A post over at the µTorrent forums by BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen and µTorrent author Ludvig Strigeus claims that Bit Torrent has acquired µTorrent.

"What does this mean for the µTorrent community? Not much, at least not at first. The intention is to maintain the website as it is, and keep the forums and community active. Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms."

It should be interesting to see if the acquisition means that µTorrent will stop using encryption, since Cohen himself has frequently spoken out against it.

Cohen and BitTorrent are busy trying to launch a video store, but it won't work out if ISPs keep throttling all Bit Torrent traffic. To get around the filters, some clients have started encrypting traffic. As a response, some ISPs then started limiting the number of connections a Bit Torrent client could make. Is acquiring µTorrent a way to throttle down this game of cat & mouse?

The other major BitTorrent client, Azureus, earlier this week announced the launch of their own video store, in competition with BitTorrent. Users in the forum post express concern that the acquisition will mean added bloat for the streamlined µTorrent client.