Until today, uTorrent – the client of choice for most BitTorrent users – was only available on Windows PCs. Now, after years of waiting, Mac users finally have the chance to try uTorrent, to see for themselves how it fares against the competition.
An early Alpha release of the long awaited Mac version of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent has leaked to the public. The application is still in development, but most features seem to work just fine. As expected, the application looks very Mac-like, and better than its Windows counterpart.
Google is a great tool to compare the popularity of searches in a similar niche. When the number of people searching for something goes up, it is often a sign of increased popularity. We take a look at the search volume for three popular BitTorrent clients, how this changed over time, and how it differs worldwide.
A vulnerability described as ‘critical’ has been discovered in versions of uTorrent and the official BitTorrent client. The ‘buffer overflow’ vulnerability can be exploited to compromise a user’s computer for the execution of arbitrary code. It is suggested that users should immediately update to uTorrent version 1.8 RC7 or higher. There is currently no fix for the official client.
After months of hard work and more than six months since their previous stable release, the uTorrent team has released version 1.8 of their BitTorrent client, with significant improvements and updates. Adding to the excitement, we were told that a public Alpha of the Mac version will be released in the next few weeks.
Configuring your BitTorrent client is essential if you want to enjoy optimal download speeds. In our quest to help users get the most out of BitTorrent, we asked one of the uTorrent developers how we can speed up our downloads.
During the last three years, not many new BitTorrent clients have surfaced. Together, the likes of uTorrent, Azureus and BitComet have a 90% market share, with uTorrent being the most popular client. For a new client it is nearly impossible to catch up with these giants, but Halite might just stand a chance.
A recently launched Facebook application for uTorrent makes it easy to manage your torrents when you’re away from your desktop computer. In addition, the application can also search your favorite BitTorrent sites from Facebook, and allows you to add new torrents remotely.
Thousands of uTorrent users got a worrying message from their antivirus software recently. Their favorite BitTorrent client was recognized as a trojan by Avast, and deleted form their computers. Attempts to redownload the software from uTorrent.com resulted in the same trojan warning.
New data on the ever changing P2P landscape shows that the number of uTorrent users worldwide has more than doubled compared to last year. The BitTorrent client is most popular in Europe – with an install rate of 11.6% – and least popular in the United States, where 5.1% of the PCs have uTorrent installed.
In the US, several universities have banned filesharing applications such as BitTorrent, mostly under pressure from the RIAA. A university in the Netherlands has taken a different approach. They use uTorrent to distribute software and OS updates across 6500 workstations, and end up saving a lot of time, money and resources by doing so.
