Gen removing Utorrent from the client whitelist in 6 months

[raziel_el]

GGn removing μTorrent from the client whitelist in 6 months

If you're on GGn, it's frontpage news. Here's the post:

> ### Removing μTorrent from Whitelist

> Approximately 4 years ago, we initially removed μTorrent from our whitelist after the discovery of a vulnerability that allowed remote access, specifically for users that had WebUI enabled. We reinstated the client again afterwards when the vulnerability was revealed to be somewhat limited in scope, however, this was ever only meant to be temporary while we thought about a better path forward. This incident made it clear that outdated, closed-source clients like μTorrent are a security vulnerability that can impact not just people that use them, but also peers connected to them. After careful deliberations, we have made a decision:

> **We will be removing μTorrent from the client whitelist.
Anyone using μTorrent should switch to a different client over the next 6 months.**

****
> ### A more detailed explanation

> As mentioned above, we plan to remove μTorrent from our client whitelist. Once this happens, the tracker will no longer accept requests from μTorrent clients, meaning that anyone using μTorrent is no longer able to use our torrents. There are two primary reasons we would like to outline below. Since the vast majority of μTorrent users are on 2.2.1 or below, we will put a special focus on addressing older versions.

> **μTorrent is not secure.** While the initial vulnerability primarily related to users with WebUI enabled and was not necessarily a vulnerability in μTorrent versions itself, it still served to highlight the fact that these older versions are outdated legacy code surrounded by a whole lot more legacy code. Since the client is proprietary, it is also not possible to properly react to or even stop future issues. It is only a matter of time until another vulnerability is exposed, perhaps with even more severe consequences. This is not just an issue for specific users; any vulnerability has ripple effects on the swarm and on the tracker itself. Stolen passkeys, incorrectly reported stats, and unintentionally downloaded data can all be quite disruptive.

> Of course, μTorrent does see active development with new versions being released. However, these new versions are also still proprietary, with only a small amount of developers able to review and improve the code. Furthermore, it's questionable whether these developers can be trusted in the first place, considering earlier issues where they intentionally bundled cryptomining malware with their client. μtorrent is profit-driven and controlled by a small development team of questionable history at this point, which doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.

> **Old μTorrent versions are outdated.** There is a second important issue affecting older μTorrent versions: piece sizes above 16 MB are not supported. While this might not be that big of an issue for other media, modern games can get quite large, especially for AAA releases. It is not unusual for torrents to reach 100 GB in size and we expect this trend to continue, even if heavy compression is used. It isn't good to force everyone else to use inefficient settings just because there are some heavily outdated clients that cannot support modern standards. Accordingly, we have also recently adjusted our article on Torrent Piece Sizes. If you're wondering in general what a torrent piece even is and why you should care about its size, we recommend you read that article. But in general and for most torrents, you can follow a simple principle: The piece size in MB should roughly correspond to the torrent size in GB. This principle doesn't work well with older μTorrent versions, as they simply do not support piece sizes ideal for modern games.

> We can look at some stats of current μTorrent usage to view how many users/peers this decision affects. Out of our entire userbase, μTorrent is used by 3.7% of all enabled users. μTorrent also makes up roughly 3.28% ([...]) of all non-unique peers, which basically means that 3.28% of all peers on all torrents combined are using μTorrent.

> There are certainly quite a few people still using μTorrent and we understand that switching clients can break habits and requires some adjustment time. Accordingly, we want to give everyone enough time to consider and test out alternatives. This might even work as motivation to check out newer clients many of us have heard about, which might overall prove more efficient, faster, or richer in features than μTorrent. Many of the currently whitelisted alternatives tend to be open-source, allowing you and others to track their development and verify the integrity of the code. **Over the coming 6 months, please try out other torrent clients and switch to one you're comfortable with.** We will once again make an announcement shortly prior to actually removing μTorrent from our client whitelist, but there won't be much time to migrate then. To ensure there are no interruptions, we recommend completely switching in the next couple of months.

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