uTorrent tricking users into changing default browser settings?

Simple: don&#x27;t use uTorrent. Use Transmission instead:<p><a href="http://www.transmissionbt.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.transmissionbt.com</a>

First Vuze, then uTorrent. It looks like the life cycle of any popular torrent application is:<p>- Starts very light, bare bones, downloads torrents and that&#x27;s all<p>- Gets bloated with more and more features that nobody wants<p>- Partners with a shady company<p>- Dies<p>Off to alternatives I go.

Ah, this explains what happened to my girlfriend who was using bittorrent to download bundles of academic papers.<p>I couldn&#x27;t figure out why all of her search and homepage settings had changed, and how they were so resilient that they were re-applied.<p>I did find SearchProtect, and eventually managed to remove it (uninstalls, + registry hacking, + force deleting files, + nuking the browser installs and re-installing).<p>But I hadn&#x27;t figured out where it had come from as my girlfriend didn&#x27;t believe that she&#x27;d installed anything and although I saw uTorrent I thought nothing of that since I didn&#x27;t believe it installed such `add-ons`.<p>For those who encounter this, SearchProtect is really nasty. Really hard to remove.

Wasn&#x27;t uTorrent The Best Thing Ever when it first hit the scene? I seem to recall it was this application. It was about a 93k executable that didn&#x27;t need to be installed. Just download and run. It was my go to torrent client of choice during my Windows days. Sad to see it become this.

Switch to Deluge[1]! It&#x27;s Free Software, and is so similar to uTorrent you won&#x27;t notice the difference.<p>The day uTorrent pushed the update that tried to install a browser extension I was absolutely done with them. I do not support malware in any shape or form.<p>[1] <a href="http://deluge-torrent.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;deluge-torrent.org&#x2F;</a>

Surprising that no-one is talking about Yahoo and their tactics to get more users. I am sure SearchProtect and Yahoo! here have a deal to push as many default searches as possible to drive revenue.

Wow, this is an unusual step for Yahoo. Who would think that a hijack process that tempers with user&#x27;s browser settings is a good idea? Hello, Marissa Mayer?<p>As for uTorrent, it&#x27;s been going down this path for a while, gradually introducing <i>crap</i> into the app. And this one is the last for me, as well.<p>Btw, apparently, they turned off registration on the forum to ward off the mounting complains. When I go to <a href="https://forum.utorrent.com/register.php" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;forum.utorrent.com&#x2F;register.php</a>, I&#x27;m greeted with <i>Get lost spammer, we don&#x27;t need your kind here.</i> And of course the topic is closed. Well done.

This is why I love Linux. Every generic piece of software comes with no BS attached. For example, on Windows, if you want to mount an ISO you have to download some shady piece of software, the installer of which comes bundled with n toolbars. In Linux it&#x27;s a matter of a simple one-line command...

Simple solution: go back to using the old, barebones, simple, fast utorrent v 2.2.1<p><a href="http://www.filehippo.com/download_utorrent/9859/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.filehippo.com&#x2F;download_utorrent&#x2F;9859&#x2F;</a><p>runs fast, no ads, no issues, just works!

If memory serves, uTorrent lost trust-ability when it got sold. IIRC, that means post version 1.6.1 it became a concern and began to needlessly bloat. Prior to that is was a brilliant bit of software.<p>1.6.1 is light weight, unmolested, and still worth using.

So glad someone posted on this bullshit. Not only has uTorrent started doing this, but BBEdit 10 and some other previously not super shady software has too.

This reminds me of an argument given by my friend proposing that a person has a higher tendency to do bad to the people who we know are bad. Even your good-guy-Greg has an inclination (of sorts) to bring down&#x2F;harass&#x2F;make money off your scumbag-Steve, even when Steve&#x27;s actions were inconsequential to Greg; which I thought was an apt observation from someone who thinks a lot in absolutes. Maybe its the &#x27;easy to get away with factor&#x27; or maybe its the karma kicking in.<p>My point is, torrent usage is synonymous to piracy, infringement and other illegal activities. So, perhaps it is this tendency that makes people at uTorrent think that it is not totally wrong to rip off people who are ripping off content &amp; software makers. In my experience, I never fully trusted uTorrent. It is simply difficult to trust something that allows advertisement of malware, porn, fraudulent sites. It started off quite well, but then it has been on my watch list since quite some time now.

Even Sun installs some kind of ad toolbar in Java!

