Welcome to Thunderdome

Posted: **Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:15 am**

http://tinyurl.com/q2msh7g

So watch out for that.

I only run it when I am actively borrowing something from my internet friends, but I'm gonna check my shit now.

Posted: **Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:18 am**

Actually, now that I think about it, this was a thing I opted out of last time I updated uTorrent. Yeah, they try to trick you by making it look like part of a standard install process, but I stopped trusting those years ago.

My system is clean.

The program is called "EpicScale" and supposedly appears in you control panel installed programs, if you have it.

Posted: **Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:26 am**

Yeah, they try to trick you by making it look like part of a standard install process, but I stopped trusting those years ago.

Custom install everything. All the time. I don't even trust uninstallers (most are written shittily and leave all kinds of registry pollution hanging around).

Posted: **Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:30 am**

But....

Peeps were blowing up the forums over this, and now their forums are offline.

forum.utorrent.com

Posted: **Fri Mar 06, 2015 1:34 pm**

I always custom-install. Although I was being quick the other day and almost installed Ask.com (Fuck you, Java!).

It does not appear to be on my system.

Posted: **Fri Mar 06, 2015 5:58 pm**

TheCatt wrote:Although I was being quick the other day and almost installed Ask.com (Fuck you, Java!).

Seconded.

Posted: **Fri Mar 06, 2015 6:11 pm**

I've been checking their forums off and on today. It was down, then it said, "Back soon," and now this, within the last hour:

http://blog.utorrent.com/2015/03/06/regarding-partner-offers/

Regarding Partner Offers
by Jordy Berson on March 6, 2015 in Announcement with No comments

The safety and trust of our users is very important to us, and we strive to make the µtorrent experience an easy, direct, and efficient one. In the past 24 hours, we have seen some complaints in our user forum regarding our partnership with Epic Scale. We take these claims very seriously, respecting our users’ passion for µtorrent and their desire for privacy.

Many companies offer partner offers in their install path, encouraging users to download and install a partner’s software. µtorrent is no different — and we always strive to work with partners that would appeal to our user base. For partners of µtorrent that make offers upon install, we have a strict policy that they are only optional. A user must accept the offer for any third party software to install.

We can confirm that the Epic Scale partnership is, per our policy, an optional install presented to users during the install of µtorrent. They are one of many partners that may make an offer during install, and there are cases where no offers are made during install.

We do our best to work with partners that will appeal to our community and think Epic Scale is doing some really interesting work. They are a cryptocurrency miner that uses a portion of your CPU cycles to contribute to the mining effort. In the future, Epic Scale plans to contribute CPU cycles to other initiatives, such as Genome mapping and other academic studies that require a great deal of processing power. A portion of the proceeds from this effort go to philanthropic initiatives. Please visit their site for more information.

But to the issue at hand this morning, we want to reiterate: there is no silent install happening.

That said, we take all complaints seriously and we are continuing to look at the issue both internally and with our partner.

Thanks again for supporting our product, and we’ll update if anything further comes to light.
Epic Scale has also provided a statement

Epic Scale was founded with a dual mission:

Benefit high-impact charities
Advance research science by providing affordable high-performance computation

Our team is a small group of developers who are determined to solve these problems. We started with cryptocurrency mining as a way to advance the first mission. Today 100% of our profits go to charity because we are just starting out and want to make as big of an impact as we can. As our company grows our plan is to donate 75% of our profits to charity. Our next step was to start helping researchers with compute problems. We’ve partnered with tier 1 research organizations such as UCSF to help with genomic computations and are working on partnerships with many more. We believe we can build a new kind of social impact company that not only makes it easier for non-profits to raise funds but also enables researchers to answer their biggest questions.

The charities we support today are Watsi and Immunity Project. To date we’ve donated thousands of dollars to both and are making growing monthly contributions. On Watsi we support individual patients with their healthcare needs.
Some of the patients we’ve supported include:

Keo: https://watsi.org/profile/1023ff0a5cd5-keo

Saradjina: https://watsi.org/profile/023f76a89895-saradjina

Ry: https://watsi.org/profile/2e6cdf6c5a05-ry

Licheng: https://watsi.org/profile/c317874c6fb4-licheng

Caleb: https://watsi.org/profile/0e6122027ceb-caleb

Patience: https://watsi.org/profile/fbc1ffb0d75a-patience

Nay: https://watsi.org/profile/475e7be23511-nay

And many more. For Immunity Project we are donating money towards their Phase I/II human clinical trial. Going forward, our plan is to support many more high impact charities.

Epic Scale is distributed through partners like BitTorrent on a 100% opt-in basis.

I'm not going to embolden and stuff.

Posted: **Fri Mar 06, 2015 6:16 pm**

A user must accept the offer for any third party software to install.

Eat a dick. The offer presented in a form that's initially rendered in a state set to install twenty different kinds of shit. Shit I have to go out of my way to avoid because you decided to be an asshole. I would gladly toss out Flash and Java from my systems except the dregs of the world continue to make use of them.

Welcome to Thunderdome

uTorrent may have installed a bitcoin miner