.0.0.0",
"rpc-enabled": true,
"rpc-password": "restart-daemon-to-hash-me",
"rpc-port": 9091,
"rpc-url": "/transmission/",
"rpc-username": "transmission",
"rpc-whitelist": "127.0.0.1",
"rpc-whitelist-enabled": true,
...

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seattle was an early adopter of the Internet. The Wiki page on this describes the problem pretty well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter

Seattle is still paying the "early adopter tax." In two neighborhoods where I previously lived, Comcast had the government-granted monopoly, but they were not able to offer cable Internet access. The amplifiers installed supported only DOCSIS 1.1, and since then the degredation of the cables and amplifiers keeps it from working at all. Also, Seattle has rules against upgrading equipment with larger replacements so in both places where I lived, the city's "director's rules" prevented Comcast from upgrading equipment. Many of the poorer neighborhoods that didn't have the first generation of equipment installed now have very good access since they have much newer cables and new amplifiers.

Also, CenturyLink installed a lot of 1.5 Mbps DSL equipment that is still in use. It doesn't handle lower quality lines as well as the newer technologies like VDSL does. Where I live now, DSL doesn't work even though I literally live in the shadow of the second tallest building on the west coast. Much of the city can't get working DSL.

It's ironic here that the more expensive the house, the more likely you're going to be stuck with dial-up due to the age of the cabling and equipment.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[ihtoit]

you can turn ads off. Go to options and then preferences, advanced, set filter to "offers" and flip the switch on "~content_offer_autoexec", "@featured_content~" (there's about half a dozen of these), "~left_rail_offer_enabled", and "~sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled". Then hit OK and restart your client. You're welcome.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[JDAustin]

I had IDSL as my first broadband connection. It wasn't fast but latency for games was insanely good.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[ihtoit]

you downloaded utorrent from cnet. utorrent doesn't install conduit. Stop with the bullshit,

Re:Why uTorrent?

[ihtoit]

10 Meg a pipedream?? Are you fucking serious?? Where are you, Outback Mongolia?

Re:Why uTorrent?

[ihtoit]

this is why I'm having such a hard time with this entire thread. I was on 56k (connected at 50667bps every time) until 1999, at which point I doubled then tripled up and ran on 150kbit for three years, I had a Megabit internet connection in 2002, pretty soon I upgraded to 5, then 10, then 50 (by this time it was 2009). Now I'm on 100MBit, and that's not even the top tier package on Virgin, who offer 300Mbps on their top tier at frankly obscene rates. I live in a county of 865,000 where there are more computers than people and more cellphones than computers.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Azureus/Vuze is written in Java, it was a bloated mess to begin with.

Re: Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe u should move out of Seattle. 10mbit is the norm even in Thailand. How do you even watch YouTube?

Re:Why uTorrent?

[fractoid]

Likewise. Tixati is like uTorrent was when I first started using it - small, lightweight, simple, fast.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

you downloaded utorrent from cnet. utorrent doesn't install conduit. Stop with the bullshit,

uTorrent, at least at some point in time, did offer Conduit with the installer from their website. Here is a post from a moderator on the uTorrent Forum:
http://forum.utorrent.com/topi...

We are among many products that support the production and distribution of our free software through advertising. In cases where an advertisement is for an installed product, our requirements include: 1) The user must accept the offer; 2) The user must be able to easily revert to a state prior to the offer install. We also offer a premium product as an ad-free option.

You may have inadvertently accepted an offer from one of our partners during your installation of BitTorrent/uTorrent or when updating to the latest version of our clients. If that’s the case, don't worry - here are some easy instructions for reverting to your original settings.

PC Users

If your home page and default search was changed to Bing you have Conduit Search Protect. If it changed to Yahoo then you have installed software from Spigot. See the instructions below based on which search engine you are seeing.

Conduit Search Protect

Conduit Search Protect is one of the offers PC users can receive. To remove Conduit Search Protect and revert to your original settings, follow these steps.

In the Windows control panel, go to uninstall a program. Look for “Search Protect” by Conduit and select Uninstall.
When the uninstall dialog box appears, simply check the “Go back to my original home page and default search settings” box at the bottom, and then click Uninstall.
Your default search engines will revert to their original settings.

Spigot

First, go into the Windows Control Panel and select UnInstall a Program or Add/Remove Programs. Locate and uninstall Spigot Search Protect. Then revert each affected browser back to your desired homepage and search engine settings with the following steps.

Chrome

In Chrome you can set the default search engine, home page, and new tab behavior on the Chrome Settings page. For more info, see these links:

Set your default search engine
Set your homepage
Set startup preferences (including new tab behavior)

Firefox

Set your Home Page
Set your New Tab page
To change the default search engine in Firefox, simply click the icon next to the search box and choose your desired site.

Internet Explorer

The method for changing your settings will vary depending on your current version of Internet Explorer. Follow these links to view instructions on Microsoft’s site.

Change your Home Page (you can select your version of IE via the tab to the right of the page)
Change your default Search Engine
Change your New Tab settings

Mac Users

Mac users can revert to their original settings by uninstalling the Searchme extension from each affected browser and then resetting the homepage manually. For more info, please view these detailed instructions.

Safari

Under Safari’s Preferences menu, select Extensions.
Locate the Searchme extension and select Uninstall.
Go back to the General Preferences tab and select the Default Search Engine and Homepage you would like to use.

Chrome

Under the Window menu, select Extensions.
Locate Searchme and click the corresponding trash can icon.
Once the extension has been removed, open the Chrome menu and select Preferences.
On the settings page that appears, select the homepage and default search provider you would like to use.

Firefox

Under Firefox’s Tools menu, select Add-Ons.
When the Add-Ons page opens, click Extensions.
Remove the Searchme extension.
To revert your search engine, simply click the search engine icon next to the search box and select the provider you wish to use.
To revert your default home page, open the Firefox menu, select Preferences, and select the General tab. Here you can select the home page you would like to use.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[thegarbz]

Not to say that uTorrent 2.2 wasn't great if not the last good release, but share with us how you quantified the doubling in speed in a controlled manner using a protocol that gets data sent from random peers with equally random bandwidth available.

uTorrent 2.2 is no faster at downloading. It's faster at starting, running and uses less system resources, doesn't spy on you etc, but that's about it.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[JohnStock]

as is iObit's software that has frequent updates that force you to download and install from scratch each time.. while you carefully look for opt outs each time.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel similarly. Both for Azureus and utorrent. What's even better is watching the utorrent fanboys continue to get screwed.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[basecastula]

The funniest part is their forum states they will not link to or tell you where to get older versions if their software. Talk about erasing the past.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's faster because it's not using bandwidth to download ads so more's available for downloading the torrents. May not matter if you have a high speed connection, but could matter if you're using ISDN. Which you would know if you had actually bothered to read the thread you replied to.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

taxiti is dominating

coudl do with some minor refinement, some ui features of classic utorrent are missed

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

ISDN? Are you a time traveller from the 90's?

Re:Why uTorrent?

