Past Efforts After being around for more than a decade, BitTorrent can safely claim the title of an enduring P2P protocol. And through that time, the protocols haven’t developed much. So someone decided to do something about it, a new project called Magnetico aims to solve this by crawling BitTorrent’s Distributed Hash Table and generating an index on a machine controlled by the user. This week, TorrentFreak caught up with its creator. That’s not to say no one has tried it before. DHT and PEX, for example, were great contributions but the reliance on centralized websites such as The Pirate Bay still persisted. That’s the problem that troubled Bora – the programmer hailing from Istanbul – who feels having a less centralized system would benefit the entire ecosystem. In his efforts to achieve this, Bora has been working on the project magnetico (small ‘m’), which aims to “unplug” conventional torrent sites altogether. Just like the now defunct BTDigg and the more recent AlphaReign, Bora’s software uses the Distributed Hash Table to search for content and peers with the difference being that the indexes magnetico creates will be private. In simpler words, it acts as a user’s personal search engine and can be installed on a machine that’s under the user’s control. Technical Details Bora mentions that both modules can run without user intervention, thus making it simple to operate. Though, the software is still in its early stages of development, therefore, it might suffer from bugs – one of them being it becoming a resource hog and needing a restart. In the meantime, Bora hopes that BEP 51 (a BitTorrent Enhancement Proposal concerning DHT) will come to fruition. While magnetico may not be for the novice, Bora says its relatively easy to get it going. To find out more about it yourself, you can head over here. Source: torrentfreak
