Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Software The Internet

BitTorrent, Inc. Acquires uTorrent 189

Posted by Zonk from the now-torrenting-faster-than-ever dept.
ColinPL writes "BitTorrent, Inc. has taken the next step — the acquisition of uTorrent. In a joint announcement made today, the two firms have publicly solidified the merger. 'Together, we are pleased to announce that BitTorrent, Inc. and uTorrent AB have decided to join forces ... BitTorrent has acquired uTorrent as it recognized the merits of uTorrent's exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together uTorrent's efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent's expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.'"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

BitTorrent, Inc. Acquires uTorrent More

BitTorrent, Inc. Acquires uTorrent

Comments Filter:

  • This could turn bad... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by badenglishihave ( 944178 ) on Thursday December 07, 2006 @06:25PM (#17153612) Homepage
    With Cohen walking hand in hand with the MPAA nowadays, how will this affect the privacy of current Torrent users such as myself? I have to admit I'm a bit worried. It doesn't come as a big surprise though. Torrent's excellent code and features make for one of the best clients available right now.
    • what tickles me is that utorrents website advertises usenext, openly:

      'Access to MP3s, Movies & much more. Fast, Anonymous, and Easy!'

      One wonders if they got a tap on the shoulder 'get bought or you're screwed, we have new powerful friends'. It's a good codebase perhaps, but they've not exactly shown themselves to be trying to be legit.

      • That's not all (Score:3, Interesting)

        by TheStonepedo ( 885845 )
        By default torrent includes a list of torrent search engines. It's as if the developers are encouraging piracy rather than hiding behind the pretense that people can use the software for legitimate stuff. I reckon most bittorrent users, like me, use the protocol and their favorite client way more often for pirating music, movies, and porn than for downloading legitimate stuff.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          For fuck's sake, slashdot really should allow unicode. Pretend there's a \u00B5 before the third word of my previous post.

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by fohat ( 168135 )
            It's the new anti (alt+0220)ber geek code they implemented with the last CSS update. Remain Calm, all is well!
      • and who says they didn't want to get bought out?

        1. Make software with possible illegal uses
        2. Become popular
        3. ???? = sell out
        4. Profit
        5. Repeat

        By selling out, you're getting money and limiting lawsuits that would involve you.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by anss123 ( 985305 )
      Hate to say this, but torrent downloads are not anonymous. They can track your IP address, and can find out who you are from there.

    • Re:This could turn bad... (Score:4, Informative)

      by SpecBear ( 769433 ) on Thursday December 07, 2006 @06:48PM (#17154056)

      ...how will this affect the privacy of current Torrent users such as myself?

      It won't. It's BitTorrent, you already have no privacy. Your IP address is readily available to anyone who cares to look.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by badenglishihave ( 944178 )
        Hardly my point. The privacy that concerns me now is any kind of software embedded into future versions of uTorrent. Obviously you will not have to use uTorrent if you choose not. But if Cohen has a handle on what goes into the client there is a possibility of tracking searches, monitoring filenames, reporting torrents with unrecognized hashes of movies, etc. It's stuff like this that current uTorrent users need to be made aware of.

        • Re:This could turn bad... (Score:5, Interesting)

          by billcopc ( 196330 ) <vrillco@yahoo.com> on Thursday December 07, 2006 @09:12PM (#17156306) Homepage
          Not so long ago there were accusations that uTorrent was tracking searches, because it was presenting context-sensitive advertising. These allegations were firmly denied by the author, but it caused many people to think twice about this "miraculous" client. I'll be quite honest with everyone, I tried uTorrent and it didn't rub me the right way, but I'm fussy. I've been with BitComet for a while, I suffered through the tracker bans, and quite frankly if tracker operators think it wise to exclude people based on their software preference, it's really their loss because I can go elsewhere.

          The same applies to this Bittorrent/uTorrent merger. So what if Mr Cohen takes Bittorrent in a direction we don't like ? Are we forced to follow ? Heck no. On the odd chance that this group actually creates something better, we're free to embrace their brainchild, or pass on it and look for the next cool thing.