[ihtoit]

wow. I sit corrected.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[eric_harris_76]

It's working for me. Now to move over those unfinished .torrent files.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[RyoShin]

This. When they first introduced ads, you could go into settings and opt out. I did so, then turned off auto-updating. I'm happy with the version of the client I have (2.something)

Re:Why uTorrent?

[Wolfrider]

--I wish I had mod points. That's pretty creative :-)

--I trust you're behind a firewall/router, but have you ever had any logged intrusion attempts on the drive?

Re:Why uTorrent?

[BlackHawk-666]

It's pretty hard to say if anyone has tried, since I'm not running any decent intrusion detection, just my router's firewall. They'd have a pretty hard time of it in any case, since it's Linux, it runs on a user space account who's only access is to that home drive and the torrent DL folder, and it's a Power PC CPU, so there's going to be pretty much no hack that will work on it unless someone goes out and makes one for that every small use case.

Re:Why uTorrent?

[YrWrstNtmr]

That's a pipedream. Other than connections like the $20k per month T3 to Sprint where I used to work, I've never personally seen a connection that fast. Most of the country is still chugging along with 1.5 Mbps DSL at the max.

Are you high? Here in Redneckistan Virginia, I have 50/50 fiber. $50(?) month. Have not had less than 25/5 over the last decade, cable or fiber. Previous to that, in Flyover Nation Ohio, it was 10/2 and then 20/5.

What 'country/state/city' are you talking about?

Worth it?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Aren't bitcoins, between the drop in value and the ASIC enthusiasts, at the point where clandestine CPU mining is close to pointless? I realize that free as in stolen has its virtues; but it likely wasn't free to get their shitware, rather than somebody else's, bundled with utorrent, so I'm surprised that it was worth it.

Re:Worth it?

[SirDrinksAlot]

At scale, a world wide army of CPU's will easily crush an ASICs. Mining is about number of hashes per second, one system is slow, an army of misappropriated systems will be very fast.

Re:Worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The conclusion of your reasoning isn't to be "surprised", but to deduce that they're probably mining a cryptocurrency other than bitcoin.

Re:Worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends on whether or not you're paying for the CPU time...

Re:Worth it?

[itzly]

At scale, a world wide army of CPU's will easily crush an ASICs

A million CPUs can crush a single ASIC, yes, but people are running warehouses full of ASICs.

Re:Worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is worth it when it isn't your computer that is using the power to hash.

It becomes worthless when you are paying for that power.

Re:Worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

At scale, a world wide army of CPU's will easily crush an ASICs. Mining is about number of hashes per second, one system is slow, an army of misappropriated systems will be very fast.

After the suggestions that Tor was owned by the government, and the attacks against the Pirate (Bay) community, I'm rather surprised there's still an army of people running torrent clients.

Re:Worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it bitcoin or some other altcoin?

Re:Worth it?

[jandrese]

It might be somewhat more viable if the client uses the GPU. Then at least you are only behind by an order of magnitude or two. Of course people will start to notice if their GPU fans kick into high gear when they aren't playing games.

Re:Worth it?

[Jawnn]

A million CPUs can crush a single ASIC, yes, but people are running warehouses full of ASICs.

And if they're paying for the space, and the electricity, my army of stolen mining machines is still more profitable. "Anything stolen is pure profit."

Re:Worth it?

[jdavidb]

If there's something I can still mine with a CPU that is worth it, I want to know, and I want to install software to mine it myself, and I want to trade it out immediately for Bitcoin or something else. Every so often a currency does pop up where this is true, but it's been awhile. So I want to know what uTorrent is mining.

Re:Worth it?

[itzly]

Depends on how much work was involved, and how big your army is.

Re:Worth it?

[jythie]

I am not sure that is the case anymore. CPU mining was already orders of magnitudes less efficient than GPU, and GPU mining less efficient than ASIC by a similar scale. Even with 'free' CPU time, even on a mass scale, the trickle it would likely generate would be next to worthless.

Re:Worth it?

[kamapuaa]

It would still be worth mining bitcoins, if somebody else was paying for the electricity.

Re:Worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

After the suggestions that Tor was owned by the government, and the attacks against the Pirate (Bay) community, I'm rather surprised there's still an army of people running torrent clients.

Do not confuse the Tor network with Torrents. They are not related.

Re:Worth it?

[QuasiSteve]

Is it bitcoin or some other altcoin?

parent anonymous poster should be upvoted - GP makes an assumption that it's mining Bitcoins, and not some altcoin.
I don't think anybody's analyzed it yet just what coin, if any, it mines - the list of things it's associated with include other potential for monetization.

Re:Worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

This may come as a surprise to you, but it turns out the rumors were true: There is, in fact, a world beyond the US borders.

Living in eastern Europe I couldn't give less of a shit about whether Tor is run entirely by FBI, CIA, NSA, ATF, WTF, BBQ or etc. I'm only concerned about local authorities, who are too poor and incompetent for any meaningful attack on that, and who are also too Eastern for any US/British/whatever agency to share data with them.

Now, uTorrent trying to use my machine for mining? I'd be really pissed about that, but thankfully I've switched to Transmission a long time ago. I remember uTorrent being really good, with a small memory footprint and no ads - but I guess times have changed.

Re:Worth it?

[ckatko]

When you're not the one paying the power bill, anything above 0% is worth it.

Re:Worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

currently there is no alt-coin worth more than BTC for mining... I used to be big on alt mining with GPU's and such, then I switched to ASIC BTC mining, then I turned everything off because none of it is profitable any more.

Re:Worth it?

[slashdime]

http://www.guru3d.com/news-sto...

Relevant text: The botnet’s Bitcoin operation was only profitable because it used stolen electricity: it used about $561,000 (£347,000) of electricity a day on its victims’ machines, while only generating $2,165 (£1340) a day.

One would have to be inhuman to let your greed cause so much damage for so little gain.

Re:Worth it?

[operagost]

Didn't know Quark was into Bitcoin. Gold-pressed latinum market on a downturn?

Re:Worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

As others have said, only factoring in the cost of electricity is why it isn't worth it.

In a month you may make $200, but you would pay for about $240 in electricity to do so.
That net loss of $40 is why it isn't worth it.

If I get to keep the $200, but you must pay that $240, then to me it certainly is worth it since I GAIN $200 that month instead of LOSE $40.
Of course to you it most certainly is not worth it, as you have to pay $240 to get $0.

Re: Worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

i believe these were both invented by the NSA

Re:Worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, it's not mining bitcoins, but some other crypto.

Let it be the first of many!

[Eloking]

My first /. news, I'm so proud :')

Re:Let it be the first of many!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I did that once, and got the same result. Don't trumpet when your own submission makes it. You can only make that sort of offtopic post if you have a humorous "fist p0st. "

Re:Let it be the first of many!

[jones_supa]

Hey, congratulations for the first accepted submission. :) Ignore the dicky replies you are getting. Keep 'em articles coming.

Re:Let it be the first of many!

