Go Cornell!

I guess some kids (ok, PhD students and CS profs) in Upson Hall are working on this distributed system for searching .torrents.

Cubit creates alongside BitTorrent a lightweight peer-to-peer network designed from the ground up to enable rapid and accurate approximate searches. It performs the searches without relying on any centralized components, and therefore is immune to legal and technical attacks targeting torrent aggregators.

Of course, as several Slashdot commentators mentioned, this doesn’t solve the problem of file spam, things with misleading labels, etc. For that, you require some measure of trust in the file source. But that’s a different, and rather more difficult, problem.