          What really grinds my gears though, is all the hubbub with the bittorrent "phenomenon". Seriously, what Mr Cohen has created is hardly any different from Kazaa or Napster, except for its so-called democracy. he's given everyone the freedom to easily spring up a tracker, which is really just an index server. So now instead of having one central hub that can be taken down, we have tens of thousands of puny little trackers that would require individual lawsuits to even try to take down, and no corporate entity behind them to pay "damages" to the litigators. Congrats! Give him a pat on the back for pulling off one of the first solid implementations of the painfully obvious evolution of decentralized file sharing. He didn't cure cancer, he didn't create peace in the middle east, he just took everyone's ideas and made them reality. Now move along, nothing more to see.

          • Re:This could turn bad... (Score:5, Interesting)

            by julesh ( 229690 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @05:50AM (#17159978)
            If BitTorrent is just a more-decentralized version of Kazaa or Napster, how come I get substantially faster transfer rates with BT than I ever did with either of those applications?

            Face it, the reason BT is so popular is because it is incredibly well engineered. The use of torrent files rather than simple searches with small hash sets (necessary in order to allow search results to be transferred effectively) allows small partial blocks to be shared more effectively and robustly than any other P2P file transfer system has ever allowed. Decoupling search from file transfer has allowed different people to concentrate on different aspects of the problem and evolve their systems with no interdependency on network updates. The use of a centralised tracker rather than the currently-in-vogue decentralised alternatives (DHT, network search) to find sources results in substantially better transfer rates, with only a small reliability sacrifice. And with a DHT as a fallback, not even that.

            Yes, none of these ideas were originally Cohen's. But as the first to combine them in a single application, I have nothing but respect for his work.

          • Re:This could turn bad... (Score:4, Informative)

            by Crayon Kid ( 700279 ) on Friday December 08, 2006 @06:09AM (#17160052)
            I've been with BitComet for a while, I suffered through the tracker bans, and quite frankly if tracker operators think it wise to exclude people based on their software preference, it's really their loss because I can go elsewhere.
            They don't ban clients just because of "software preference". Usually that client does something bad or dumb, which causes problems and unneeded extra bandwidth consumption for the tracker, for the peers or for everybody. Gratuitous extra bandwidth consumption in a piece of software whose main purpose is to reduce it is pretty stupid, you have to admit.

            Furthermore, the BitComet client had its history of acting like an asshole, ignoring tracker restrictions, not respecting private flags and so on. And that's just bad form.
      • I think he means that, since uTorrent is closed-source, there will be no way (short of sniffing your packets) to know if the MPAA gets pingged whenever you run uTorrent. Hell, if someone had your IP address before you and downloaded a movie, now the MPAA knows (1) "you" downloaded a movie, and (2) you are running P2P software. Checkmate, man.
        • So, which Bittorrent client is the best? Azureus [sourceforge.net] is open source. Do you recommend it?
          • If you are a Torrent user now, either stick with the version you have now (i.e. don't upgrade), or switch to Azureus. Azureus is a great client as long as you don't try to run games at the same time. But I've heard that if you run Azureus on Linux, you won't have speed issues because the GPL (is it GNU?) implementation of Java is apparently quite the speed demon.

            And since Sun is about to (has already?) open-source Java, expect to see similar speed improvements in the Java client on Windows soon, and thus im

    • Re:This could turn bad... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by LordSnooty ( 853791 ) on Thursday December 07, 2006 @07:45PM (#17154968)
      how will this affect the privacy of current Torrent users such as myself? I have to admit I'm a bit worried. It doesn't come as a big surprise though.
      The answer is, use an OSS client like Azureus - which would be forked immediately if something like this happened.
      • Uh, the BitTorrent spec is fully available in about a million formats. There's a lot of projects with efficient implementations that you can use, or make your own. I suggest the open sourced libtorrent from Rasterbar. There's no need to subject yourself to the steaming pile of crap that is Azureus.

