Newest version of uTorrent has Bitcoin mining offer during install

[1] https://github.com/rakshasa/rtorrent/wiki/RPC-Setup-XMLRPC

I only need the sequential download to proceed a little bit faster than playback. After that, bandwidth should be used to re-assert the (future) health of the torrent, so that segments at the end continue to have enough seeders.

But it's not for everyone. Most of my clients in the past have had specific commercial software requirements, so I wouldn't even bring up switching platforms. These days it's easier, as everything is moving to software as a service and web apps, and they are already used to running their home office from their iPad or Android tablets. Still, I make sure that my end goal is to offer the best value to my client, not push potentially unfamiliar and net-cost-ineffective solutions based on software license alone.

The problem is they use reverse psyc, hidden triggers, double negatives, etc.

For example, I can't remember if it was Downloads.com or SourceForge, I recently almost installed Vosteran because the option to deselect the "extra awesomeness" was hidden in "Advanced Install" section and I had clicked on "Normal Install".

I've also seen plenty of "Accept Offer" with "Decline Offer" next to it, greyed out like it was disabled.

Plenty of examples exist of them TECHNICALLY giving you an opt-out - but hiding that opt out in every way imaginable.

For a modern top of the range CPU you can expect maybe ~5MH/s (likely even less)

If 1 million people install utorrent and have their processors mining constantly, you can expect a daily profit of about $14

This is sort of a holy grail of distributed computing because it could allow people to elastically donate their storage similarly to how people donate their CPU cycles to Folding@Home or GPU cycles to BTC mining. The idea is that a lot of your CPU cycles (for example) are wasted because you aren't doing anything on your computer, so you can donate those cycles to Folding@Home. You could do something similar with RAM, but RAM is different: if I decide to run a program and start using my CPU cycles again Folding@Home can just push computation to another machine. But if I decide to reclaim RAM from a distributed computing system to run a program on my machine, then whatever the system was storing in RAM is lost, and if they need that, they a) need to have it duplicated elsewhere, and b) need to know how to retrieve it efficiently from a network of computers any of which may or may not actually have the data. This has proven to be a very hard problem to solve in practice.

Second of all this is bit different from normal theft in the orders of magnitudes involved. If you steal 1000€ from someone the other person loses 1000€. In this case uTorrent guys are stealing 1000€ and receiving only 0.1€, or robbing 0.1€ and causing 1000€ worth of damage. It's like burning down a department store, destroying all the goods in it and the building, just to rob a single cash register.

How is that a problem in my analysis? It's important.

For example say you bought a Macbook Air and came with mining software, used 100% of your CPU and GPU and made your computer unusable. And it generated 1 penny per year in return. And it'd cost you $100 in electricity.

Would you consider it normal to say 'But for Apple it's 1 penny, for free! Your analysis is flawed because all those costs, who cares, Apple isn't paying for them, for them it's a free penny'.

Of course not. It's ridiculous. Screwing over your user is not without consequence, there is a cost involved. A moral one, for one, which if you can't express financially still matters. That is, locking up 25% or 50% of a CPU, reducing the lifetime of their CPU and costing them $20 in electricity per year is screwing over your users.

But secondly there is also an economic cost, just not directly. But indirectly in the long run, doing things like this will lead people to uninstall and avoid your product. In the exaggerated example about Apple above, it's obvious nobody would ever buy that Macbook Air again. A similar thing will happen for uTorrent on a smaller scale, and that's a cost.

And if your little scheme generates peanuts in revenue, then that cost of losing users is likely bigger than your revenue if you'd built a less intrusive scheme.

As for your example, it's from spring 2013. Spring 2013 the hashrate was about 50k, today it's 350 million. So literally, the same infected computers today would earn $1.17 in the same period, or about $28 per year. And the electricity costs would be thousands of dollars. Even if you didn't have to pay for it, a business model where you screw with your user's hardware performance, generate thousands of dollars in costs for them to make $28 is ridiculous.

Even if you scale that up from 14 thousand to 14 million users, not with heavy GPUs but average users using their CPU, it's absolute peanuts. I showed that already.

I'm not making this up. This is exactly my point, as I mentioned, a few years ago this would've been a brilliant idea, hell even spring 2013, today, not so much.

* When you're under active torrents, select a torrent, wait for it to become unactive (ie going from downloading to done), the torrent is unselected (because it's not in view anymore) and the details of the torrent are not available. With µ if you select a torrent it's selected until you select something else no matter what states the torrent goes through and which view you're in.

* When adding a new torrent, the default destination is always the same, in µTorrent it's the last place you downloaded. When I add a torrent, the content always goes into a sub folder depending on type, it's much more likely that the last destination I used is the correct one (say I want to download a couple of music albums)

* The UI when adding a torrent is just cluttered and confusing and I have, a couple of times managed to enter the "add torrent-file"† instead of the "select destination for download" dialogue because it's such a mess

† Why is this even accessible from the prompt I get when I double click on a torrent in my file explorer? When would I ever double click on a torrent file, and then want to select a different torrent file? So unnecessarily messy.

I develop. Did not know Deluge was using Python. I might contribute one day, but doing front-end stuff is not really something I enjoy