Rufus is an alternative to BitTorrent.  BitTorrent portal TorrentSpy has licensed their own version of Rufus and is including WhenU SaveNow in it.

Note that if you download Rufus from its site, you won’t get adware.

It’s currently advertised on the front page of TorrentSpy:

There is no disclosure from TorrentSpy that adware is included on their download page: 

We’re proud to announce the release of our official BitTorrent client. Torrentspy Rufus is a freeware application that will allow you to download the torrents indexed by our site. The Rufus client will make downloading files via BitTorrent a breeze.

Torrentspy Rufus is a powerfull [sic] Python BitTorrent Client. It supports many advanced options such as speed limits, proxy and port mapping, simultaneous downloads and fast resume, torrent searching and more!

Make the Change to Torrentspy Rufus Today

Uninstall those clunkly BitTorrent programs and try out our official Torrentspy Rufus. This application is certified by us and is our reccomended [sic] client.

It is only disclosed when the user downloads the application.  

At least they are bundling WhenU, a relatively tame adware program that has decent notice and disclosure and is removable from the add/remove programs.  But it does produce pop-ups.

The author of Rufus is not happy about this.  

You are right, I’m not liking this. Monk2000 gave me a heads up in an email and I’m now trying to sort it out. I don’t want Rufus associated with adware at all.  
 
Here is what is happening: 
I’m affraid [sic] to say that this is partly my fault – Torrentspy’s client is the prebeta 0.6.8 which I had released to a few people for testing as I wanted to make sure that the fast resume was working correctly.  
 
In this version I also added some code to allow for an image and text to be inserted into Rufus allowing it to be branded – this was requested by torrentspy as they wanted to release Rufus with their logo on it which I had no problems with at the time. 
 
I personally loath adware and it makes me cringe to think that it has been bundled with Rufus. I had no idea that they were going to include adware with their install and have contacted the TorrentSpy admins and am trying to sort it out.  
 
Also as superontvetter said, I’m having computer problems at the moment – I dropped my laptop (main Rufus dev environment) and am waiting on a new motherboard. It should be here any day now. 
 
I’ll keep you all posted. 

Most antispyware programs will remove WhenU SaveNow (although Lavasoft recently announced plans to de-list WhenU, they are apparently still detecting it), but you can just go to the Add/Remove programs and get rid of it if you don’t want it running:

Link here via Digg.

Alex Eckelberry
(Thanks Dan)