    • With Cohen walking hand in hand with the MPAA nowadays, how will this affect the privacy of current Torrent users such as myself?

      Fortunately, the original Bittorrent software is free software [gnu.org] so you'll always have the freedom to make sure the software preserves your privacy (insofar as that can be done on a Bittorrent network). The same cannot be said for uTorrent which will remain proprietary.

  • Ahhh... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    uTorrent. My favourite bittorrent client.

    Now THAT programmer is someone who cares about quality.

    • irc chat log: with ludde and bram (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 07, 2006 @07:19PM (#17154574)
      http://digg.com/tech_news/BitTorrent_merges_with_u Torrent [digg.com]

      Some answers from #uTorrent-questions:

      -will uTorrent be ported to Linux?
      probably

      -how many lines of code is it comprised of?
      ~50-60K

      -will encryption be removed?
      no (answered by Bram)

      -features most important to you (directed @ Bram)
      low memory footprint, code size, cpu usage

      -is there any thoughts to an osx client?
      (Bram) we plan to produce an up to date osx client, but that's significant porting work

      -are there any features that will be removed from uTorrent?
      (Bram) we're leaving the uTorrent client mostly alone for now, on the grounds that people like it (further defined 'mostly' as in, not much of anything substantive will change)

      -will uTorrent be replacing the original python client?
      (Bram) we aren't announcing integration plan details right now

      -Bram, are you talking with asus and other router makers for putting uTorent in there?
      (Bram) we're talking to lots of people

      -will uTorrent ever be open-sourced?
      (Bram) not in the forseeable future, but we'll continue to maintain an open source reference implementation

      -Bram, you said before that you're not a big fan of protocol header encryption... do you still stand behind this?
      (Bram) it isn't much harder for an isp to recognize encrypted headers than unencrypted headers.

      -will content be monitored?
      (Bram) absolutly not

      -does the uTorrent codebase compile on linux today (in your labs?)
      (ludde) No

      -ludde can't develop anything new for uTorrent?
      (ludde) bittorrent inc will do the majority of the development work

      -what IDE was uTorrent developed on?
      (ludde) Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0 with a few routines written in visual cobol. uTorrent was written in C++ with some tiny chunks of assembly

      -will uTorrent continue to be free?
      (Bram) utorrent will continue to be available and continue to be free (as in, no cost, not open source)

      -Utorrent uses a lot of Windows API's right? Won't that be a problem when porting to *nux/OSX
      (ludde) Yes, the UI is tightly bound to Windows APis, however, the core backend is easier to port.
      (Bram) the utorrent UI is windows native, so porting that part to osx or linux is a significant amount of work (but planned to be done at some point)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bcat24 ( 914105 )
        Visual COBOL?! WTF?

        • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

          by Umbrae ( 866097 )
          As he said, it was C++ with small bits of assembly. He probably just used the Visual COBOL IDE to write the assembly.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Z34107 ( 925136 )

            I doubt he used the Visual COBOL IDE to write the assembly; in C++ (at least Microsoft's Visual Studio 6.0 flavor it it) you put your assembly in an __asm{} block. No need to boot another IDE.

            But... I didn't know there was such a thing as Visual COBOL. Or that it worked without a tape reel.

    • and money apparently. c'mon how long do you think it will be your favorite for now? the next version will likely be chock full of bloatware on account of this merger.

  • The end? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by blueCommand ( 990998 ) on Thursday December 07, 2006 @06:26PM (#17153646) Homepage
    Let's hope it's not the end of a perfectly fine BT client. Maybe I've lived long enough with the embrace, extend, extingush thing, but this doesn't feel that good :(

    • Re:The end? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Christopher_Edwardz ( 1036954 ) on Thursday December 07, 2006 @06:44PM (#17153974)

      I thought the very same thing when I read the title.

      uTorrent was an awesome piece of software. It.just.worked. It was small, non-invasive, and non-evilware.

      My heart sank.

      I have no faith that this would be anything other than the death of uTorrent as a usable client.

      (Same as winamp years ago, same as winternals, same as ... the list goes on.)