[Eloking]

Thank you jones. I know it's a little silly but after a good 10 years of browsing /. without any implication it's a little intimidating to start posting comment and submitting story.

Sadly, it seem that news is false after all but at least there's an interesting discussion here.

Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to abandon utorrent. In fact, time to abandon all software who's owners bundle in adware/malware/anything-other-than-the-program-the-user-is-trying-to-install.

The only way this practice will stop is if users refuse to download and use software that does this.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[juanfgs]

If only we have software that we could trust, that we could see the code. And that when one vendor starts doing this, we'd be free for forking the project and making one without the bundled spyware. We could even come up with a license that protects this code, and ensures that everyone that forks the project has to respect the liberties of the user in the same way.

Ohh well, I guess one can just dream

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I use Deluge. Unless there's something wrong with Deluge I don't know about...

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the ideal, but what about all the users who will never notice that this has happened? Is it realistic to expect every person to be hypervigilant about every CPU cycle and notice unusual CPU or network activity. Hacking laws need to be written to include this practice and perpetrators prosecuted as enthusiastically as Aaron Schwartz.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

Is he trolling or serious?

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

The time to abandon uTorrent was years ago when it first got bought out.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Braedley]

No, the time to abandon uTorrent was when they started showing ActiveX ads. That was a while ago. I've been using Transmission running on my DroboFS ever since (which considering that was where most of my downloads were going in the first place ended up simplifying things).

uTorrent is just the latest piece of software that started off pretty awesome, and was ruined by greed.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[DaRanged]

Basically almost anything from cnet and download.com.. their 'network' installer is sickening.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Holi]

Let's not forget SourceForge

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[jandrese]

This means I have to abandon Java and Flash.

...

I can live with that.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[jythie]

I would wager 'sarcastic'.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[mrchaotica]

If only we have software that we could trust, that we could see the code.

That's necessary, but not sufficient. Even Free Software can get bundled with malware if you don't obtain it from a reputable source (e.g., the first-party website or your Linux distro's package management tool). Even previously-reputable download sites like Sourceforge have been guilty of bundling shit.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

uTorrent has been a bad choice for years. Not sure why you think this is somehow the last straw or something.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

To turn off all ad related and featured content:

Options>preferences>Advanced...

Turn all these settings to false:
left_rail_offer
gui.show_plus_upsell
sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled
bt.enable_pulse
gui.show_notorrents_node
offers.content_offer_autoexec

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[seeland]

I was solely a Linux user for at least the last decade. Back when I was on Windows Torrent was the best around. I just switched back to Windows a few months ago for my primary computer. When I downloaded the latest version of Torrent I was shocked at how far it has fallen. I mean it is crappy, bloated, full of ads(?) and the features I used to like are strangely missing or hard to find. I mean... what? Torrent used to be lightweight, I mean, it is in its name for goodness sake - .

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Skidborg]

Except that as soon as you start to download it and see the waves of fishy advertising and requests to install third-party software you should know something is up.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Nemyst]

Go grab qBittorrent instead. Free, open-source, not owned by the Bittorrent corporation.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[NJRoadfan]

Plenty of GPL'ed software is bundling things like OpenCandy with the installer.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[geekmux]

Time to abandon utorrent. In fact, time to abandon all software who's owners bundle in adware/malware/anything-other-than-the-program-the-user-is-trying-to-install.

The only way this practice will stop is if users refuse to download and use software that does this.

Wrong.

The only way this practice will stop is if users stop demanding every damn thing for free and actually come off their wallets and pay for the damn software.

It is up to the cheap-ass customer to decide whether that is through incessant ad revenue or a one-time charge.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you Dice for pushing me to GitHub!

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to abandon utorrent. In fact, time to abandon all software who's owners bundle in adware/malware/anything-other-than-the-program-the-user-is-trying-to-install.

The only way this practice will stop is if users refuse to download and use software that does this.

errr... a lot of us did that like in he 90's of previous century. just install linux.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Mashiki]

I've been using qbittorrent for the last year and I like it over deluge myself.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

so, abandon Google....they offer the bundling of Chrome and the Google Toolbar in a lot of things.

Abandon java - they bundle Ask/McAfee/Google in JRE...

etc

etc

Let me know when you do all that

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[DrXym]

Deluge isn't very well integrated with windows (e.g. magnet links) but it's adequate and infinitely preferable to a client which installs unwanted software.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[JohnFen]

Or, even better, just don't use uTorrent.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[JohnFen]

The only way this practice will stop is if users stop demanding every damn thing for free and actually come off their wallets and pay for the damn software.

It is up to the cheap-ass customer to decide whether that is through incessant ad revenue or a one-time charge.

Wrong. I am very happy to pay software I use and enjoy, but most of the time I don't have that option. You can't blame this sort of thing on people being unwilling to pay when there is no option to pay at all, or paying doesn't get you a version of the software that is free of ads and tracking.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[lister king of smeg]

Thank you Dice for pushing me to GitHub!

does github allow distributing binaries still? I thought they stopped doing that back like three years ago.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Pfhorrest]

As a Mac user, I don't trust installers at all. Why the fuck do I need to run another program to get a program onto my system when it could just be the app bundle in the archive? What else is this installer doing to do besides copy that app bundle into the Applications folder, which I can happily do myself if I want?

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[null etc.]

Doesn't this violate the terms of GPL? They're shipping binaries (for the bundle ad-ware) without providing the source.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm

You can spin this around on the software maker too.

Create a stable and reasonably bug-free product ( the first time around, not six months of patches down the road ) and don't nickel and dime people to death over upgrades, maintenance agreements, online registration schemes, limited installs, DRM, and planned obsolescence and more folks might be willing to " buy " and thus, support, the product in question. ( Though, now that I think about it, were normal software manufacturers to follow this idea, the need for bit-torrent would drop through the floor :| )

You provide me with a quality product that is worth buying, and I will be more than happy to pay for it.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[tepples]

What's the advantage of distributing binaries other than binaries of GCC?

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Uggg, Sourceforge too?
Failing a repository I always said Softpedia and Download.com were reputable sites for software. Then Download.com started bundling shit. I did some quick searching and sure enough Sourceforge has bundled shit as well.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[LinuxIsGarbage]

To turn off all ad related and featured content:

Options>preferences>Advanced...

Turn all these settings to false:
left_rail_offer
gui.show_plus_upsell
sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled
bt.enable_pulse
gui.show_notorrents_node
offers.content_offer_autoexec

The problem isn't the ads as much as the bundled shit during installation. They make it ever more difficult to opt out of it all, and include malicious stuff like Conduit browser hijacker.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[LinuxIsGarbage]

This means I have to abandon Java and Flash. ...

I can live with that.

Oh how I wish I could.

As the years tick on Java has fallen into almost complete irrelevancy (though it will take over your screen at random to notify you of an update for the plugin you forgot you had.) Flash is thankfully becoming more irrelevant as well. As much as I hate Apple at times, I do have to credit the success of the iOS platform combined with the stance against Flash as being a big driver for Web developers to move away from Flash.

