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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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/