In the distant year of 2001, a certain Bram Cohen developed a file exchange protocol called bittorrent, which when translated loosely could mean something like a stream or cascade of bits.
A torrent is the file itself that will be used by clients using the bittorent protocol. It is not really the file that is exchanged, but a file built on the basis of a series of metadata with diverse information, mainly with information about where the different pieces or parts of the shared file are located.
So in reality, a torrent is just like a list of locations where different parts of the same file are located, not the content of the file itself. We could write several articles describing a torrent ... but this is not the subject of this tutorial.
Like any protocol, bittorrent is useless if there is no client program that manages and handles the protocol and torrent files. Brian Cohen developed the BitTorrent client (which was original) precisely for that purpose ...
what better than the author of the protocol to create the program. Initially it was a freeware program ... but soon he wanted to monetize it and it became a paid application ... it was actually freeware, but with many options covered and with a multitude of spam and worse.
This spawned free alternative clients like mushrooms. Among all of them stood out µTorrent, developed by a certain Ludvig Strigeus in 2005. Its popularity was such that it seemed to be the only torrent client in the galaxy.
Against this background, BitTorrent was ostracized and living in the gutter (pay for what someone else gives me for free and better? ... no thanks). And is that µTorrent was not only free and free of advertising ... but it was better than paid BitTorrent.
There are several ways to face this type of problem ... one is to harass your rival in court ... whether or not complaints of all kinds are true (this is what giants like Apple, Microsoft, Acrobat, etc ...), but it requires money and time. Another is to improve your proposal ... but you are not always better enough than your rival, who also has the approval of the mob ... recovering lost prestige is difficult. Another is simply ... buy your rival and trust the powerful gift of money and offer a tempting figure. That's what Bram Cohen did and in 2006 he bought µTorrent just one year after its success.
Once with your opponent in your ranks, you also have several alternatives to follow. You can remove it from the face of the earth and the universe or absorb it in your developments. Cohen made a hybrid. He decided to keep µTorrent alive (how not to harness the immense power of all captive users !!) and transform BiTorrent into a µTorrent clone. And since then we have two almost identical options. Usually it is µTorrent where we can see experiments and tests of new options and features that are later incorporated into BitTorrent. So µTorrent has become a laboratory of experiments and BitTorrent is content to be more stable but with fewer options (only notable for "professionals" of the bittorrent protocol).
To end this long but enlightened prologue, I will tell you that in 2018, BitTorrent (and µTorrent) became part of the Tron Foundation company, created by Justin Sun for the modest price of 140 million US dollars.
Personally, I prefer other alternatives and I prefer the extraordinary qBittorrent ... free and without spam or advertisements. It is what µTorrent should be if it had continued as a free and open source application
Be that as it may, there are those who are still in love with µTorrent and prefer it to other alternatives. There are two versions, one totally free and the other Pro paid. The difference is that in the free one we come across advertising on its interface (which makes the program slower than it should and possibly a lot of it data collectors). It does not have a built-in player, a malware scanner… and so on various details. For those of us who simply want a client to download without more stories, the free version is worth it, but eat all that publicity… it doesn't feel like much… especially when we have the same or better alternatives without advertising and open source.
Old glories never die ... and despite all the above, there are many who prefer to continue trusting µTorrent. I have come across several versions of pirate µTorren on these Internet trails. I do not recommend them, but everyone ... Indeed, these versions activate the Pro version without advertising, but we already know about the risks of using pirated programs. Some install it, not because they want the options of the Pro ... but what they want is to get rid of the advertising banners. If with the free version you manage, we will now see how to eliminate, natively, all µTorrent advertising without going through the box or pirated options from the program itself.
In µTorrent click on Options, and in the pop-up menu, on the Preferences option
We will see a series of adjustments. Most with true / false value.
We look for the following settings and give the value FALSE to all of them:
- bt.enable_pulse
- gui.show_notorrents_node
- gui.show_plus_upsell
- offers.content_offer_autoexec
- offersfeatured_content_badge_enabled
- offers.featured_content_notifications_enabled
- offers.featured_content_rss_enabled
- offers.left_rail_offer_enabled
- offers.sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled
Some may already be set to False.
Once the previous values have been modified, click on OK to validate the changes and exit that screen
And we will see that the advertising banners disappear from the µTorrent interface.
Date update on 2021-03-31. Date published on 2021-03-31. Category: Computer class Author: Oscar olg Fuente: blog-conocimientoadictivo