I did abandon Adobe (Acrobat) Reader in favour of PDF Xchange viewer 7 years ago due to: Less security risk, higher performance, more features. Sadly they've started offering Ask toolbar and other shit during installation.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Hadlock]

I would be willing to pay for utorrent, it has a fantastic web interface, and now that I have it setup as a service and use the web interface instead. It also interfaces with the XBMC utorrent plug in. So for that I would buy it for maybe $30 one time purchase, instead it's on a subscription model, which is annoying. There's no one time payment option, and I have too much going on to manage a billion tiny subscriptions each month and review if I'm still getting X value out of them each month. I'm not going down that road.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[SeaFox]

The source is available on the same website as the installer. But most people aren't interested in the source. They want to install the program and run it.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[lister king of smeg]

What's the advantage of distributing binaries other than binaries of GCC?

Because not everyone wants to run gentoo or LFS (linux from scratch).

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

Serious question: What's wrong with Source Forge?

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Braedley]

What part of "I've been using Transmission" do you not understand? Seriously, ActiveX errors should have been the first and only red flag for any techie. I'm fine with simple gif, jgp, and png based ads, but since ActiveX has access to so much stuff it was easily crossing the line. Ads themselves were never really the issue. Ads that could potentially leak sensitive information were.

The only reason that this is a story is because there are still a large number of people using uTorrent. That group shouldn't include readers of Slashdot. If you're reading this, and you were using it until you read this story (and especially if you're still using it), you're doing it wrong.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[jones_supa]

Exactly. Why use something of which you have to turn a crapload of things off to make it usable.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[pslytely psycho]

Except most people know jack shit about their machine. And no matter how much you warn them, they invariably choose 'Express Install' instead of 'Advanced' because, you know, 'Advanced' is scary!

Then they pay me to remove it. I have become a leech to the advertising malware consortium. I do it as a side job at their homes for (insert favorite intoxicant here) money.

I try to teach them, even to the point of downloading something with a bunch of crap and walking them through the 'Advanced' install. Decline everything that isn't what you downloaded, never say yes. Never install something if you don't know what it is. Don't open emails if you don't recognize the sender, yada, yada, yada is all they hear.

At least they keep me supplied.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah it would be cool if the software works as well.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[geekmux]

The only way this practice will stop is if users stop demanding every damn thing for free and actually come off their wallets and pay for the damn software.

It is up to the cheap-ass customer to decide whether that is through incessant ad revenue or a one-time charge.

Wrong. I am very happy to pay software I use and enjoy, but most of the time I don't have that option.

You represent 5% of society, which is why marketing departments are focused on the other 95% who acknowledge FREE as the only reasonable cost.

You can't blame this sort of thing on people being unwilling to pay when there is no option to pay at all, or paying doesn't get you a version of the software that is free of ads and tracking.

No, I blame this on an ever-cheapening society that demands it. You will see fewer and fewer pay-for options in the future. Downright ownership will become a joke at first, and then likely illegal in the end in our ad-subsidized society.

But hey, it's FREE right NOW, so the price is right. That's all that matters to society.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't this violate the terms of GPL?

Bundles of multiple independent programs are an "aggregate" which specifically does not extend GPL obligations to other parts of the bundle:

A compilation of a covered work with other separate and independent works, which are not by their nature extensions of the covered work, and which are not combined with it such as to form a larger program, in or on a volume of a storage or distribution medium, is called an "aggregate" if the compilation and its resulting copyright are not used to limit the access or legal rights of the compilation's users beyond what the individual works permit. Inclusion of a covered work in an aggregate does not cause this License to apply to the other parts of the aggregate.

This protects both the innocent distro builder and the not-so-innocent download monetizer.

Re:Another piece of software to uninstall

[IHateEverybody]

Still this is useful for lazy users who are slow to switch clients. It's easier turn off ads and tackle malicious stuff as it comes than it is to go out and actually do research on what alternatives are available and trying them out before deciding on which one to keep. Or for that matter, even if you are a proactive yet cautious user, it makes more sense to work to minimize the damage being done by the devil you know while you decide on a new devil.

And that's why....

[Anonymous Coward]

We've all switched to Transmission or some other piece of software. This has been crapware filled for years now! Who the hell is surprised at this?

does anyone use the most current version?

[derideri]

A couple of years ago uTorrent started installing adware with their software as well, and everyone either bailed or went back to v2.2.1. So why would anyone be using the most current version of uTorrent anyway?

Re:does anyone use the most current version?

[gbjbaanb]

people new to torrenting and need a client might look at old links (there are many on the internet) and go and install the very pretty looking uTorrent, and of course they'll want the latest version.

Frankly, I ditched it when they started getting shitty with the adware, I moved to qbitorrent which doesn't look too dissimilar from uTorrent and all is good now.

Re:does anyone use the most current version?

[vux984]

Seconded, I switched to qBittorrent as well; even before utorrent got truly awful:

c++ so no dependency on Java; but does require python if you want to use its built in search.

Opensource / GPLv2+

So hopefully much less likely to end up the mess that utorrent became.

Re:does anyone use the most current version?

[xfade551]

Yeah, I tried out uTorrent a few weeks back after not having played with torrents for a few years. Between the installer that asked me if I wanted to install optional crapware, the in-app advertisements, and some rather obvious things not working right, I promptly uninstalled it within a half-hour. It was bad enough that it made me suspicious whether it was an automated mole for the MPAA/RIAA.

Re:does anyone use the most current version?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a long time ago I rolled back to version 2.2.23071 from oldversion.com, which was the last one that I got that was not annoyingware.

http://www.oldversion.com/windows/utorrent-2-2-23071

Re:does anyone use the most current version?

[Kjella]

A couple of years ago uTorrent started installing adware with their software as well, and everyone either bailed or went back to v2.2.1. So why would anyone be using the most current version of uTorrent anyway?

Laziness, in my case. I've just upgraded with each new version, no crapware has been installed and the ads... I don't spend any time in the uTorrent UI, I don't understand how they make money. I launch torrents and is gone, occasionally I check if something done but it's just open -> scoll list -> yes, launch file or no, oh well. I literally can't remember any product or service they've had an advertisement for. Before that I used Azureus Vuze, but it turned into such a horrible mess. I'm sure there's other alternatives but I haven't seen any reason to bother.

Re:does anyone use the most current version?

[Livius]

It's still unusual, though increasing less so, for newer versions of anything to be inferior to older ones. People who aren't thinking too carefully or too deeply will be fooled.

Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Eloking]

I'll not post any link here (it's quite easy to Google it anyway), but I suggest going back to utorrent 2.2.1. It's the last stable build without any malware/ads/crap. There's already many torrent site that doesn't allow utorrent version higher than 2.2.1.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[snarfies]

Why would you suggest PIG DISGUSTING closed source software when there are so many quality open-source solutions, including:

Deluge
QBittorrent
Transmission

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[MrL0G1C]

It seems that you can install utorrent without the extra crap now simply by declining each offer one by one. But you still get obnoxious ads.

