this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

some private trackers won't let you use uTorrent either, good.

[–] [email protected] 122 points 4 days ago (1 children)

If it keeps newcomers from making mistakes in client choice it looks like a good thing to me?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (4 children)

But is the statement correct? What’s the story behind uTorrent?

[–] [email protected] 118 points 4 days ago (1 children)

μTorrent, or uTorrent (see pronunciation), is a proprietary adware BitTorrent client owned and developed by Rainberry, Inc.

That should be enough for any sane person. A proprietary bittorrent client is the worst joke i have heard in a while.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CTorrent

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 days ago

An adware whatever should also be avoided.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yes. It stopped being good around 2010-2012 depending on who you ask. Unfortunately there are still plenty of old blog posts praising it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9CTorrent

[–] whats_all_this_then 1 points 2 days ago

This. For most people, they either hated the 3.0 update (assuming 2010), or hated the enshittification after 3.2.2 (assuming 2012).

[–] [email protected] 46 points 4 days ago

The parent company, bittorrent Inc got purchased by a serial crypto scammer Justin Sun at some point.

In March 2022, the SEC charged Rainberry with fraud for selling cryptocurrencies Tronix (TRX) and BitTorrent (BTT) as unregistered securities.

I think the SEC dropped all charges recently because the literal US government got on the payroll of Tether Inc, which basically runs the crypto show. Justin is just one of the appendages to the scheme.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

After uTorrent was brought by BitTorrent Inc, they started releasing new shady versions, first added ads then released uTorrent bundle with crypto mining software without user consent

https://torrentfreak.com/new-utorrent-release-breaks-ties-with-bitcoin-miner-150413/

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 days ago

They speedran the enshittification process, so quickly the term wasn't even invented yet.

[–] [email protected] 110 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Took long enough. uTorrent has been cancerous for a long time now.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I honestly couldn't say how long. I know I was late to the party on knowing what was going on but even I moved on from it a long time ago now.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

i used utorrent until a few years ago when i started caring enough to switch. old habit, like over 15 years ago when my mom taught me how to pirate, utorrent was good back then. don't know why i kept using it for that long, i even had to block ads in it by editing the hosts file...

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If they would support a client like Rain I would actually switch to the *arr stack.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 days ago

Don't need to support every client, if the client supports folder monitor you can use blackhole

[–] [email protected] 58 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Only a decade late.. Luckily qBittorrent is brilliant. And if qBittorrent somehow wasn't an option, I might go with BiglyBT - it's not the easiest on the eyes, but lots of settings.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

To be fair, if you set up a Servar stack, you should already know enough not to use utorrent.

[–] [email protected] 70 points 4 days ago

didn't realize people were still using utorrent. been at least a decade since it was decent

[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Transmission has never let me down.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

My only gripe was that it doesn't handle (unencoded) spaces in a URL name, which is probably correct behavior but they're in the titles of torrents on some sites, so I'd have to manually edit them each time. I ended up just using qBT.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

It doesn't have a proper dark theme in Windows so it let me down when it flashbanged me.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

Its Single-threaded

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (4 children)

Has anyone even used uTorrent in the last decade?

Edit: Apparently, unfortunately, yes

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

you would not believe how common it is. It's like making a class of highschoolers take a colorblindness test. There's always ONE who had no idea

sidenote, it's really sad how the education system won't even spend 10 minutes a year to diagnose something that effects millions of children. There's FREE websites that they can just open on their board or projector

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I remember on Reddit I'd see like a post a month from some uneducated pirate person asking how to fix a utorrent issue. It was fun watching them try to justify using it with all the other legit, updated clients. It didn't ever go well for the OP.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

I mean if they want to use it despite being told the state of things then who cares? There’s nothing to win here, it’s their pc

I couldn’t care less if someone on the internet sabotages their files because they want to be right 100% of time

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

uTorrent's brand recognition is crazy, it's been crap for years and it still the name people who don't torrrent often recognize.
Nice change, good to steer the novices away from that junk.

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[–] [email protected] 29 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I thought people either used the old 2.2.1 version or jumped ship. Had no idea it was still going.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago

Same, I was under the impression that this was fairly common knowledge, but it's good to have it openly announced by some authority on the matter.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (6 children)

I've always used Transmission, since there's a Docker container I use that bakes in your VPN-of-choice & a killswitch.

https://haugene.github.io/docker-transmission-openvpn/

That said, it looks like it hasn't been updated in over a year... I wonder if there's anything else out there that does the same thing as this. (EDIT: Yes. Google brings up plenty of choices.)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago

You can set qBittorrent to only use a certain interface, and set that to the wireguard interface of your VPN.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 4 days ago

If uTorrent has no haters, I am dead

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I'll be the one: use rtorrent

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 days ago

Why rtorrent vs QBittorrent?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Do people still use transmission? That seems like be the default one I see in prebuilt torrent server containers.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

It's not bad but it's pretty bare. A lot of people like their bells and whistles these days.

Edit: Changed the wording to be less broad for all the "But I..." specials.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

speak for yourself. if it's pretty bare, it just moved to the top of my list

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (9 children)

Transmission's minimal features is what I like about it.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 days ago (2 children)

There's a migration program to transfer torrents from utorrent to qbittorrent.

https://forum.qbittorrent.org/viewtopic.php?t=3224

I remember using it way back when, and they've kept it updated.

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