Comment 41 for bug 301189

Once again, Vuze's built-in updater is not expected to work if you are using the version installed by the package manager. This copy of Vuze should only be updated by the package manager. If you want Vuze's built-in updater to work, just download it from their web site and run it from somewhere in your home directory.

That being said, I'm also disappointed that the version in the repositories is so old. However, it looks like Ubuntu just gets Vuze from Debian's repositories, and they have a really old copy too. Might be worth filing a bug over there, or looking into what it would take to get the new version packaged and distributed in Ubuntu.