Jump to content

Worried uTORRENT SPYING!


vikingprincess

Recommended Posts

Hi,

Here's what makes me very worried!

I hope there is an innocent explaination, since I like uTorrent better than any other bt software.

I am a techie, don't hold back ;-) Just tell me that I got it wrong, and explain why!

Background:

I often shut down my machine by cutting the power, instead of using the XP shutdown procedure. (Bad habit, I know, but with NTFS format hard drive it is basically safe. )

However since I started using uTorrent instead of Azureus, and also using a FAT32 formatted drive instead of NTFS, I have noticed that this combination does not like my brutal handling. Half the time uTorrent looses all it's torrent library and I have to re-load all the torrents. So far, no problem, I know my bad habit is asking for trouble.

As you know, FAT32 formatted system disks automatically run Scandisk at boot-up if it wasn't properly shut down.

If Scandisk finds a file that is corrupted, it creates a record called "file0000.chk (and so on.) I normally just delete these files.

Well today, I decided to open such a file and check what was in it.

The evening before, I had shut down my machine by cutting the power.

Upon booting, Scandisk had run and had reported only the uTorrent settings file (somethingorrather.dat?) to be corrupted. No other corrupted files.

So the only information that should be in the file0000.chk file should be information from uTorrent. only

TO MY SURPRISE, I FOUND A COMPLETE RECORD OF MY WEB-BROWSING THE DAY BEFORE , in the record of what uTorrent had been keeping track of!

The file first listed something about the torrents that I had been downloading. That's what I had expected to see. But after that it listed every single site I had visited, searches I had made etc etc. I nearly fell off my chair!

Well I have heard that the source code for uTorrent is not open source. Is this why?

I feel very suspicious and somewhat cheated.

I really hadn't expected something like this.

I had been using uTorrent in good faith. I believe the guy who wrote it is Swedish like myself. I had not worried about spying at all. But why else does it log my browsing? And what does it do with this information?

I don't have anything to hide on my machine, and my browsing is very innocent.

But I don't want to be spied on!

So I am back on Azureus for the time being, despite it being very bloated compared with uTorrent. The Open source community has worked on it, and it is clean.

Does anybody know anything more about this?

Is uTorrent actually spying? Else, why does it log my browsing? What of the 'secret' source code?

All the best from a techie girl who is WORRIED!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

OMG.. its windows.. never pwr down a windows boxen the disk cache never fully flushes until shutdown... you've more than likely lost more data than just torrents..

hence the filechkXXXX.chk files.. thats the data that was in virtual mem or partially written to disk (disk cache) but wasnt flushed..

(ever wonder why windows takes soo dang long to shut down.. its purging/flushing the open files/memory (standby) to disk.)

never pwr down a windows box without the risk of losing data.. your call..

and wtf, fat32... if you can use NTFS.. use it.

EDIT:

oh and i myself am concerned about some outgoing discrepancies with µTorrent.. have still to have sufficient reply.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Ok, after chatting with the above poster on the IRC channel, I am not really worried about this any more.

I'll check the scandisk file again next time this happens, but it seems unlikely that I should have come across something that nobody else is aware of. Lots better techies than me are using uTorrent without concern. -

Link to comment
Share on other sites

µTorrent is completely unrelated to your problem..

the corruption is from powering your computer down without any consideration to what its doing.

shutting down randomly leaves unflushed virtual memory/unclosed file handles, and more, all caused by you randomly powering off your computer.

windows is, in respect to other operating systems, slightly retarded. although scandisk does its best compared to other drive/sector/cluster scanners it is EXTREAMLY RETARED. its picking up ALL of the corruption in sectors of vmem, on disk, that were current at the time of your promisciuos shutdowns..

if anyone would like to debate my theorem???

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...