The Bittorrent 7.9.2 client looks the same as utorrent, it tried to foist some crap on me a couple of days back - there was no way to decline the crap and continue so I exited the update installation, now it's saying there's no update.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Holi]

Because he's not RMS and probably doesn't have a problem with closed source software, like most of the world.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Coren22]

I just installed the latest Bittorrent yesterday. It installed spyware without asking me, which my Trend Micro virus scanner immediately alerted on. I would not recommend installing Bittorrent to anyone.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

Or use qbittorrent.

Re: Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Threni]

Yep, install utorrent in windows. Then you can watch your virus,botnet client and utorrent bitcoin miner fight it out. Thanks, but I'm with RMS on this one.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[MrL0G1C]

Utorrent and Bittorrent clients are both owned by Bittorent inc, they are essentially the same by the looks of it.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[jez9999]

qBittorrent wipes the floor with it anyway.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

top kek

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[TheGratefulNet]

would you go so far as to say it whips the llama's ass? or not quite that far?

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Registered Coward v2]

Because he's not RMS and probably doesn't have a problem with closed source software, like most of the world.

And here I thought it was because he showered regularly...

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm always curious about the complaints of adds in a Bittorrent client. Does anyone actually watch the client window while downloading??? Sounds slightly less fun that playing Progress Quest.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[m.alessandrini]

Doesn't what's reported in the summary seem a "problem" to you?

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

go back to utorrent 1.8.1

the last version before they got bought by bittorrent the actual company. owned by the mpaa.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

utorrent 3.1.3 build 27498 is halfway decent

(you still need to disable some crap in options menu)

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[jones_supa]

Why would you suggest PIG DISGUSTING closed source software when there are so many quality open-source solutions

Who cares? Most people run compiled binaries of those too, so there is no practical difference.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

Transmission is great, but lacks the ability to set it to never use trackers. Instead, the properties of each torrent have to be opened up and each tracker deleted manually--not even a disable option, just fully delete. It is a pain in the butt to do that manually for each and every torrent. And in the meantime, of course Transmission has already connected to any and all trackers it could get ahold of. That is the only thing that stopped me from moving from the old 2.2 uTorrent to Transmission. So if Deluge or QBittorent are not bloated, and with a setting to never use trackers, I am probably already sold.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[basecastula]

You could just use the magnetlink for the torrent you want and cut the tracker portion at the end. Or write a little plugin to do it for you.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds great, except the sites I mainly use are still stuck in the stone age with .torrent files. This includes pretty much every Linux distribution that has a torrent option on their site.

Re:Go back to utorrent 2.2.1

[Anonymous Coward]

... it whips the llama's ass?

qBittorrent has a Winamp plugin? Or is it that Winamp has a qBittorrent plugin?

But why though? Math time!

[slashmydots]

A very rough estimate reveals that one $400 ASIC mining device for bitcoins that can make about $500 a year profit is equivalent to 150,000,000 i5-2400's running the hashing algorithm. So in other words, realistically, all the computers running uTorrent in the entire world combined would probably make the company about $5 or so, maybe $10 per year. Litecoins running Scrypt don't turn out to be much more profitable either. I actually don't think this news story is true.

Re:But why though? Math time!

[Anonymous Coward]

That cannot be correct.

Re:But why though? Math time!

[itzly]

One i5-2400 does 14MH/sec, so 150 million of them can do 2100 TH/sec, which would be $6000/day.

Re:But why though? Math time!

[slashmydots]

I calculated this at 8 MH/s out of my memory and missed a comma but if it's 14MH/s that's only $3,534.62 per day. It's something like a 100:1 loss on electricity at $0.11/KWH by the way. Hurray for efficiency. I doubt they're installed on 150 million i5 systems and running at full blast on all cores for 24 hours a day though. This is still utterly pointless.

Re:But why though? Math time!

[itzly]

https://alloscomp.com/bitcoin/... says $6000/day for 2100 TH/sec.

I agree that the installed number is going to be much less than 150 million though. Just pointing out that the math is way off.

Re:But why though? Math time!

[farble1670]

It's something like a 100:1 loss on electricity at $0.11/KWH by the way.

except they aren't paying for the electricity, so it's all profit. even if they are only making $100, that's still pretty great. considering they probably spent a week hacking together existing software ... and after that it's zero expenditure and all profit (except what they are paying bittorrent).

Re:But why though? Math time!

[ncc74656]

I calculated this at 8 MH/s out of my memory and missed a comma but if it's 14MH/s that's only $3,534.62 per day. It's something like a 100:1 loss on electricity at $0.11/KWH by the way. Hurray for efficiency.

Of course, when it's your vict^H^H^H^Husers paying for the electricity and not you, you really don't need to care what it costs.

Re:But why though? Math time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Chuckle.

Ask Comcast how deploying a wireless network without paying for the electricity nor the footprint to do so is working out :D

Crap Reports

[TimSSG]

"Reports that uTorrent silently installs Bitcoin crapware are... crap" http://betanews.com/2015/03/06... Tim S.

Re:Crap Reports

[Eloking]

"Reports that uTorrent silently installs Bitcoin crapware are... crap" http://betanews.com/2015/03/06... Tim S.

I'm not sure "betanews" is the most credible source out there, but there's indeed a update on TF's news that suggest the news might actually be false after all.

Re:Crap Reports

[Holi]

Yes because that piece was such great reporting.

Re:Crap Reports

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a company that has in the past used offers in our installers. The companies that provide the offers always claim that nothing is installed without the user's consent. Our experience has consistently shown otherwise. uTorrent claiming that nothing is installed without consent is, I'm sure, just as meaningless as other advertisers claims of the same.

Re:Crap Reports

[Pope Hagbard]

I'm not sure "betanews" is the most credible source out there

Hah. Says the guy on Slashdot. :P

Re:Crap Reports

[Cramer]

"accidental consent" They make it as confusing and hard as humanly possible to find and select the "hell no" button. If you don't stop and read every single character on the screen, just hitting what immediately looks like "Next" WILL install their crap.

Disappointing, but not surprising.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like uTorrent because from a technical sense, the developers _really_ know what they're doing. It is small and lean and fast and does everything and isn't too buggy either. Compare that to the leading Java-based client, which has always been horribly slow and huge and buggy and just generally not as good.
I know that uTorrent is a closed-source commercial entity though so I've never completely trusted them.

Me? I've been using rtorrent/ssh/screen for many years and I don't think I will ever change without a very good reason.

Re:Disappointing, but not surprising.

[ZorinLynx]

>the leading Java-based client

If you mean the client I think you do, that has been crap for many years.

Transmission is the way to go these days.

Re:Disappointing, but not surprising.

[QuasiSteve]

Transmission is the way to go these days.

http://www.transmissionbt.com/

Any thoughts on Deluge?
http://deluge-torrent.org/

Re:Disappointing, but not surprising.

[facetube]

I miss Bram's original Python version. Lawn, off, et cetera.

Re:Disappointing, but not surprising.

