We've talked before about ways to control a BitTorrent client from the iPhone, and some unofficial developers have gotten it working in a jailbroken way. But apparently that's as far as we'll get -- µMonitor, a little iPhone app to control µTorrent (a popular BitTorrent app that I use pretty often) was recently submitted to the App Store, and Torrentfreak reports that it's been rejected out of hand. This isn't the first time something like this has come up: Drivetrain, another torrent remote control tool, was also rejected back in May.

Apparently Apple tells the developer that they are disallowing all types of BitTorrent-related apps "because this category of applications is often used for the purpose of infringing third party rights." Often does not equal always, but technically that's another point: it's Apple's App Store, and they can take their ball and go home if they want. Torrentfreak claims that the myNZB app technically does the same thing (it basically controls a newsreader that can be used to download large numbers of files, possibly in violation of copyright), but it's the word "torrent" that Apple (and, likely, their content partners) have an issue with. Sure enough, a search of "torrent" on the App Store doesn't bring up anything related to the BitTorrent technology.

You can still run µTorrent on your iPhone, although you'll have to jailbreak it and dive into the Cydia repository, where it's listed under "Utilities." As for Apple's stance, I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for things to change on this one -- µTorrent isn't even an app that enables BitTorrent downloading; it just makes it easier (by accessing a client that's doing the work elsewhere), and if they aren't willing to pay heed to these distinctions now, it's not likely they'll bother in the future, either.

If it's Monday, there must be a few more stories of iPhone apps rejected for curious and spurious reasons. Today's contenders are up to the line... and away they go!

First, it's Maza's Drivetrain app, a remote control for the Transmission client for Bittorrent running on the user's computer. Rejected! In this case, the reason is that Bittorrent is sometimes used for the trading of third-party copyrighted material. Yeah, but... um... the iPhone app isn't a torrent client at all, it's just a UI for a client running elsewhere. How does that make any kind of sense? iLounge quotes the developer as saying the rejection is "ridiculous," and it's hard to disagree.

Second, if you've ever wanted to replace the face of Jesus with your own, well, you can't do it with an iPhone app. SAI reports that the developer of the previously-approved Animalyzer (which let you replace animal faces with your photos) has gotten a rejection notice for the Me So Holy app that extends the face-replacement to religious figures. Apple's justification for the rejection is the catch-all "objectionable content" clause 3.3.12 of the developer agreement, which states

"Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users."

Could one reasonably judge that some iPhone or iPod touch users might object to an app that lets users replace a divine visage with a mugshot or LOLcat? Sure, they might... but when an app that lets you aim virtual urine at a toilet sails through to the store without a hiccup, 'reasonable judgement' doesn't seem to be a valid operating standard any longer. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of 'offensive' apps in the store already -- but offending religious sensibilities is clearly different than grading feces.

[via Engadget & Techmeme]

The folks over at Intego let the world know about a new trojan making the rounds along with copies of an application designed to crack Adobe Creative Suite 4. They consider the risk "serious."

If you don't download software using peer-to-peer tools like BitTorrent, then you're perfectly safe. You can stop reading this story, if you like. If you're one of the 5,000 people who recently downloaded and installed the serial crack, then you have a bad day ahead of you.

The malware, after asking for your administrator password, installs an executable with a random name in /var/tmp, a folder that isn't deleted when the computer restarts.

The randomly-named program will install itself in /usr/bin/DivX, create a startup item in /System/Library/StartupItems/DivX, and if it has root privileges, save a hash of your password in the file /var/root/.DivX.

The software then listens on a random TCP port and awaits instructions from its evil overlords. With an infected computer's root password, those in control of the software will be able to execute commands on the infected computer, including deleting files and performing malicious network tasks.

Late last week, pirated copies of iWork '09 were infected with similar malware.

Intego VirusBarrier X4 and X5, as you might imagine, protect you against the Trojan. Either looking for (and removing) the files mentioned above or using a virus removal utility is recommended.

Also recommended: Not downloading pirated software (and their associated tools) on peer-to-peer networks. If you do choose to get your software that way, you have nobody to blame but yourself if your system gets infected.

Transmission - the open source, lightweight BitTorrent client that is the closest alternative to uTorrent that us Mac users can get - has just released version .90.

