I suppose when you externalise your energy costs, even mining Litecoin can make you money.
Not much mind.
Litecoin-mining code found in BitTorrent app, freeloaders hit the roof
μTorrent users are furious after discovering their favorite file-sharing app is quietly bundled with a Litecoin mining program. The alt-coin miner is developed by distributed computing biz Epic Scale, and is bundled in some installations of μTorrent, which is a Windows BitTorrent client. Some peeps are really annoyed that …
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Saturday 7th March 2015 02:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
"buying that Blu-Ray in the first place"
Yeah right, Shaun. Smart users started migrating off uTorrent years ago when it went from the lightweight/powerful leader of torrent clients to owned by BitTorrent Inc. and experimenting with adware and bloat. Old versions could be used but that's not a great strategy since it doesn't benefit from enhancements or security fixes. Instead, there are open source torrent clients available such as Transmission, Deluge, Tribler, qBittorrent, FrostWire, etc.
Take your "freetards get their comeuppance" message and stuff it.
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Saturday 7th March 2015 02:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "buying that Blu-Ray in the first place"
The AC is obviously fired up!! However, he's right on uTorrent. I know a few people that still run it because they are far from computer literate, but most people I know run Deluge on Linux. For most of the Windows users I recommend Deluge for Windows, and if they don't like that, freedownloadmanager.org.
What the AC forgot to mention (which he may not know), is that uTorrent _NEVER_ was a powerful application, it just had a Ui that allowed some unique things for its time (i.e. priority transfers). However, it was always bloated and riddle with security problems even before it was bloatware. Hell the "encryption" didn't work for what, 3 years (if it even does today)?
If you use uTorrent today, you really do get the "Freetard" badge along with the "Stupid User" badge.
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Saturday 7th March 2015 05:45 GMT John Tserkezis
Re: "buying that Blu-Ray in the first place"
"lol u mad???"
No, he's just offended that his power and bandwidth costs are (inefficiently) going towards some charity - not of his choosing - where the internal administration costs could be as high as 80%. (YMMV)
If it were "donateware", then not only could the user choose a charity with lesser administration costs, you don't have to piss power and bandwidth money up against the wall to do it.
But that's not what's happening here. It's been chosen for you, and why those specific charities? I can't help thinking there are kickbacks of some type happening here.
And the "but if you just clicked “Next, Next, Next..." doesn't fly with me. When you structure the installation phase specifically to ask multiple stupid inane questions, it's human nature to just click next repeatedly. They know this, and they're specifically taking advantage of this.
No good will come of this.
Best of all, I haven't mentioned pirate software fucking once, because it isn't relevant. Well, OK, just once.
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Saturday 7th March 2015 07:56 GMT Khaptain
Re: "buying that Blu-Ray in the first place"
"And the "but if you just clicked “Next, Next, Next..." doesn't fly with me."
You have the chance to opt out and you don't use ut, that's not the fault of the greedy.....
After all this isn't MS Office that you are installing..
OK I digress, the Java installer is just as bad, but we already know that it has become a POS.
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Sunday 8th March 2015 22:35 GMT Blitterbug
Re: You have the chance to opt out
Sorry, I call utter bollox on this. As has been claimed repeatedly by people who aren't noobish twats, this fucking miner sometimes installs silently, whether its supposed to or not. It did it on my new PC and I specifically declined the offers during install.
Blame me for being fuckwitted enough to use uTorrent by all means, but don't stick to the tired bullshit of 'user error' on this bundled crapware. I only spotted it cos my antivirus (360 internet security from Qihoo) screamed about it almost immediately, which was awesome.
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Monday 9th March 2015 12:23 GMT Looper
Re: "buying that Blu-Ray in the first place" - "You have the chance to opt out"
No. You didn't.
During the malware installing period of infection, for some of those doing a uTorrent upgrade there were no prompts at all, and the Epic Scale malware was installed silently without the user knowledge.
For new installs many people did not get the "Accept" or "Decline" option, or even any reference to Epic Scale at all, but still had the bitcoin miner silently installed without their knowledge.
Other new installs did get the notification and declined and did not have the software installed.
BitTorrent Inc have already admitted all of this.
Some others even did fresh installs of a previous version, and set uTorrent to NOT accept any updates, and yet still had an Epic Scale folder created on their hard drive.
The upshot is that BitTorrent Inc was not being upfront with what was being tested and/or bundled with uTorrent from at least January until about a day ago.
If you installed or upgraded uTorrent within that time period you should check your system. I would not be surprised to see more than just Epic Scale software installed without permission.
Massive FAIL by BitTorrent Inc. However, it's been on the cards ever since they took over uTorrent. They are just another adware promoting entity where the "product" is unimportant provided the real product (you) is targeted.
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Saturday 7th March 2015 09:45 GMT John Tserkezis
Bit of a stupid story. "People who don't read what they are installing, surprised at what they are installing". May as we be "Stupid people use computers too"
But that's my point. While it may have once been the case, today, some software has its user interface specifically structured to make people stumble.
I'll give you a 'frinstance. A fair amount of my time at one place I worked at was re-writing instructional manuals. They were fairly short at less than 4-5 pages, but were detailed instructions on programming equipment that was not user-friendly or intuative at all, so were important that everyone could do the job.
