Andy Wood

µTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint. It was designed to use as little cpu, memory and space as possible while offering all the functionality expected from advanced clients.

Most of the features present in other BitTorrent clients are present in µTorrent, including bandwidth prioritization, scheduling, RSS auto-downloading and Mainline DHT (compatible with BitComet). Additionally, µTorrent supports the Protocol Encryption joint specification (compatible with Azureus 2.4.0.0 and above, BitComet 0.63 and above) and peer exchange.

µTorrent was written with efficiency in mind. Unlike many torrent clients, it does not hog valuable system resources - typically using less than 6MB of memory, allowing you to use the computer as if it weren’t there at all. Additionally, the program itself is contained within a single executable less than 170 KB in size.

Various icon, toolbar graphic and status icon replacements are available, and creating your own is very simple. µTorrent also has support for localization, and with a language file present, will automatically switch to your system language. If your language isn’t available, you can easily add your own, or edit other existing translations to improve them!

Download here

Release notes here

New plans to scan e-mails for illegal images of child abuse may give the appearance that children are being safeguarded but they may not be as effective as they first seem, argues Technology commentator Bill Thompson.

Every time you send an e-mail it passes through a series of computers on its way to the intended destination. Most of them are owned and managed by internet service providers, although if you use webmail from Yahoo, Google or Microsoft then it may take a different route.

But whoever provides your e-mail, the chances are they are having a look at every message you send or receive. At the moment, their reasons are mostly benign, since they are looking for spam, viruses and other nasty stuff that we wouldn’t want anyway. Google mail users have got used to the fact that their e-mails are being read by a machine looking for context-sensitive ads to put on the same page, and most of us have encountered a company that reads all incoming e-mail looking for rude or inappropriate words, even if it sometimes appears absurd.

And the consequences for all net users could be more serious than just losing the odd legitimate message to the spam filters. via bbc