      Oh well, which client does one use next?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by julesh ( 229690 )
        Oh well, which client does one use next?

        How about continuing to use the current version of uTorrent? It works well, doesn't seem to have any major bugs, is likely to continue working adequately for the foreseeable future (as BT is a much less fast-changing protocol than some of the other systems, like Gnutella which regularly introduces network-changing new features, and ED2K where many servers will kick you off if you're using a client they deem to be "too old") and has all the features most of us actuall

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by colmore ( 56499 )
        Perhaps an open-source one, which would prevent this sort of thing from happening?

        How long is it going to take for people to make the connection between the practices that make the software industry miserable and closedness?
  • Bringing together uTorrent's efficient implementation and compelling UI with BitTorrent's expertise in networking protocols will significantly benefit the community with what we envision will be the best BitTorrent client.'

    Oh god, leave it alone! uTorrent is perfect!

    • Re:Leave it alone! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 0siris ( 123757 ) on Thursday December 07, 2006 @06:33PM (#17153756) Homepage
      So why worry? If you keep the build you have right now I doubt it'll be incompatible with torrents any time soon. What I have right now does the job fine, and I don't really need any new features.
      • How do I know the build I have now doesnt have some bullshit back door to either autoupdate or spy on me? Its not exactly open source. If MPAA money is involved in this then utorrent users should be wary about downloading MPAA owned copyrights. I would think that the current version is now a moderate privacy and security risk.

      • Re:Leave it alone! (Score:4, Informative)

        by thepotoo ( 829391 ) <thepotoospam@yah[ ]com ['oo.' in gap]> on Thursday December 07, 2006 @07:15PM (#17154502)
        uTorrent phones home for the DHT network feature; it's pretty important if you care about speed.
        Shut down the uTorrent central server, and you've effectively halved (or worse) everyone's download/upload speed.

        It's a serious problem; if it happens there could be an alternate server, but it would require third party hacks.

        • You could just turn off DHT, you pretty much have to for private trackers otherwise your upload/download ratio gets messed up.

          • Not true.

            Well, that's true that the "private" trackers (i.e. tree-houses for pimple-faced "leet" pricks who want to feel better about themselves while getting thoroughly suckered by the site owner) do demand that you durn DHT off. But that is because with DHT and peer exchange, their "private" little clubs would soon join the public swarm of peers with that torrent they are trying to squirrel away. The DHT does not affect the "share ratio" of the person who had it on to the exclusion to all else, but inst

          • You could just turn off DHT, you pretty much have to for private trackers otherwise your upload/download ratio gets messed up.

            There's no need to turn off DHT completely to do that, uTorrent allows you to turn it off on a per-torrent basis.

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by kripkenstein ( 913150 )
          uTorrent phones home for the DHT network feature; it's pretty important if you care about speed.
          Shut down the uTorrent central server, and you've effectively halved (or worse) everyone's download/upload speed.

          Not quite. It uses router.utorrent.com to bootstrap into the DHT network. But if it already has known nodes (e.g. saved from the previous session) then it wouldn't 'phone home' as you call it. The whole purpose of the Kademlia DHT feature is to be decentralized, i.e. without the need for a central

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by danomac ( 1032160 )
        ...don't forget to turn off the auto update feature, if it has one. I used to use uTorrent before switching over to linux, and I don't remember if it has an auto-updater like some other clients do.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by aaronl ( 43811 )
          It has a "check for updates" option, but it just notified me the last time it was updated.

          BTW - I'm a full time Ubuntu user, and still run uTorrent. It's much better than anything available on Linux, as far as I've found. KTorrent is nice, but not very fast, and Azureus is a horrid pig. uTorrent runs fine through Wine, though.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by PingSpike ( 947548 )
      I've got part swallowed-by-the-evil-empire and part they'll-fix-it-til-its-broke feelings about this. utorrent was the only client that really gave me what I wanted. The trouble with perfection is that from the top you can only go down.

