Magnetico: A Personal Torrent Search Engine That Can’t Be Shut Down

[jerrysmatrix]

You want all torrent clients to have their own private database of all torrents to search at their discretion, and have that database syncronize across all clients? Do I understand this correctly?

[dueda]

In essence. This will add overhead, but will make it much harder to stop in case the © Suits shut down torrent sites.
Tixati is similar idea but doesn't scan the DHT nor keeps a meta-file database; it shares links posted by users, even if they don't have that torrent.

[ihasdivui]

Adding this to torrent clients itself is a bit overkill. It should be a fully optional seperate program (as it is with magnetico) that just opens the magnet links with your torrent client.

[Moe]

It is just a proof of concept. It is less than ideal for the average pirate to run locally as it uses a lot of bandwidth and disk space.

[jerrysmatrix]

That is very unrealistic, to have it work out for every client/setup. You want to download a list of every torrent, add comment support, some filtration, then secure it all with block chain? Sorry to repeat that question, but I'm still trying to wrap my head around all of the requirements this would have to meet. You still have to index the illegitimate torrents, and block chain is going to make the size requirements exponential.

A better strategy would be to expand the DHT protocol, so that each peer has just a portion of the database. That portion would just be a list of files available to download from that peer, and nothing more. Then when searching, the term gets delegated throughout all of the peers. Thorough search queries could take days, but at least it would be feasible.

So the way I see it is, there are two options so far:

The first is to keep a large copy of the database on capable peers/hosts, who have the option to offer up computing power. It would offer fast(er) searches, but would be less resilient.

The second option is to have every peer broadcast a list of it's torrents. It would have slow search queries, but be extremely resilient.

I guess a third option would be to combine those two options? The weakest link would become the VPN providers.

So, aren't we worried about essentially turning the VPN providers into hosts for these databases? It could (almost certainly will, eventually) cause a reform for how VPNs are allowed to operate, and once that happens, it's game over for a lot of us.

[ihasdivui]

The second option is to have every peer broadcast a list of it's torrents. It would have slow search queries, but be extremely resilient.

That's already a BEP. http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0033.html

[dueda]

Creating major peers like Tor's nodes can lead to security issues (rogue nodes). Not that it can't happen in other scenarios, but it would harm more.
Second option seems the most reasonable.
Hybrid system adds first option vulnerability but reduces it by the second. Only real world evaluation for a few years would say it's good or not.

[Moe]

The second option is to have every peer broadcast a list of it's torrents. It would have slow search queries, but be extremely resilient.

That's already a BEP. http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0033.html

That is not the same thing.

What you linked to is the ability to scrape a hash on DHT to obtain peer statistics like you can do now with a traditional tracker.


I would think having a client broadcasting a list of available torrents would be a bad idea for obvious reasons. Unless you like a lot of legal attention.

[ihasdivui]

That is not the same thing.
What you linked to is the ability to scrape a hash on DHT to obtain peer statistics like you can do now with a traditional tracker.

Ah, okay. Misunderstood something then.

I would think having a client broadcasting a list of available torrents would be a bad idea for obvious reasons. Unless you like a lot of legal attention.

I wouldn't mind. I use a seedbox that doesn't reveal any info about my identity, including any payment info. Tho for the average joe, it could be bad, yeah.

[joew771]

This seems to act like a tornode, which as I said earlier will just open you up even more to scrutiny by your isp and others. I still think it's evil.