Saturday, March 27, 2010

Banned my favorite torrent client

This is going to be a whine session, so someone better bring some crackers and cheese.

Earlier, this month one of the private torrent trackers that I get stuff from banned the use of uTorrent 2 on their tracker. (Basically, it favors other people using uTorrent 2; therefore it was unfair to those who used other clients.) In fact, every torrent client I like is on the banned list.

Now, I realize that no matter how you dice it, sharing torrents is stealing, unless you are sharing your own material. I have mixed feeling about the torrent sites. The reason I fluent the torrent sites is that I am hunting for out-of-print books, and I do not currently have a DVR (my VCR setup is pretty bad because I am using a digitual converter box and do not have cable). Basically, I can only tape what I am currently watching; therefore I would have to pick between House and Chuck. And we all know that the books I am after will never be reprinted (there is no market for them---there are only about a dozen of us interested in them).

Nevertheless, I know that I am doing wrong by downloading torrents. On the same grounds, DVRs, VCRs, and photocopy machines are also instruments of evil.

I did briefly try kTorrent: just long enourgh to realize that it was not really user-friendly (how the heck do you get it to download a torrent to an external hard-drive?). I do have one torrent client on my computer that I can use, but it it not great if you need to restart seeds after restarting your computer (bittornado). And I have a lot of files to seed.

I have came to the conclusion that this torrent site is out to annoy me. Heck, one of the clients they suggest, you have to compile yourself. Hmmm...my computer programming days are long past; I prefer my programs to come in prepackaged form.

Anyway, that is my complaint of the day---I can no longer use my favorite torrent client.

Now, give me that cheese and crackers.