BitTorrent Inc. has been accused of loading its popular µTorrent BitTorrent client with cryptocoin miners that install silently and then harvest the processor power of unwitting torrenters.

Users of the software created a thread on the official µTorrent forum to complain about a high processor load when the computer is idle. The culprit was a program called Epic Scale, installed alongside µTorrent.

Epic Scale is a distributed computing client from a company that claims it wants to harness "unused processing power to change the world." The website says that it uses the processors of machines with the software to solve "math problems for weather prediction, physics simulations, cryptography (including cryptocurrency mining) and more," and this computation is monetized. Currently, it appears that the software is mining the Litecoin cryptocurrency.

The "changing the world" part comes from what Epic Scale proposes to do with the proceeds of its distributed computing: the company says that long term it intends to donate 75 percent of its profits to charity, and in the short term, it's donating 100 percent of its profits. The chosen charities are presently healthcare funding initiative Watsi, and HIV vaccine researcher Immunity Project.

BitTorrent denies that Epic Scale was installed silently, and Epic Scale tells us that it was not aware of, and did not consent to, any silent installation. Our own testing supports this; during installation of µTorrent, the software clearly asks if Epic Scale should be installed.

We would note that "Accept Offer" is, however, the default button, so blindly hitting return or impatiently clicking the bottom right to Next your way through the installation wizard will result in the software being installed. While this clearly isn't silent installation, we can see how users might accidentally or unwittingly accept the install.

The company also tells us that Epic Scale has been included for some two months prior to the accusations of silent installation.

While it may yet emerge that there is some way by which the Epic Scale client was indeed installed silently, for the time being it looks like both it and µTorrent are the victims of an overreaction. µTorrent does include bundled apps as part of its monetization system, but it asks prior to their installation, and makes them all strictly optional.

The response to this bundled software is perhaps influenced by Lenovo's Superfish brouhaha, wherein the PC manufacturer was found to be preinstalling software that completely subverted the security that secure HTTP is supposed to offer. This has provoked greater sensitivity to, and suspicion of, the unwanted software that's hitching a ride on the programs and hardware that we do want.

The fears over this software, and the apparent overreactions that can result, put both app and hardware developers in a sticky spot. End users may claim to dislike the crapware that's so often found on new PCs, but they're also extremely price sensitive; if a manufacturer can cut the retail price of a system by a few dollars, and make that up in kickbacks from crapware companies, they'll do so, because that price cut will produce stronger sales.

The same conflict repeats itself over and over again. Facebook users will gripe about the presence of ads and the mining of demographic data for better ad targeting, but it's hard to imagine Facebook becoming the social networking behemoth it has become if, as an alternative, it charged its members for its services.

Even µTorrent has a paid "pro" version with some additional features and no in-app advertising, but if we were to guess, this is about as popular as paid versions of WinZip, a program that exists only in myth and legend.

Without some great shift in consumer behavior, it's unlikely that we'll see any real change. If end-users can't be convinced to pay directly for useful services and desirable software, and if they insist on pinching every penny when buying hardware, those lost margins will be found elsewhere. Bundled ads and apps are going to be the answer, and they may not all be as harmless, or as explicit, as Epic Scale appears to be.