I'm the writer behind the stories. I posted this comment lower down, but I thought I'd re-post again here for a bit of clarity.

We gave BitTorrent the benefit of the doubt and assumed they weren't pushing it on users silently (although that contradicts several reports and screenshots that suggest otherwise).

Regardless, you're right in saying uTorrent does make it purposefully difficult to avoid the install. It's also important to note that this installation isn't the same as signing up to a spam newsletter or a toolbar. Inadvertently installing this could leave some users paying over the odds for electricity (however minimal), suffering computer performance decreases, all so a company (however charitable) can outsource processing power. What's worse is many users won't even know this was installed.

I'm really glad this story took off, because it should serve as a lesson to software companies that there is seriously bad practice occurring in software bundling right across the industry. The uTorrent example was particularly compelling because of the impactful nature of the software being bundled.

And that's all aside from the fact that many users still claim their uTorrent wizard didn't highlight the install to them.

And as an end note, the betanews.com story isn't worth its salt. They tried to install it (as did we) and found no evidence of this. But the build number was different, and that still doesn't settle user complaints. Who's to say there isn't a bug with the installer? Who's to say build does or does not affect this? They're basically mimicking the poor PR handling by uTorrent, which is to blame the users. If a user has a problem with your software, it's not the users fault; it's poor software design.

Hope I've shed some light on how and why we reported in the way we did.