Bittorrent Clients Selling Out to RIAA/MPAA

AZ has started a new commercial branch called Zudeo which identifies itself as AZ 3.x.x.x, and had claimed that 2.5.0.2 was the final 2.x.x.x stable that would ever be released, and all future versions would identify themselves just like Zudeo, as AZ 3.x.x.x. this raised concerns because we would not be able to tell if a member was using Zudeo or Azureus, and we want nothing to do with Zudeo, since we feel it is a security risk, and because Zudeo identifies itself as AZ.Azureus claimed that Zudeo was simply a different user-interface for AZ, but Zudeo incorporates DRM, and has aligned itself with people/organizations that end with initials **AA. While investigating Zudeo, two of our admins, system & ibslice discovered that packets of data were being sent back to AZ, and when confronted, AZ devs at first denied, then said it was only anonymous info about how the client was working, then our staffers discovered that the packets being sent back contained your total UL stats, your total DL stats, and your ISP name/info. We replied to AZ with this information, and in a seeming panic, they did two things:

1. Admitted privately that this had been going on with ALL recent AZ stable releases for the last 12 months
2. Immediately put together and released AZ 2.5.0.4.
Who knows what other private data on you they have acquired, and if they do indeed keep this data confidential?

Bram Cohen had previously been forced to sell/partner with the Major Studios/MPAA because he was being threatened with legal action. Now, Ludde, the developer of uTorrent, has sold uTorrent to Bram’s venture. This means that uTorrent is now partially/wholly owned by the very people you read about who are suing children and grandmothers for filesharing, and who have taken down many torrent sites over the last few years. Ludde had supposedly been banned from doing any more work on new bittorrent updates by the terms of his deal with Bram/bittorrent inc., but after we banned the uTorrent beta here a month ago, he has come to our IRC chat and asked if we would accept a new stable uTorrent release 1.7. this would basically be the banned 483 beta build with a new name, making it technically within our standard client rules.

No worries thought as long as you have the “safe builds”, uTorrent 1.6.474 and Azureus 2.5.0.4