Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

I don't have many hard and fast rules in my life, but one that I've learned through painful experience is this:

Never Update a BitTorrent Client

Version 1 of every bittorrent client is lightweight, fast, and does nothing besides torrent your bits. Version 4 is 400gb, takes 30 seconds to load, shows ads, installs a rootkit phoning home to the NSA and mines bitcoin in the background.

This is an inviolate for bittorrent clients. There never has and never will be an exception.

View on HN

You must not have strayed far from the crappy clients of old then.

The latest stable Windows x64 build of qBittorrent is 27.9 MB (https://www.fosshub.com/qBittorrent.html). Older versions fluctuate between 18MB and ~29 MB (https://www.fosshub.com/qBittorrent-old.html). qBittorrent is open source and has no ads. I've been a user for many years now.

Do you realize you're writing this on a thread about how the latest version of qBittorrent got crappy?

This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's why I've been ignoring upgrade messages on qBittorrent (which is my daily driver) for over a year now.

> Do you realize you're writing this on a thread about how the latest version of qBittorrent got crappy?

It's one issue which will likely be addressed in the near future. You're blowing it out of proportion.

They botched, in some peoples’ opinion, a visual update. It did not “get crappy.” QBT is not Transmission/uTorrent (yet).

What's wrong with Transmission? I haven't used it recently but it seemed more than competent enough when I did.

Perhaps I am mistaken—someone please correct me if I am wrong—but I think its auto-updates were compromised with malware a few times.

Yeah, here's a story about one of the incidents https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11234589. I believe there was another. But I guess even in spite of this, it's not fair to say it's crappy :). My bad!

>Never Update a BitTorrent Client

Advice like this doesnt make any sense.

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1617...

Then there is transmission: https://github.com/transmission/transmission

Us French call that l'exception qui confirme la règle.

The English equivalent is the direct translation - 'The exception that proves the rule'.

In English it's the other way around, there's more exceptions than rules, although it can still be learned through tough thorough thought.

As a non-native english speaker my internal voice stuttered while trying to read "through tough thorough thought", felt like a real life 4th wall break.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

rtorrent works fine too. Too many exceptions and the saying is dumb in the first place anyway...

Or picotorrent

https://github.com/picotorrent/picotorrent

Deluge is up in its 83rd version and its 5.3 Mb in size.

https://github.com/deluge-torrent/deluge

I think you just have a talent to finding shitty ones.

I used rTorrent for over a decade, only recently migrated to Transmission because I no longer cared for the text UI and client-server model fit what I did with it better

The malware-ridden version 4 of any torrent client is just the modern variant of http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html

I'm guessing that you used Azureus/Vuze, and called people who told you it was bad elitists.

One of these days, I'm going to make my own BitTorrent client, then sell it to a shady corporation so the BitTorrent client can fulfill its destiny.

Yeah, proprietary stuff can really bite you, after the honeymoon period ends.

QBittorrent is 16 years old and just recently made text harder to read on dark mode a probably 2 line fix in the future.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com