Over the past few hours, the uTorrent client has received a huge amount of criticism due to claims from some users about the installation of Epic Scale, a software that, among other things, can take advantage of a computer's resources for cryptocurrency mining. The most serious part is that affected users insist that it was installed without their consent, a detail that uTorrent's leaders completely deny…
The Business of Free Software
Developing and distributing free software is a much more complicated process than it appears. Its creator invests time and money, so there always comes a moment when they decide to recover that investment in one way or another. We've seen certain companies develop free products that serve as a bridge to lead users to more advanced versions, or that have advertising to receive a minimum income. But there is also the integration of adware, and for many users, that's where the line is crossed. Take the case of uTorrent: initially it was known as a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client, which allowed it to capture a significant share of the market. Over time, uTorrent began to incorporate more "offers" in its installer, not to mention the addition of external advertising on the interface. During yesterday, one of those offers played a very bad trick.
The first offer of the installer... Several users announced on the official uTorrent forum that the latest update of the program was installing the Epic Scale module without any warning. What exactly does Epic Scale do? According to its official site, it solves "mathematical problems" presented by weather predictions, physics simulations, and cryptography. This last point includes cryptocurrency mining, which immediately caused general rejection. In other words, Epic Scale can take cycles from our processors and use them to obtain coins like Bitcoins. The fact that uTorrent has so many users out there makes CPU mining viable to a certain extent, but no one denies that it's an unpleasant maneuver. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time we've heard about a program that installs mining software in the background, and we imagine it won't be the last.
So this is what the uTorrent interface looks like once installed. The ads can be deactivated in the advanced options. Epic Scale is nowhere to be found... The conflict point here is that uTorrent developers deny the installation of Epic Scale without notice. While the program appears with some versions of the installer, the message to decline the offer is there. The most curious thing is that several specialized sites have obtained different results. The latest available uTorrent build is 3.4.2.38913, and while some saw the Epic Scale message, others did not receive the offer. In our case, what we found was a message to download the Five Knives Bundle, and another to install Skype. This makes it so that, from a technical point of view, the uTorrent people are right, but we already know how trust works in the computing world. The main recommendations to replace it are three: Deluge, qBitTorrent, and Transmission, all of them open source.
