The conflict between BitTorrent search engines and authorities remains as fierce as ever. Copyright hawks celebrate every time they knock out one of these portals, but within days two or three new sites appear to replace the lost search engine. For years, attempts have been made to decentralize content discovery on BitTorrent, and the latest example is a project called Magnético. The idea is to use DHT to generate a local index, which in turn eliminates any possibility of blocking.
The main BitTorrent clients can be downloaded without problems. The Pirate Bay works perfectly, beyond occasional blocking by local providers and a bit of downtime. Last year there was a series of very important actions against search engines. Locating torrents didn't become impossible, but a bit harder for many users around the globe, and that reinforced the idea of decentralization. One of the most popular programs betting on cutting ties with traditional indexes is Tribler, though it still needs to improve its optimization. However, in recent days, a new name started circulating: Magnético.
How Magnético Works
Unfortunately, we cannot provide advanced details about how this client works because its code is in pre-alpha stage, and it doesn't even offer a binary compatible with Windows. What we do know comes through its programmer, a young Turk named Bora Mert Alper. Magnético (technically "magnetico" with lowercase and no accent) follows AlphaReign's path and relies on DHT (Distributed Hash Table) to present results. The big difference is that the index generated by Magnético is private, local, and personal, always under user control. The only way to prevent its use would be to attack the download capability itself, that is, interrupting Internet access or applying throttling. At the end of the day, there is nothing that can be "closed".
A Double-Edged Sword
Now, Magnético is something like a double-edged sword. Having a local index sounds very tempting, but the software doesn't have filters, therefore the index could end up full of very delicate and controversial content (child pornography is one of the examples cited on the official page). I imagine that in the future that could be implemented somehow. For now, we'll keep waiting for the binaries.