New features added in this update include:

• Encryption support (finally!), with an option to ignore unencrypted peers
• The ability to ban peers that send too much bad data
• Reporting only downloaded and verified good data to the tracker
• Improved BitTorrent compliance and more

For OS X users, specific updates include:
A per-torrent action menu, optimizations to decrease memory usage, and general changes/updates to the interface to make managing files easier and to provide users with more options.

Note: Users upgrading from version .72 or earlier will lose any data from uncompleted downloads, so please beware and either move your torrents to another program or finish downloads before installing the upgrade.

[via Digg]

You TUAW readers have spoken loud and clear: Transmission is your favorite BitTorrent client. If you're nodding your head right now, you'll be happy to know that v0.8 of the cross-platform app has gone official, ushering in a boatload of new features and fixes for all OSes it works on, as well as some great Mac-only goodies. Before we get to the new stuff, however, I have to echo a warning on the main Transmission page: if you're in the middle of any downloads right now, finish them before upgrading; you could lose data if you jump the gun.

That said, let's talk about the shiny new changes. First up, here are the new feature highlights that everyone can enjoy:

• Ability to selectively download and prioritize files
  
• Torrent file creation
  
• Speed and CPU load improvements
  
• Better rechecking of torrents that have many files

And here are the new goodies just for Mac OS X users:

• Overlay when dragging torrent files, URLs, and data files onto window
  
• Ability to set an amount of time to consider a transfer stalled
  
• More progress bar colors
  
• Various smaller interface improvements
  
• Italian, Korean, and Russian translations

More details and screenshots are available at the Transmission site, and be sure to swing by the Transmission donation page to show the development crew some love.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Lots of the youngsters out there are clogging up the Internet tubes with their torrents and their Rock and Roll music. Sadly, the choice of BitTorrent clients (BitTorrent, in case you aren't familiar, is a distributed peer to peer downloading protocol. The more people who download something, the faster it is for everyone... in theory) on OS X has been missing a biggie: uTorrent. uTorrent is the most popular Bit Torrent client on Windows, and it was recently purchased by BitTorrent, Inc which is a mighty fine stamp of approval if you ask me. Sadly, it isn't available on the Mac. So very, very sad.

Weep no longer, torrent obsessed Mac fiends! uTorrent is coming to OS X and according to TorrentFreak it is pretty slick. It is faster, smaller, and simpler than the other offerings on OS X and it is free. What's not to like? Ah, right, the fact that it is in closed beta at the moment.

Thanks, RM.

One of the things I love about OS X is the fact that for pretty much any conceivable task, there are multiple applications to choose from with which to do it. Unfortunately, this hasn't really been the case when it comes to BitTorrent clients. Yes, there may have been multiple native clients out there, but only two of them were really any good– BitRocket and Transmission– and for the longest time, Transmission was banned on many private torrent trackers. This left only BitRocket, a client lacking some key features such as the ability to view and set upload/download ratios. Until Today.

Transmission 0.71 fixes the much hated multiple-announce bug which caused it's banning by many trackers. The new version also includes some other small bug fixes and interface updates. Transmission is Open Source and available as a free download.

Goodbye BitRocket!

[via CrunchGear]

Whether you're digging the recently-out-of-beta Xtorrent or you roll with a different app, you might still need a simple way to actually create a .torrent file to help with the seeding process. There are of course plenty of ways to do this, but the new CreateTorrent Dashboard widget is handy for the widget junkies in the crowd. A simple drag and drop of a folder or file will create the proper .torrent file, ready for seeding in your favorite BitTorrent application.

The CreateTorrent widget is free and available from MacUpdate.

David Watanabe (of NewsFire fame) has released a second public beta of Xtorrent, his BitTorrent client that first appeared on the scene back in September. The largest change is one of the least visible: a major overhaul under the hood of the downloads pane to pave the way for upcoming integration between the search pane, downloads pane and a future RSS module (oh Dave, you're such a tease). The swarm column was also redesigned to be more forthcoming on seeds and leeches (expand yours if it's too thin), and the main window now allows you to drag-and-drop torrent files, complete with a "slick informational overlay."

Xtorrent is free while in beta and is available from Xtorrentp2p.com.

