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

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I'll be the one: use rtorrent

[–] [email protected] 8 points 20 hours ago

Why rtorrent vs QBittorrent?

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Transmission has never let me down.

[–] stevedice 2 points 9 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

It gets messed up when downloading files onto a slow smb share but that's mostly my bad

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Its Single-threaded

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

True. Sometimes it's weird about packed files, and cleaning up after itself. Still worth it.

[–] [email protected] 118 points 2 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 2 days ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 112 points 2 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] 19 points 1 day ago

An adware whatever should also be avoided.

[–] aislopmukbang 64 points 2 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 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] 42 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 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] 21 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 99 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 54 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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] 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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] 53 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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] 7 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (4 children)

Has anyone even used uTorrent in the last decade?

Edit: Apparently, unfortunately, yes

[–] TriflingToad 22 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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

[–] charade_you_are 16 points 1 day 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] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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] 3 points 1 day ago

I used 2.2.1 well into the last decade. Every version after that was either pointless or full of some sort of malware.

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[–] Jeef 70 points 2 days ago

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

[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 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] 9 points 1 day 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] 34 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

It’s so ubiquitous that for about a second I thought wait what I thought that was the good one until I remembered that I’ve been using qBittorrent for a decade.

For a time, it just was the client.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 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] 9 points 1 day ago

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

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

I switched from that container to one that uses qbittorrent and a VPN.

qBittorrent web UI works better on a phone for my use case, and I kept having to manually restart the transmission container whenever the VPN connection dropped.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 days ago

If uTorrent has no haters, I am dead

[–] IrateAnteater 16 points 2 days ago (6 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day 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] 14 points 2 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] 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (7 children)

Does Transmission let you force the use of a specific connection?

For example, qBittorrent lets you choose your VPN as its only allowed connection so that you can't accidentally use your regular network when not connected to the VPN.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day 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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

if I still downloaded directly to my local drive, I'd use utorrent BUT only the 2.2.1 version. it's been at least 4 years since I've done that due to a lack of having a functional laptop so I've been out of downloading stuff that way for years, but even then I knew that modern utorrent was bad. I actually stopped using any new version once bittorrent bought it.

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