  • on IRC (Score:5, Informative)

    by Don Negro ( 1069 ) * on Thursday December 07, 2006 @06:31PM (#17153722)
    Bram and Ludde are answering questions on #utorrent-questions -- irc.p2p-network.net

  • With you kind permission ... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kryten_nl ( 863119 ) on Thursday December 07, 2006 @06:32PM (#17153748)
    ... I'd like to turn this into an "Ask Slasdot". Which client should I use, are there any good GPL clients or promissiong projects?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by fluffywuffy ( 844881 )
      http://www.binarynotions.com/halite.php [binarynotions.com]

      Open source, very small (473 kb), looks promising.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bcmm ( 768152 )
      The Curses version of the official Bittorrent client (you use Unix, of course :-). For me, it's by far the best client to leave on overnight, because it's far more stable than any X-based torrent client (your X might be more stable than mine. I use nvidia drivers). I run it in a screen session, and I've never seen anything go wrong in many many days of running time.

      Unlike the 'console' version, It provides a nice display of current upload and download rates and a progress bar. It doesn't seem to support m

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ksheff ( 2406 )
        There is a 'launchmany' curses mode for the official client that will process all the torrents in a given directory. I recall the exact name of the command at the moment, but it's slick in that it will periodically scan a directory for new torrent or that a torrent has been removed. It will display the upload/download stats for each torrent on the screen and scroll this information if you have too many torrents to display in the current terminal. The advantage of this compared to running multiple instanc
    • libtorrent with the rtorrent front-end. http://libtorrent.rakshasa.no/ [rakshasa.no]

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Jack Action ( 761544 )

        Rtorrent [rakshasa.no] is by far the torrent client with the smallest footprint.

        I tried them all to get one that worked on a 486 with 60MB RAM and no X. Rtorrent (with ncurses ui) was the only one that didn't max out the resources.

        Now I can turn my 4Ghz energy hog off at night, and do my downloading on the 486, which uses about as much electricity as a light bulb.

        (For ed2k on the same machine I use mldonkey [sourceforge.net].

        • Now I can turn my 4Ghz energy hog off at night, and do my downloading on the 486, which uses about as much electricity as a light bulb.

          Alternatively, you could use a modern Mini-ITX machine or laptop as your only machine. It would consume about the same power as the 486 while being much more powerful as a computer.

          I admit it's pretty cool that you can make use of a 486, but it's not the best solution for saving energy.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by julesh ( 229690 )
            Alternatively, you could use a modern Mini-ITX machine or laptop as your only machine. It would consume about the same power as the 486 while being much more powerful as a computer.

            I admit it's pretty cool that you can make use of a 486, but it's not the best solution for saving energy.

            I don't think your idea would actually improve his energy consumption. I don't have a 486 to test with, but some of my older Pentium systems use only ~40W fully running and loaded. My laptop uses about 80W in this state.

            • I don't think your idea would actually improve his energy consumption. I don't have a 486 to test with, but some of my older Pentium systems use only ~40W fully running and loaded. My laptop uses about 80W in this state. I don't have a Mini-ITX system to test with, but suspect that the processor alone would consume than his entire 486 PC.

              My laptop has a 1.6 GHz Pentium M, and the power supply is rated at 60 watts max. I've undervolted the processor so it should consume even less. Of course, most of the time it's not fully loaded.

              Remember that 486's were passively cooled. There's a reason they could get away with that.

              So is my Mini-ITX machine (VIA Nehemiah 1 GHz). The total max consumption of the machine is somewhere around 60 watts as well (it has a 80 watt laptop-style power supply), not counting the LCD. Most of the time it's only running as a server and the display is blanked.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Curien ( 267780 )
          Funny... My Sempron 3000+-based machine uses about 40W peak.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbc001 ( 541033 )
      I've been really happy with Azureus [sourceforge.net]. I haven't really compared it to other clients though so I'd love to hear some discussion.
      • IMO Azureus is the best. uTorrent has a way smaller memory footprint, and a much faster startup time, but these things simply don't matter much to me. Azureus's memory use is still reasonable (compared to say, Visual Studio, *shudder*), and its startup time is irrelevant to me because I never shut it down. It doesn't use any measurable amount of CPU, either, but it comes with a plethora of features and plugins, notably DHT, that blow uTorrent out of the water.