[Cramer]

Right. Because it was such an amazingly efficient client. (hint: it was just as slow and bloated as many modern clients. And it ran a single torrent per instance.)

Re:Disappointing, but not surprising.

[facetube]

Nostalgia, not performance.

Alternatives are available...

[mr_jrt]

When they started pulling this crap I switched to something else that apes the older, simpler, cleaner versions: http://www.qbittorrent.org/

Re:Alternatives are available...

[drinkypoo]

I've been using miniget, but it has no features other than being small and downloading torrents. It is really small, though.

Re:Alternatives are available...

[daid303]

qbittorrent is a great switch from utorrent. As it looks almost the same, without the crap. I switched my girlfriend torrent tool to qbittorent, and she didn't notice any real difference except for the lack of ads.

Re: Alternatives are available...

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I really the only person who turned the ads off in utorrent? It's like two options under the advanced settings.

Re: Alternatives are available...

[CosaNostra Pizza Inc]

No, I turned them off too after they started to get really annoying (video with sound). However, in light of this news about a silent install of a currency miner, maybe its time for me to switch to Qtorrent

Re:Alternatives are available...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly it doesn't appear there's a standalone (a.k.a. "portable") version of qbittorrent for Windows, only ones that use installers. :(

Re:Alternatives are available...

[basecastula]

The only thing I would want from qtorrwnt is a way to add previously downloaded content, via magnetlink, from the command line. I would love to be able to add a magnetlink and set the download location to where the content already resides. Then verify and seed. So far only transmission has allowed me to do this. Works very well with my reseeder tool.

Re:Alternatives are available...

[mr_jrt]

Feel free to contribute then ;)

Surprised they thought they could get away with it

[ZorinLynx]

With so many people using laptops these days, all the sudden additional heat, blowing fans and lack of battery life would become immediately obvious.

You just can't hide CPU-bound processes on machines these days and expect people not to notice. Especially people who are into torrents!

Why is uTorrent so popular still?

[jacks smirking reven]

I used uTorrent when it was fairly new and it was excellent but in this day and age does it offer anything versus the number of matured open-source alternatives out there? I'm really asking if it has some special sauce that gives it an edge. When it was released one could look past it's closed source nature since it made it's mark being lightweight yet feature packed. Once the major update that brought advertising on-board I saw no reason to use it anymore.

I've been using qBittorent for a couple years and it gives me all the relevant functionality without the mess as well as Transmission QT for Windows and Deluge, I can see no reason to use uTorrent when it's been shown repeatedly to be scum-ware.

Re:Why is uTorrent so popular still?

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember uTorrent being "lean and mean", and quite good at what it did. However, even in the early days of torrenting, I'd always run the torrent client software in a virtual machine, and after I reached a 200-300% seed ratio, I'd shut the VM down, fish the torrented file out, and roll back to a good snapshot (or in those days with MS's VirtualPC, just drop the redo log file.)

I have noticed that uTorrent has gotten fatter and more intrusive. However, with it stuffed in a VM behind a form of firewalling and NAT, just clicking "next...next...next" will get a large gob of foistware, but one could download a needed torrent regardless without too much hassle.

Re:Why is uTorrent so popular still?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Why is uTorrent so popular still?"

Many people are still on older versions (2.2.1), all you need a torrent client FOR is to download shit. Does it download? Then you don't need to change. Similar to why Linux didn't gain traction, you already got something that works.

Re:Why is uTorrent so popular still?

[Anonymous Coward]

because plenty of people are stupid, resistant to change, love to hang on to the trusty program they've used for X years and did I say they are stupid?

qBittorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Start using qBittorrent(www.qbittorrent.org). It is open source, cross platform and updated regularly. It should suffice for most bt needs. More info in their webpage.

Re:Surprised they thought they could get away with

[Anonymous Coward]

With so many people using laptops these days, all the sudden additional heat, blowing fans and lack of battery life would become immediately obvious.

You just can't hide CPU-bound processes on machines these days and expect people not to notice. Especially people who are into torrents!

They don't have to get away with it. They just need enough to install it and not care to read Slashdot.

only one reason why uTorrent is still popular

[Voyager529]

...because it's popular.

Older versions could fit on a floppy disk, and didn't require an Installshield Wizard. Now, it's not at Vuze levels of bloatedness (though Vuze beats to a different drum and has a pretty nice "content store" for Creative Commons content and similar), but it's gotten big and annoying. Transmission works on Windows (...and OSX...and *nix...and plenty of routers and NASes...) and is nice if you don't need RSS feeds. QBittorrent does RSS and is simple to use. Deluge, while being a bit awkward, does a good job. if you're into a super-configurable ecosystem, rTorrent has 101 plugins and browser based frontends, but can also run exclusively from the CLI if that's your thing. The list goes on and on, but utorrent seems to be coasting on inertia, nothing more, nothing less.

The interesting thing is that a similar "we'll borrow some unused CPU cycles" method of revenue generation caused a huge mess with Digsby, an IM client that was great and had a pretty good following until that point. Then again, with most technical folks opting for one of the plentiful alternatives to utorrent, I don't see this being a major impact.

Re:only one reason why uTorrent is still popular

[Coren22]

I have seen several people point out this "fits on a floppy" thing. I don't get this, please explain. The reason for using bittorrent is to download large amounts of data as fast as possible, why would it matter if the install is 1.44MB or 10MB?

If you are already intending to download CD or DVD sized files, why would it matter how big the installer is?

Re:only one reason why uTorrent is still popular

[GuB-42]

The 10 MB file is not the problem, the problem is that if everything useful can fit in 1.44MB, then 86.66% of the installer is for things you don't want.

Re:only one reason why uTorrent is still popular

[Anonymous Coward]

Deluge, while being a bit awkward, does a good job.

I installed Deluge a few months ago to get an Xubuntu ISO. I didn't find it awkward at all. Get the .torrent file, open the .torrent file, wait until the torrent completes downloading.

And I'm a guy that really doesn't bother with torrents much. The last peer-to-peer filesharing program I used was probably WinMX back in about 2003.

Re:only one reason why uTorrent is still popular

[Anonymous Coward]

Older versions could not only fit on a floppy disk, they could fit on a double density, single sided 5 1/4" disk. Twice. That's like half the size of a typical Apple II program.

Re:only one reason why uTorrent is still popular

[Anonymous Coward]

Because bloat is bad.

Re:Surprised they thought they could get away with

[mlts]

There are ways to hide a program so that increased CPU life would not be noticed:

1: Wait for the MSI install/upgrade mechanism to be used, then start using the CPU after it completes. The program installed will get the blame.

2: Ramp it up over a period of time, so the user gets used to his MBA eating its battery in two hours.

3: Wait until the laptop is plugged in and the screensaver is on, and hit it.

It eventually will be caught, but there are ways to keep all but the more astute people from noticing.

I am actually surprised more "free" programs don't do this with a stipulation in the EULA that they have free run to use the end user's CPU/RAM/IO/disk/network as they see fit, and there isn't anything legally that can challenge that.

Any Linux torrent clients that support proxies?

