Ubuntu to add Torrent search to The Dash

Ubuntu will be including a default new scope with the aim of encouraging its philosophy of Free Culture directly into the user experience via the search engine of the OS. It will allow The Pirate Bay users to perform BitTorrent searches directly from the desktop.

There was cautions from software developer David Callé regarding including the scope by default due to the fact that the results would most definitely contain unlicensed content but Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, quickly squashed those worries. He said “The tool is super-useful and it’s perfectly justified to make it available by default. We use torrents for distributing Ubuntu itself. So please don’t hold back!﻿”

David Callé still does have reservations about the current prototype, which uses The Pirate Bay backend, because the filtering process is still not viable. To be available by default, Callé wants it to have license filtering that will promote works that are open license and public domain content but still wants to offer the filtering to be switchable, so users that want to use BitTorrent search to its fullest extent will still be able to do so.

The Dash is already a helpful and important feature of Ubuntu that Callé would like to improve even more by including the torrents scope as well. Currently, the prototype uses results from The Pirate Bay because it was the easiest to overlay with an adult content filter. In the future though, Callé said, “the project will use any BitTorrent services it can harness to give access to Free Culture and will be available wherever they are are not blocked.”