        Be warned, though: I hear that Azureus is going

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by BokLM ( 550487 ) *
          Be warned, though: I hear that Azureus is going to re-write their client to act primarily as an on-demand movie viewer, with some weird convoluted UI that makes no sense. So, enjoy it while it lasts...

          Hey, if they make something that sux, we can still use the current Azureus. And it's GPL, so people can still continue to improve it ...

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by jcarkeys ( 925469 )
        Azureus takes up an absolutely insane amount of RAM and runs very, very slowly. I'm very sad that uTorrent is gone down. I guess I'll be sticking with version 1.6 for quite some time now.
    • I see a lot of people giving props to rtorrent, (yay for screen and other text-y goodness) but I'll throw in my $.02 with ktorrent - I like the IP blocking filter in place on it, handles multiple torrents, and doesn't get in my way when I don't want it to be. ;) (You are running linux and kde, right?)
  • I tried the HTML entity code, but it doesn't work either.

  • There's Goes the Neighborhood (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Thursday December 07, 2006 @06:43PM (#17153960)
    I liked uTorrent because it wasn't Bittorrent. An alternative supplier with a great client who wasn't in bed with the MPAA. Makes me wonder if MPAA money was behind this acquisition.

    Reminds me of the time when Microsoft couldn't compete with another x86 assembler on the market. They bought it out, and rather than use it to replace the relatively awful MASM, killed it instead.

    Will uTorrent face the same fate? Can we all make money by writing a better BT than BT and taking money for it afterwards now?

    • Azuerus would have went first dont you think? They are actively trying to expand what they do with videos and such. uTorrent was/is strickly what it says it is, a client to manage torrents that leaves a very small footprint.

  • Back up your copies (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ZDRuX ( 1010435 ) * on Thursday December 07, 2006 @06:47PM (#17154036)
    Ladies and gentleman, maybe it's time you start archiving all the current and future version of uTorrent incase they decide to implement "features" you don't want. Having a copy sit somewhere on CD isn't a bad idea anyway. I have personally tried uTorrent and don't like it, and went back to Azureus. Mainly because I have gotten too used to the interface, and it's open-source project so I know what I`m getting.
  • I never liked either of them. uTorrent is Windows only and BitTorrent is somewhat lacking on the Mac. As much as I think Azureus is cool, I am starting to take a liking to Torrent Flux [torrentflux.com]. Plus... I can run it on my hosting site.

  • Why is anyone surprised? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Knowbuddy ( 21314 ) on Thursday December 07, 2006 @07:22PM (#17154616) Homepage Journal
    Disclaimer: I'm the guy that wrote TorrentSpy (the application, not the web site) and have contributed a small amount of code to the Python/core BT client and tracker. I haven't written any code for BT in a while, nor have I chatted with Bram in literally years, but ...

    From what I remember, Bram always viewed the Python/core as a sort of "reference implementation" -- it was never his goal to make the Python client or tracker the end-all be-all.

    Why is it then surprising that he'd want to bring on a client that doesn't have to be Open Source, and thus doesn't have to be clean and perfect, but is still sexy as hell? He still keeps his reference implementation that supports the features and is easy to reimplement a dozen times in two dozen languages ... but he also gets something he can brandish at anyone who wants to throw money at BT.

    Remember that his goal since incorporating has been to legitimize and broaden the adoption of BT. A sexy client is a huge step towards that goal. It's not like Sony or the MPAA or whomever is going to distribute a customized version of Azureus any time soon -- it's a beast! But a custom version of uTorrent? A 1MB executable that you could throw on a CD that requires zero install? YTF not? Remember also that Strigeus has been working towards licensing out the core engine for uTorrent.

    Plate. Shrimp. Plate of Shrimp.

    Some of you are excessively paranoid. You know that, right?