For people having issues finding the files that need to be removed, look for anything related to Conduit; and remove that. SearchProtect and a few of the other names are not what the software is called in all cases it seems. I had to remove this from my wifes machine yesterday, and everything was related to a Conduit installer. No mention of SearchProtect.<p>uTorrent is gone in our case, I&#x27;ve moved her over to using Qget with our Qnap NAS and while it&#x27;s not as feature rich as uTorrent it&#x27;s a much better option. And it&#x27;s one I can watch and control a little better as well!

This isn&#x27;t malware. Malware is defined as software meant to disrupt or compromise your machine.<p>This is fuckyou-ware. Software that serves a reasonable purpose, but does it with utter contempt for the user.

Is there any response from uTorrent about this? Didn&#x27;t see any posts by any admins or moderators in that thread; I was wondering if they said anything besides just closing the topic?

Use qBittorrent instead if you like the feature-set of uTorrent. In particular, qBittorrent&#x27;s UI is modeled after uTorrent. It is open source and works on Linux, OS X, Windows, FreeBSD and OS&#x2F;2(!), supports sequential downloading (aka download in order or streaming) and has an optional web UI. <a href="http://www.qbittorrent.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.qbittorrent.org&#x2F;</a>

Oh, man, this one ultimately was the last straw that broke my old XP box&#x27;s back. I accidentally clicked through the set-up, and I didn&#x27;t really have the sysadmin chops to fix it at that point. Whatever hitched a ride on search protect slowed that machine to a crawl. I ultimately ended up installing linux on it, but it&#x27;s just not the same anymore.

Don&#x27;t use &#x27;official&#x27; installers manually ever, for this same reason that they try to cheat you into &#x27;agreeing&#x27; to something - use something like <a href="http://ninite.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ninite.com&#x2F;</a> that run the installers with the correct no-to-optional-malware options.

Use old versions of uTorrent. Before it was bought out by BitTorrent, Inc.<p>Now it&#x27;s just another parasite on the internet.

I would love to hear from Yahoo (hopefully from Marissa Mayer, or whoever authorised it at Yahoo), and from uTorrent. I was personally chearing for Yahoo&#x27;s new breath of hope, under Mayer&#x27;s leadership. This is a pretty crappy move. An apology would be enough.

Actually qBittorrent seems to be a good alternative. Let&#x27;s see how good it is compared to uTorrent.<p>I was looking for a simple replacement for uTorrent for a while now. I have been using linux for years now and was surprised how awful it became while I was off windows.

I switched to rTorrent with ruTorrent a few years ago. I haven&#x27;t used uTorrent since. It&#x27;s perfect if you have an old machine laying around somewhere. Just whip out your favourite flavor of Linux and you&#x27;re golden.

I just tried installing and after declining the offer the installer hung. Buh bye.

Just an off topic question as it was a while ago since I left the world of torrenting. Back in the day, it was mainly music and movies that most folks were trying to get. What else are being torrented these days?

The only positive aspect of this, and make no mistake - this does not excuse their fishy behaviour - is that Yahoo has lead the way in defending its user&#x27;s privacy against the NSA.

This is exactly why I have such a love&#x2F;hate relationship with BitTorrent Sync. I use it a lot, and it works so great, but I so wish it were open source.

uTorrent started selling itself short quite a while ago.<p>I stopped using it about 2 yrs ago for similar reasons. It&#x27;s a malware seeding garbage now.

Report search protect to All anti-viruses, report to Yahoo!, report to their domain name provider and hosting providers.

Sounds like you need you some Deluge.<p><a href="http://deluge-torrent.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;deluge-torrent.org&#x2F;</a>

I have latest uTorrent 3.3 (build 29625) [32-bit] on my Windows box and there is Yahoo in Firefox.

Damn; and I blamed Firefox for this.

uTorrent is a horrendous bloat, anyway. Personally I used rTorrent for a while (minimal ncurses interface, very appealing to me) but later switched to Transmission.<p>I&#x27;ve also used Deluge, but there&#x27;s nothing too special about it in my eyes.

I havent upgrade utorrent is years because of how bad BitTorrent Inc. made it.

Not new, though. uTorrent install has been shipping with crap for a while now.

Since i stopped using windowz in mac i use the official bittorrent app

uTorrent went bad ages ago...ive been using an old, solid version (around 2.7?) for years, no reason to change.<p>It was a beautiful bit of software.

this is why &quot;freeware&quot; can&#x27;t be trusted, the threat of a fork keeps open source developers honest

I never updated uTorrent, I run 2.2.1 so either find it or I can probably send you the exe.

Wow. People are actually angry in that thread because they didn&#x27;t look closely at the setup steps.<p>Let&#x27;s be clear here: the user was still given a choice, but the user &quot;trusted&quot; uTorrent to not force them to make one. Give me a break.