BolehVPN News/Status/Fun

This month, torrent users on uTorrent and BitTorrent have surpassed the 150 million user’s mark, as reported by TorrentFreak. This surge of users marks the largest amount of personal file sharing to date, and it looks like the numbers will only grow. This means that uTorrent and BitTorrent have grown a full 50%. It is estimated that there are now 250,000,000 BitTorrent users in the world today. Here’s what TorrentFreak had to say:

“Despite massive competition from cyberlockers, BitTorrent continues to expand year after year, and not just by a little. Today, BitTorrent Inc. announced that their two flagship clients increased their user base by 50 percent, to more than 150 million active users a month.
Most growth can be attributed to uTorrent, which more than quadrupled its number of monthly users in the last three years. The ‘tiny’ BitTorrent client went from 28 million monthly users in December 2008 to 132 million last month.
“This marks an amazing milestone for our company and we want to thank our loyal users and partners for their support. Our protocol and software clients have become some of the most pervasive pieces of technology in Internet history,” says BitTorrent Inc. CEO Eric Klinker.”

Check it out here

uTorrent 2.2.1 has been updated to Release Candidate status with build 24908. For the full details/change log look here. Lots of little changes coming in, mostly bug fixes so it looks like it would go into ‘stable’ status pretty soon.

– 2011-02-28: Version 2.2.1 RC1 (build 24908)
- Fix: fixed some cases where the sidebar wouldn’t be updated
- Change: Always show tray icon is always enabled to work around disappearing systray icon

– 2011-02-18: Version 2.2.1 beta (build 24796)
- Change: enable incoming IPv6 on Windows 7 SP1 (SP1 fixes an IPv6-related hang bug introduced in Windows 7)
- add torrent crash fix

– 2011-02-18: Version 2.2.1 beta (build 24763)
- Change: CPU usage optimization for the GUI thread
- Fix: create more space for strings in UI for translations

Our ordering site is back up. However the security certificate has expired and we’re in the process of renewing it. The slight delay is due to them requiring us to verify certain company details with the certification body which involves the provision of documents. However it is safe to still order through the site despite the certificate error until we renew it. Just confirm the security exception for now and ordering should be still processed as per normal.

Currently users are reporting that despite the apparent ‘fix’ on the Utorrent Beta for the freezing on the Socks proxy, the program still freezes after a while. We have reported this to uTorrent developers for their feedback on this. For now, the recommended version for uTorrent is 2.04.

UPDATE: SSL certificate has been renewed and a TrustLogo installed to ensure your security!

The issues that some people were facing with uTorrent and our PublicTracker/PrivateTracker configurations which caused uTorrent to freeze has been traced down to a bug in the uTorrent code which we believe to have been fixed in the latest Beta release.

We haven’t had the opportunity to test this out yet so appreciate customer feedback on this!

You can download the latest beta here.

Changelog:

– 2011-01-19: Version 2.2.1 beta (build 24217)
- Fix: fixed gui.graph_overhead
- Change: limit cache size to 2000 MB (for 32 bit builds)
- Fix: attempt at fixing disappearing systray icon
- Fix: Copy and paste in File list view fixed. (ctrl-A, ctrl-C, ctrl-V)
- Fix: don’t attempt to open a file if it doesn’t exist (caused association dialog to appear)
- Change: only apply the port > 1023 for outgoing connection restriction for peers only hear about through the DHT
- Fix: back-ported proper support for disabling udp trackers from 3.0
- Fix: fix bug in UDP socks5 support which would cause infinite loops
- Fix: Use system call to open containing folder instead of launching explorer.exe (when available)
- Fix: Don’t connect to ports < 1024 when no-connect-to-services is enabled (which it is by default)
- Fix: privacy checkbox in general settings would have multiline text
- Change: add port 80 and 443 to the default port block list

Several of our customers using the PrivateTracker/PublicTracker function have been experiencing issues with uTorrent 2.2 where the torrent client freezes and there’s high CPU usage when being used in conjunction with certain socks 5 servers.

The uTorrent developers have identified the problem and will be releasing a bug fix in their next build of uTorrent 2.2.1. This is NOT available yet so hang tight!

The usage of uTorrent 2.2 should also improve privacy and prevent traffic from leaking out of the VPN as well which was a bug in previous versions of uTorrent.

Through a few instances of tech support, we noticed an interesting problem that cropped up now and then

Symptoms are

1. Tracker updates work fine and status is Working
2. Utorrent refuses to connect to any peers/seeders even though the swarm is healthy.
3. Connection to our servers is fine and not subject to routing issues

The common problem was that they had upgraded their utorrent from an older version without uninstalling it completely first. Now by right, utorrent should be able to import the settings from the old client and have it work perfectly but somehow it doesn’t seem that way.

The best way to make sure you get a working utorrent is to UNINSTALL the old utorrent and when it prompts you whether you wish to delete your app settings, say yes. This ensures a clean install.

If your utorrent is REALLY OLD you might not even have an uninstall option. As such to delete the settings, open run and type in %appdata% and press enter. Browse to utorrent and then delete the whole folder.

Then reinstall with the new one. BolehVPN should work fully with the latest build of utorrent 1.8.4