Thanks Junior

The market for Mac torrent clients has been expanding quite a bit recently, and Torrentfreak has a nice review of a new beta version of Transmission, a long-standing favorite of many a Mac torrenter. While the review rounds up many of the nice new features, I'll give you the cliff notes for the slackers in the crowd: "Transmission 0.7 Beta is by far the fastest, most light-weight and one of the most appealing BitTorrent clients for the Mac."

Diving further in, some of Transmission's new features seem to be inspired by Xtorrent, a new beta client from Dave Watanabe (of NewsFire fame). Of these new features, notables include time-of-day based speed limits (i.e. - slow down my torrent downloads while I'm at my desk at work from 9-5), as well as a Watch Folder with automatic cleanup of your torrent files (again, very Xtorrent inspired). The idea is: most Mac browsers by default download all files to the desktop, but that might not be where torrent users want to keep their downloads as well. This Watch Folder allows Transmission to automatically snag any torrent files you download to the desktop, move them to a user-specified folder and begin the torrent download. Ah, software automation - it's a beautiful thing.

Check out the rest of Torrentfreak's review, as plenty more is packed under the hood of this new beta.

[via digg]

News is coming in via digg commenters and posts on forum threads linked therein which seems to indicate and give evidence that BitRocket uses code taken from the Transmission.app source without giving any attribution as required by the MIT license under which Transmission is released. These accusations are further supported by the fact that the developer of BitRocket, Julian Ashton, previously developed XFactor, a P2P application, which was proven to take code from the Poisoned project, again without proper attribution.

Update: Scott, our fearless leader, did some digging and found a post on the forum thread linked that I seem to have missed. According to at least one account, BitRocket does properly credit the source it uses.

We all love OS X, but any Mac user with half a brain will admit that there are some areas in which the Windows world has us beat. When it comes to BitTorrent clients, Windows users have a veritable cornucopia of options to chose from, while us Mac users have a paltry 5 choices. TorrenFreak, always dedicated to excellence in the peer-to-peer realm, decided to take a look at all of the dedicated BitTorrent clients for the Mac. The reviewer considered the whole package of features, interface, and speed. As some of the more torrent astute readers might guess, Transmission and Bits On Wheels came out on top, with Tomato Torrent, Azureus, and the official BitTorrent client trailing behind.

Forgive the bitter headline, but I'm sick of Mac game companies releasing games, especially ones as massive and significant as Quake 4, without a demo. This gripe is further compounded by the fact that the current state of Mac gaming is so demanding of hardware; yes, it's certainly improving, but many of these games require a PowerMac G5 or, now with the Intel switch, at least an iMac or a MacBook Pro to run them with any decent amount of detail and frame rate. Releasing $50 games without the ability for users to test them first is shooting oneself in the foot, and apparently, companies like Aspyr seem to have no shortage of feet.

With that small bit of editorial out of the way: Aspyr has (finally) released a demo of Quake 4! Hooray! Both a torrent and a direct download link of the 536MB Universal Binary demo are available from MacGameFiles. Enjoy.

[via MacMinute]

Opera, the little browser that could (and did - go free, that is), has finished its beta and reached version 9, going Universal in the process. New features include:

• a built-in BitTorrent client
• adding your favorite search engines to Opera's search bar simply by right-clicking them
• site-specific preferences for cookies, pop-ups, etc.
• thumbnail previews of tabs when hovering over them
• widgets (hey, at least they didn't call 'em 'gadgets')
• customizable content blocker
• and more

This version definitely seems snappier now that it's Universal, and (say what you have to) these new enhancements like a built-in BitTorrent client show that Opera is blazing a trail faster than its competition. Give this version a whirl if you haven't touched Opera in a while but are still curious about it. If you need help with a browser transition, why not check out some of the del.icio.us tools (like my personal favorite: Delibar) we've blogged that take the 'bookmarks bar' out of the browser and into Mac OS X's menubar, removing the need for worrying about which browser you're using.

An enterprising Mail.app user by the name of Matt Comi has ironed out a simple yet powerful trick for using Mail.app as a remote bittorrent client, of sorts. Basically, he set up a rule in Mail.app with a custom AppleScript that looks for torrent file attachments. This AppleScript then sends the torrent file to Azureus for downloading. Check out his site, Big Bucket Amusement, for instructions, screenshots and the script you'll need.

[via Hawk Wings]