    (Yes, yes, I know: "Welcome to Slashdot".)

    • Some of you are excessively paranoid. You know that, right?

      But under this new regime I assume they'll charge for torrents of the latest & greatest movies, yes? Now what's to stop me using this shiny new official client to grab the latest release off the scene, probably before it's available via BituTorrent? Surely this would be a big problem for the Man. Except, what if Bram extended his promise to wipe out infringing content - what if there was a way of ripping up unauthorised torrents in new-u-torren

      • Shocking, they are going to charge for movies? No, really?

        There is nothing wrong with movie companies charging for their product. There is something wrong with movie companies charging for a crippled and limited versions of their product. there is a differnce. If the movie companies want to toss their conent out there, I say more power to them and there are worse ways to do it than through uTorrent. I would be happy to drop $2 or whatever for fast, good quality copies of episodes for series I like as t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by julesh ( 229690 )
      But a custom version of uTorrent? A 1MB executable that you could throw on a CD that requires zero install?

      Just to correct your apparent misapprehension -- uTorrent is substantially smaller than 1MB. The version I have installed is less than 200K.

  • Explanation request (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rg3 ( 858575 ) on Thursday December 07, 2006 @07:28PM (#17154694) Homepage
    Reading some of the comments in here and from people chatting in the IRC channels linked from a previous comment, I see many people are worried about this. In one corner we have Bram Cohen, a man which designed the bittorrent protocol and provided an open source, multiplatform, reference implementation of it. He also has a website that linked to illegal content, apparently, and made a deal with the MPAA so it would comply with the law (DMCA). Else, he could have been sued and lose a lot of money, I understand. On the opposite corner we have the utorrent author, someone who is apparently a good programmer that provided a free, non open source client, which is tiny, featureful and runs very well under its platform, which is Windows.

    Now, when I read people saying they don't trust (sic) Bram Cohen and that they will no longer update utorrent, or that this will be a bad thing, I don't really understand why they are worried. Is it for technical reasons? Do you fear utorrent will stop being tiny _if_ it's made multiplatform? What motivates that fear? Something from the past that I missed? Or is it because of the deal between Cohen and the MPAA? If so, why do you consider it bad? Do you fear the bittorrent protocol and official implementation will suffer because of that deal and that same situation will extend to utorrent? Honest questions, really. Please, englighten me.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by rmerry72 ( 934528 )

      What motivates that fear?

      I think the fear is that the featureful, small uTorrent client the world loves will now be "improved" to provide fast dollars for the new owners. And how do you do that these days? Stuff advertsing into your product, turn off advanced features and produce a "pro" version, "encourage" your community to download your commercial stuff, and when they resist then automatically "upgrade" their client for them to follow the new "strategic direction".

      The uTorrent community is the bigges

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Do you fear utorrent will stop being tiny _if_ it's made multiplatform? What motivates that fear?

      Azuerus

  • The only important question is: Will they release uTorrent code as Free Software?

  • Snore! (Score:2)

    by noz ( 253073 )
    "[...] uTorrent's exceptionally well-written codebase and robust user community. Bringing together uTorrent's efficient implementation and compelling UI [...]"
    When this is said after acquiring a product, and not before, it's just plain sales. The only missing word is framework. B+

  • stop the madness! (Score:5, Funny)

    by WheresMyDingo ( 659258 ) on Thursday December 07, 2006 @10:27PM (#17157108)
    prior to this uTorrent ate nanoTorrent which ate picoTorrent, only moments after femtoTorrent was devoured. we must stop this before there is just one giant torrent walking this earth, devouring everything in its path!

  • 1. Open uTorrent
    2. Click on Options
    3. Click on Preferences
    4. Untick "Check for updates automatically"
    5. ???
    6. Profit.

  • Qbittorrent [qbittorrent.org] is an excellent, GPL bittorrent client that is fast, and has a very small footprint. It's in development stages right now, and is only for Linux, but it works very well. .debs are available; you should try it out.

Slashdot Top Deals

What is research but a blind date with knowledge? -- Will Harvey

Close