[BenJeremy]

I'd run my torrents exclusively on one of my Linux boxes, but none of the clients support proxies. WTF?

It doesn't matter what I'm downloading.... I'm not hanging my ass out there for potential DMCA abusers to hand out subpoenas.

Re:Any Linux torrent clients that support proxies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Install tsocks.

Re:Any Linux torrent clients that support proxies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use a VPN instead of SOCKS.

Re:Any Linux torrent clients that support proxies?

[BenJeremy]

Well, looks like qBitTorrent supports the proxy service.

I would consider using VPN, but I already have a proxy service and setting up VPN to only run for the torrent on a (relatively) headless Linux box introduces some complications, like being able to administer it over the web.

I understand the reasoning that removed proxy support from the more popular torrent clients a while back, even if it was incredibly and mindblowingly dumb and naive.

Re:Any Linux torrent clients that support proxies?

[watermark]

Try "Deluge". Supports proxies, is cross platform, and supports RSS.

Re:Any Linux torrent clients that support proxies?

[Anonymous Coward]

UGET is FOSS/Cross platform and supports proxies (even Tor).

I don't know if they allow for TORRENT proxy support, however.

Re:Any Linux torrent clients that support proxies?

[Ogi_UnixNut]

rtorrent is curses based, and supports proxies as well.

How is this post a troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Torrent used to be great. It had over 100 million users and was the most popular client for years. I remember the first version fit on a floppy, and you could xcopy install it. It was awesome. I did a test of different BitTorrent clients for a PC magazine, and Torrent won easily when it came to download speeds. It beat Vuze, as the poster I'm replying to mentioned, by more than 30%.

It was small and fast. It did everything you need. Now it is bloated and too slow to leave running when using your computer. Also, it wastes tens of megabytes of bandwidth per day downloading animated ads plus it uses so much CPU to show the ads that it overheats my new Dell laptop. The guy above exaggerated with this gigabytes claim.

So why was this guy marked a Troll? He is correct. Do we have a Torrent fanboi with mod points?

Re:How is this post a troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow /. dropped the mu. Add a mu before Torrent everywhere in my post. Why doesn't /. understand Unicode in 2015? This is sad.

Re:How is this post a troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, it's still 2015. Presumably this is also the same year you started using Slashdot if you did not know this yet.

Re:How is this post a troll?

[Sowelu]

Do you really want a Slashdot full of Zalgo, emojis, and Japanese character art?

Re:How is this post a troll?

[ckatko]

Yeah, and then people would be calling Slashdot racist/sexist for not having the right ethnicity/transgender emojis. I mean holy shit, that actually happened. You give a wolf a bone and he rips your nuts off.

Re:How is this post a troll?

[aevan]

Won't using HOSTS keep me safe from that?

Re:How is this post a troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

If being asked to include people is the same to you as having your genitals ripped off, I'd suggest that the problem lies with you, and not anyone else.

Re:How is this post a troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

HAH! Nice one!

Re:How is this post a troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than accented a apostrophe dash colon dollar sign...

Re: How is this post a troll?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with that sentiment is accommodating everyone becomes a losing battle. If you are a some esoteric snowflake-flower and then expect everyone to cater to your special status maybe you're just crying for attention? If I look like a person I don't think I'd expect people to think i was secretly a dragon or whatever the fuck else people think they are.

Is it safe?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still using 1.5.11 on OS X, is that version considered safe?

Users deserve it

[Anonymous Coward]

Since 99% of uTorrent users are stealing content they pretty much deserve to be shafted.

Definition of "Silent"

[RandomUsername99]

As far as these companies are concerned, not a single piece of punctuation dropped any old place in the middle of there 50 paragraph EULA is 'silent.' See? It's written right there in plain english!

As far as user behavior goes, silent has a very different meaning.

Betanews is so heavily riding the tip of the VC backed new tech industry that they are clearly not going to go against any sort of new fangled tech-oriented revenue generating schemes.

Deluge

[Anonymous Coward]

uTorrent started off as a decent lightweight downloader and then degenerated into a vector for adware and other undesirable behaviour. I would recommend Deluge these days - an open source client with a similar UI without all the scumminess. It's not quite as slick but it has the major functionality covered.

Re:Deluge

[Anonymous Coward]

I had issues with Deluge crashing and Deluge likes to use random ports, which messes with DHT. Port randomization a good or bad thing depending on which tradeoff you want. Your IP+port tuple can live in the DHT for several days. If you keep opening and closing Deluge, you'll get many entries in the DHT and you get a lot of spammy UDP traffic for days after you've closed it. If you reuse the same port, it's not nearly as bad.

I've had decent luck with qBitTorrent. I've let it seed uncapped for over a month strait with no issues. The one problem I ran into with qBitTorrent is they have a read cache defaults to evicting only based on time and has no max size. If I set the cache to last 180s or more, the cache can become too large and hit the 32bit limit, which causes it to act really funny for a while before finally crashing. You have to set the "write cache" size limit, which is just a cosmetic naming issue. It's really a read/write cache.

Re:Deluge

[geminidomino]

Deluge likes to use random ports

Edit->preferences->Network, uncheck "Use Random Ports" and it will let you specify a port range, old-school style.

Re:Deluge

[Socguy]

I found Tixati was as close as I could come to what utorrent was in it's prime.

Re:Deluge

[Garybaldy]

I'll give that a look.

Re:Deluge

[Anonymous Coward]

Deluge was great but lacked a smart enough method of importing my hundreds of torrents from other clients. I also had stability issues on Windows Server 2008 that would cause it to crash every few hours. Not sure if it's just W2K8 or what.

gave up on local torrenting years ago

[Nukenbar]

Just another reason to have a seedbox for all of your torrent needs.

Installed it... then uninstalled it.

[Mike Van Pelt]

Fortunately, that was a couple of weeks ago, when I wanted to download LibreOffice. I recalled from the last time that "utorrent is the thing". Back then, it didn't do ads. I would have left it installed to re-seed LibreOffice, but it didn't take much getting pelted with "Hottttt Roooskie wimmin are lusting after U" ads for me to remove it, with prejudice.

I've been using this for years

[waspleg]

It's great.

Deluge

[Garybaldy]

Try Deluge. It is everything uTorrent used to be.

Deluge, Another piece of software to install

[Garybaldy]

Deluge is a good option. I find it to be everything uTorrent used to be.

Screw uTorrent

[Anonymous Coward]

I abandoned uTorrent a while ago. Every time I install it I have to spend time going through the configuration to disable all the stupid ads and crap they've added to the UI. I ended up going with Deluge because it is open source and cross platform. It might not be super fancy, but it does the job and doesn't annoy the hell out of me.

A lot of good it will do them

[Cafe Alpha]

to mine my 6 year old atom "powered" netbook.

How many millions of years would it take my netbook to generate a bitcoin?

Fair

[Anonymous Coward]

99% of people who use uTorrent use it for illegal purposes - those people don't have permission from the author to download their software or videos. Seems fair that uTorrent uses their computer and electricity to compensate for this.

