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Here’s a few big improvements for the NewsBlur website.

• The site title bar is now mounted to the bottom of the screen. This will allow you to mark a site/folder as read at any time.

• Marking as read can go back a configurable amount: 1, 3, 7, and 14 days back.

  

• If you’re reading in newest-first order, when you mark a site as read, any newer stories that have come in since you’ve loaded the site will no longer be marked as read.
• When you add, move, or delete a site or folder, all of your open web browsers will reload to correctly show the change. This allows you to have NewsBlur open at home and at work, knowing they will be synced when you change or add sites.

You may be thinking to yourself, 1, 3, and 7 days back makes sense, but why 14 if the unread limit is at 14 days? Why, having 14 days as an option would only make sense if the full limit was… (stay tuned).

The µTorrent BitTorrent client is without doubt one of the most popular of its kind. Much of it comes from the fact that it works more or less out of the box, is rather light on system resources, and ships with enough advanced options to spend the better half of the day configuring the client.

Complaints have increased in recent time though. Especially the toolbar and adware offers during installation and upgrade, as well as the advertisement that is displayed in the player when it is running have been mentioned in this regard.

The following guide walks you through the process of installing µTorrent on your PC without installing the program's adware and toolbar offers at the same time. The second part of the guide looks at advanced settings in the client to get rid of the advertisement displayed in the program interface.

Installing µTorrent

You can download the latest version of the program from the official website. Here you find downloads for all platforms, access to beta versions, the Android version of the client and µTorrent Plus, the commercial version of the program.

Run the installer on your system after you have downloaded it. The first screen highlights the version of the client that is about to be installed on the system. Hit next here.

The warning screen informs you that µTorrent scams exist on the Internet and that you should only download the program from the official website. Just click next again.

The next screen displays the license agreement. You need to click on I agree to continue with the installation. Here you find information that the program uses OpenCandy to power the advertisement offers during setup.

This installer uses the OpenCandy network to recommend other software you may find valuable during the installation of this software. OpenCandy collects NON-personally identifiable information about this installation and the recommendation process. Collection of this information ONLY occurs during this installation and the recommendation process; in accordance with OpenCandy's Privacy Policy, available at www.opencandy.com/privacy-policy

You can select to create a start menu entry, quick launch icon or desktop icon on the next page of the installer. Click next once you are finished making the selection here. No installation directory was displayed here which felt strange.

The configuration screen will map .torrent files, magnet links and .btsearch files to uTorrent automatically unless you uncheck the option here. The program adds an exception to Windows Firewall and runs it on startup as well unless you disable those options here.

The next offer is an official one, that is offering a free download to all users. This is Bagboy by the Pixies at the time of writing. Just uncheck the "Yes, I'd love to check out this free download" before you click next to ignore the offer.

Make sure you check the "notify me before installing updates" option on the next screen. This displays information about available updates on the screen so that you can control when and how they are installed.

The first adware offer comes on the next page. While offers may differ, you can usually find out if the offer is an advertisement or not by looking at the buttons on the page. If you see accept or decline, it is usually an ad.

This is for Conduit which you may not want to install on your system. Click on Decline Offer to pass.

The second offer is displayed on the next page. You find accept or decline radio buttons here. Note that you also see back and finish buttons here. Make sure you select Decline on the page and then Finish.

You may alternatively get an offer to install the uTorent Browser Bar or another toolbar. The screen looks like the following:

Make sure you uncheck all three options here before you click on the next button.

Configuring µTorrent

The µTorrent program starts right after you click on the finish button. The following part of the guide looks only at ads displayed in the client and not at configuring the client in general.

So called in-content ads have been introduced in µTorrent 3.2.2. These ads show up on top of your torrent listing and in the lower left box of the client.

To disable those ads do the following:

1. Click on Options > Preferences.
2. Switch to the Advanced menu.
3. Enter offers in the filter box.

• Set offers.content_offer_autoexec to false.
• Set offers.content_offer_url to blank.
• Set offers.left_rail_offer_enabled to false.
• Set offers.sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled to false.

You need to restart uTorrent before the changes take effect. The top in-torrent ad is removed after the restart while the lower left box ad is replaced with a generic uTorrent Plus offer.

Other preferences that you may want to set to false:

• gui.show_plus_upsell (removes the plus ad that you see in the lower left corner).
• bt.enable_pulse

Ad offers may also be displayed to you when you are upgrading the client, so keep that in mind.

Verdict

You have to pay attention to the installation or upgrade dialog of uTorrent to make sure that you do not install adware or other unwanted software on your system. Note that other offers may be displayed to you which makes it difficult to write a guide that prepares you for all eventualities.

It is important that you read each page of the installer carefully to avoid making mistakes in this regard.

The post How to get rid of all ads and toolbars in µTorrent appeared first on gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials.

There were two sessions in a row on Wednesday afternoon at this year’s GDC. The first was a panel of women in the games industry, discussing the causes and results of the #1ReasonWhy and #1ReasonToBe phenomena – the reasons to be and not be in the games industry. The second was Feminist Frequency’s Anita Sarkeesian, talking about the positive and negative consequences of her Kickstarter campaign, and the way forward from here. I came out of the first – vivid, passionate declarations of purpose from the likes of Leigh Alexander, Mattie Brice and Brenda Romero – feeling certain that the industry and its audience was on a wave of significant change. An hour later I came out of the second – Sarkeesian’s challenging and demanding story of recent horror – re-grounded to the current reality, introspective, and further determined.

There is a clear message: Rock, Paper, Shotgun will never back down on the subject of sexism and misogyny (nor racism, nor homophobia, for that matter) in games, the games industry, and the games journalism industry. Good times are ahead – we can see them.

(more…)