The original documents were along the lines of those "test" instructions that first state you should read all the steps, then go through a dozen steps that are essencially pointless, the very last step is to ignore the above and do something different - intended to catch you out, because they know very well humans don't work like that.
This is not helpful at all, and anyone who claims otherwise probably works for Bastards Incorporated.
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Saturday 7th March 2015 06:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
I do own a blu-ray burner
I just find it more efficient to torrent, especially if the rare disc won't rip correctly and I don't feel like messing with it. I even understand if someone doesn't own one and downloads their movies to run off an HPC. However, if there's a dialog box to not participate in these side projects, then it's up to the installer to take that few seconds to uncheck it. These people must have tons of garbage on their browser toolbar.
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Saturday 7th March 2015 07:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Using utorrent 3.0 and later is not recommended due to the frequent "not valid bencoding" errors (both Win and Mac versions) in addition to the adware included. Recommended versions are 2.0.4 build 21431 and later (earlier versions have security issues), private trackers tend to have a recommended version, typically 2.2.1 build 25154.
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Saturday 7th March 2015 08:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
"STUPID fREETARD HERE"
Running the latest version of uTorrent and no sign of Epic Scale on my system - most disappointed.
Thanks to previous posters for offering alternatives, I have recently become hacked off by all the adverts and flashy cr@p spoiling my experiences. Sadly this happens to all good freeware eventually, free-good, free-OK, free-flashy-crappy-ads-everywhere.
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Saturday 7th March 2015 10:09 GMT Dave Bell
Who do we trust?
There are lot of these "partner" programs sent out with free software, and it may be how some of the costs are paid, but that confusion between opt-out and opt-in, where the installer defaults to "yes" feels a bit dishonest, at best.
This software ends up using our power and processor time, competing for resources with the software we want to run.
Epic Scale says there is a standard uninstaller in the Windows Control Panel, but unless it's been changed for Windows 8, they seem to be writing about an obsolete version of Windows. And, if you can't find it, they say you can download a special uninstaller.
Can I trust them? Dishonesty or incompetence, which shall it be?
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Saturday 7th March 2015 15:27 GMT DrXym
Whatever happened to uTorrent
I remember the first few versions which were lean and mean little clients for downloading. Then I used an update and it was laden down with crapware in the installer and ads in the client. Yeah they've got to make money but there is a line between making money and being obnoxious.
Anyway there are free and open source clients for this sort of thing - deluge is quite good although the GTK widgets look a bit weird on WIndows.
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Sunday 8th March 2015 00:51 GMT JulieM
Share and share alike, innit?
Fair exchange is no robbery ..... A few CPU cycles doesn't seem like a massive price to pay, when all is said and done.
You could actually have a true micropayment system based on a completely Open Source client for this sort of stuff. The secret would not be in the Source Code, but in the output. Along with the currency code itself -- which is also used as the encryption key for the content that will be sent to you -- it generates a corresponding decryption key. And they won't send so much as a byte of your download until the coin code is successfully cashed, in their name.
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Sunday 8th March 2015 14:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Install Unchecky already or use a less amateurish torrent client, and use an OS VM.
I already shunned μTorrent (with stupid thread unsafe uTP code) years ago in favour of the more powerful Azureus/Vuze running on the latest JVM on a VM hosted OS.
Anyone running what is effectively a server directly on their main OS is asking for trouble, you never know when devious exploits will sneak up on you, like this blatantly unethical, μTorrent revenue malware.
Using VMs and containers are a much safer way to run servers e.g. FreeNAS does this by hosting plugin servers inside FreeBSD Jails, unlike the stupidly dangerous way most off the shelf NAS and routers, and "server" OS's do!
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Monday 9th March 2015 13:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Install Unchecky already or use a less amateurish torrent client, and use an OS VM.
Dropped μTorrent years ago, when it started to bloat. Plus didn't like the idea of downloading directly to my PC, or having to leave it switched on for long periods of time.
Using a HP microserver now, with FreeNAS, and Transmission. (Also used for media streaming, and as backup server).
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Monday 9th March 2015 07:52 GMT Tom 64
"You hold Epic Scale next to something like a [browser] toolbar, and it's night and day."
No, its night and more night, asshole.
You are praying on those foolish enough not to read a fat screen full of text to fund your next porsche, you and your 'partners'. Morally questionable at best.
From the screenshot I also like the bit about curing aids being promoted at the top.
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Monday 9th March 2015 12:40 GMT Looper
Re: "You hold Epic Scale next to something like a [browser] toolbar, and it's night and day."
Actually it's worse.
With the toolbar you can see that someone has changed your system, and then take a remedy. With Epic Fail, you may not notice it is there until your machine dies an early death from overheating.
Someone calculated the monetary benefit to BitTorrent Inc for allowing this crapware to be bundled vs the cost of extra electricity across the uTorrent population. It was something like $2500 vs $230000.
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Wednesday 13th May 2015 10:26 GMT Archaon
Different Strokes...
Making the world a better place by using your CPU cycles for F@H, SETI etc? Ok, fine (as long as they get permission of course).
Making the world a better place by using your CPU cycles to mine Litecoin for us to keep? Hold on, say what? (a) what's that got to do with helping the world and (b) just no.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