LOL

Re:Fair

[ihtoit]

citations needed.

Unicode on Slashdot (5:erocS)

[tepples]

Why doesn't /. understand Unicode in 2015?

Past abuse of bidirectional override control characters to spoof comment scores. Details

Re:Unicode on Slashdot (5:erocS)

[Anonymous Coward]

> Past abuse of bidirectional override control characters to spoof comment scores. Details [slashdot.org]

That still only proves that slashcode sucks.

Its not terribly hard to segregate user input from site content. The rest of the internet does it

Re:Unicode on Slashdot (5:erocS)

[rdnetto]

More importantly, slashdot.jp can handle it too. It's probably trivial to port the code across - I'm surprised no one has done it.

rm -rf

[Anonymous Coward]

uTorrent, you were nice, now, meet your new friend, rm -rf. RIP.

Re:rm -rf

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the trailing slash otherwise the bitcoin code won't be removed! rm -rf /

Running on startup

[tepples]

I'm not familiar with how user session management works on OS X. Say you copy an application to the Applications folder, and you open a document. Then you get a power outage or you have to restart for a security update. How does the application register itself to restart when the Mac does? I imagine that an "installer" allows the application to put a shortcut in Startup Items to check whether it had been open and reopen itself if so.

Re:Running on startup

[Pfhorrest]

I don't know how it does it (except that it doesn't involve Startup Items), but it works for apps that don't use installers (which is most of them), so an installer isn't needed just for that.

One reason paying to see ads has caught on

[tepples]

Some publishers have the idea that customers who are willing to pay for something are statistically more likely to buy other things, making them better leads for advertisers. That's why cable TV has ads, satellite TV has ads, Hulu Plus has ads, and The New York Times has ads.

Pause while on battery

[tepples]

With so many people using laptops these days, all the sudden additional heat, blowing fans and lack of battery life would become immediately obvious.

BitTorrent really isn't something you do while connected to cellular Internet or public Wi-Fi. And if you have home Wi-Fi, you probably use the laptop with the charger plugged in, so an app's publisher can probably mine cryptocurrency unnoticed so long as it pauses while on battery.

uTorrent quietly does... not actually do anything.

[irreverentdiscourse]

The amusing part of this story is how everyone is basically lying about this "silent install" which never actually happened. Better headline: uTorrent quietly reveals people don't pay attention when they install things. News at 11.

Never use any uTorrent over version 2.2.1!

[Cito]

Last 2.2.1 version
http://www.oldversion.com/wind...

For list of all older versions
http://www.oldversion.com/wind...

2.2.1 tiny, zero ads, supports magnet links, was made with original devs before they were bought out and the original coders were laid off.

One of the old devs helped provide sites with archive of all old versions.

Do not use past 2.2.1 if you want to use utorrent.
It has web interface, magnet links, zero ads, zero search bar, very tiny footprint. Its running on my old PC I use as a file server, app been up for a week straight as I leave it up and use the web interface via my tablet. Its only using 12k memory in the process list.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Better yet, don't use uTorrent at all.

[meldroc]

As so many in this thread have mentioned, there's lots of worthy alternatives: qBittorrent, Deluge, Transmission, that are open-source, and are not bundled with malware. I'm not going to use an older version of a program produced by a bunch of sociopathic scumbags pulling this dishonest bullshit. I'm going elsewhere.

Re:Better yet, don't use uTorrent at all.

[Cito]

Version 2.2.1 and prior devs were fired

It was the last no malware and supports all modern torrent abilities, there's zero need for a new version

The company that made utorrent their last product was 2.2.1 then laid off when bought out

You can find ex Dev blogs leaking all the crazy shit that happened breaking their NDA.

Fixes?

[antdude]

Does it have upgrade and fixes though?

Well that might explain it

[rjejr]

I'd been using uTorrent for about a year or 2 now but the past few weekso the downloads have been super slow, regardless of the number of seeders leechers, time of day, anything, that made sense. This might make sense. And how many Chinese and Russian women do I really need to date anyway? Thanks to all the suggestions, I'll uninstall and try qbittorrent on Monday.

My neice is the bellweather

[EmperorOfCanada]

She messaged me in fear from some article that said the new uTorrent would set her motherboard on fire. She probably doesn't know what a motherboard even is. I can't wait to see the stats on uTorrent market share over the next month or two.

There must be an economics term for when a good product gets more and more exploited by the MBAs who take over until they haven't just damaged the reputation of the product but basically lynched their own brand.

For instance I am certain that if it weren't illegal that Air Canada would use their employees and probably their passengers for fuel. Only regulators have generally kept the MBAs that run that company from setting itself on fire.

Not even the worst thing it installs

[BillX]

All this furor over Epic Scale bitcoin miner, and none over other crud like Wajam that uTorrent installs?

Have a look at the last image in this article. "...may change your local proxy settings...collect...URLs of the pages you visit...content of encrypted webpages...Wajam may protect itself from other software that tries to wrongfully interfere with it."

Yikes. Lenovo got spanked pretty hard for packaging advertising malware that MITMs your encrypted sessions, but at least theirs doesn't officially threaten a counterstrike against your antivirus too.
 

Re:Not even the worst thing it installs

[ihtoit]

yeah, only way I could rip out wajam was to boot into a knoppix session and force-kill the files then boot into safe mode and hack the registry.

What a pain the fucking arse that was.

Utorrent :)

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, these people complain must be public tracker users.
Anyone using ANY version but 2.2.1 has no clue what they are doing....and deserves the stick in the butt.

Stick with uTorrent 2.2.1

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Been using this version forever (or at least since the horrible bloatware that was 3.x). Works fine, is lightweight, no complaints.

Move on, the show's over

[Zanadou]

uTorrent alternatives you should have moved on to a long time ago; cross platform clients, with clickable links for the lazy:

qBittorrent v3.1.12

Deluge v1.3.11

Re:Move on, the show's over

[Anonymous Coward]

Tixati is also fun.

Kinda like linux before systemd.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Exactly. It was great but not anymore. Either use an old version that had no advertising or switch to something else like qBittorent."

Kinda like linux before systemd.
Everything gets corrupted.

UGET is better and FOSS/Cross Platform

[Anonymous Coward]

http://ugetdm.com/

Features list:
http://ugetdm.com/features

==

About:
http://ugetdm.com/about

"What is uGet?

        uGet is a lightweight and full-featured Download Manager for Linux and Windows. uGet allows you to download in multiple parallel streams for download acceleration, put files in a Download Queue, Pause & Resume downloads, Advanced Category Management, Browser Integration, Clipboard Monitoring, Batch Downloads, localized into 23 Languages, and many more features.
        Our Downloads page includes over 25 packages for various Linux distributions including but not limited to: Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Slackware, Linux Mint, elementary OS, Mageia; and a portable app for Windows."

===

#1 Open Source Download Manager
Available for Linux, BSD, Android, and Windows.

===

alternatives to uTorrent

[eric_harris_76]

Quite a few to choose from, according to Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...