KickassTorrents resurfaces online

[speeder]

The old kat, that had nothing to do with USA, complied with dcma requests.

Now that this obviously doesn't work, what prevents new kat to ignore them?

Also, why USA can force random people from random countries that doesn't do business in USA to follow their laws? If they keep doing that, they will end with random dictators pulling a Turkey and demanding arrest of political opponents that live in USA

[csydas]

Treaties. The nebulous amount of treaties across the world, specifically with the US can make it incredibly easy for just about anyone to be subject to its jurisdiction in some manner. As long as the US is politically active and persuasive enough to get foreign governments into these agreements, their reach will extend very far. As an aside, it's part of why Britain's EU Exit is such a mess; all the treaties and agreements formerly drawn up were based on Britain in the EU - those agreements were discussed for years before being agreed upon. There are thousands of discussion points and it takes a really long time.

As to why keep attacking KAT? (or any other torrent site for that matter?) To scare your average citizen. When Napster was huge in the US and the RIAA got involved, you'd have almost daily stories in newspapers or on TV about the RIAA suing college students, high school students, etc, with huge lawsuits. You'd think this would result in a revolt against the RIAA, but the reality is that these had sticking power in the US courts. Most US citizens, despite the relative wealth they have compared to other countries, could not pay off the few thousand dollar per song fines they would receive if sued. Most couldn't even afford a single $1000 fine. The idea for the RIAA/MPAA wasn't that you need to stop every download every - it's that you need to make a big enough splash to scare the majority of citizens into not downloading.

While many streaming and download services have arisen since that time, offering cheap and legal options for on-demand shows/music, the companies still would rather that stuff went back to the way it was, with only their authorized publishers being the source for media. Attacking torrent sources isn't about recouping loss from piracy - it's about recouping losses from the media conglomerates' inability to rapidly adjust to new technology, and the change in how many citizens choose to get their entertainment.

[StavrosK]

> If they keep doing that, they will end with random dictators pulling a Turkey and demanding arrest of political opponents that live in USA

And they just won't comply, because the USA does whatever they want without much regard for laws.

[tn13]

This is pretty much like the drug war. El Chapo's interview was extremely insightful in this regard. He basically asked if he going to jail had any impact on the drug trade in first place. The answer is resoundingly NO. There is a huge market for drugs and if not El Chapo, Chloe Epa would take it over. Same goes for torrents. They will always exist, American law thugs just want to justify their own existence jailing some.

[tomjen3]

They almost certainly did business with with US based banks, which, given that at least one of the charges is money laundering, is likely to be enough.

Story: https://torrentfreak.com/can-kickasstorrents-make-a-comeback...

[supergreg]

> "hosted on multiple cloud servers to prevent blockade, and the hosting information is well hidden behind Cloudflare."

Isn't Cloudflare an American company? I wouldn't trust them to hide that information from the American government.

[mtgx]

And for some strange reason ThePirateBay uses it.

[jsprogrammer]

Cloudflare also runs a MITM operation on TLS connections.

[ScroogeMcDoug]

Seems to work well for carder forums.

[kilroy123]

This feels very similar to the war on drugs. Take down one site, two more appear the next day. Take down a domain name, it moves to another hours later. This will never stop.

Eventually, I predict there will be a decentralized torrent site. Using magnet links and just file names. Nothing hosted anywhere. More and more questionable VPNs will appear for people to use and hide with.

I'm not advocating for piracy, I'm just saying there will be no stopping it.

[icebraining]

A decentralized torrent search network already exists, and it's actually funded by European public grants :)

https://www.tribler.org/

[mastax]

> Eventually, I predict there will be a decentralized torrent site. Using magnet links and just file names. Nothing hosted anywhere.

There's probably other versions of this but I know of 'Play' on zeronet (which I won't link because piracy, it's easy enough to find). It's a fairly elegant version of what you described.

[reubenmorais]

Previous discussion on the arrest/takedown:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12132849

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12142532

[AnbeSivam]

> hosting information is well hidden behind Cloudflare

Anyone facing issues with Cloudflare's captcha. Not just for this site, I have faced this issue with other sites too. Only around 50% of the time I am able to get past their captcha, most other times I just get frustrated and close the page.

[throwaway160722]

As a legally blind person it is impossible to prove me not being a robot by demonstrating the use of human-like visual capabilities. Other CAPTCHAs offer audio alternatives, but not reCAPTCHA. When I contacted Cloudflare's support about this, they first required me to associate a business account with my private request and then deflected from the accessibility of reCAPTCHA:

> The issue you are experiencing is related to the security settings that the administrator of the website you are visiting has set.

Maybe I should have been more persistent for Cloudflare's sake, but when you're frustrated it's not really easy to be politely persistent. So, now I'm just voting with my clients' wallets.

[michalskop]

I used to have that for a very long time. (CloudFlare became the company I hate most on the net.)

[the_mitsuhiko]

Where are you from? I keep hearing that people get captchas but I wonder what triggers it. I have only seen it from a Russian hotel IP so far.

[witty_username]

It works fine for me; it takes maybe 10-20 seconds to solve the CAPTCHA.

[orionblastar]

Beware when this happened to The Pirate Bay some clone sites were fake and served malware.

But some are legit as well and scraped the database and torrents in case it went down.

[whoopdedo]

And an FBI honeypot mixed in there as well.

[drops]

Is there a possibility of someone actually making a stable, long-term KAT mirror / follow-up without getting busted like the original one?

[jeeceebees]

The future is an IPFS mirror where the entire magnet list and web frontend are peer to peer. When everyone can host the site individually on their own computer there won't be a way for authorities to seize servers or domains.

[ktta]

torproject.org

[noxin]

Same story at TorrentFreak: https://torrentfreak.com/kickasstorrents-mirrors-and-imposte...

[Vexs]

In a similar vein, I've seen a lot of push in some communities to move to a zeronet-based torrent site.

[kilroy123]

That's really the only solution. A decentralized torrent site, that only hosts names and magnet links.

However, there needs to be some kind of control built in. That way there isn't spam and abuse. Not sure how you would accomplish this.

Then there would be another weak link that authorities would likely target - trackers and servers running trackers.

[rasz_pl]

kat.am looks very dodgy, it goes out of its way to appear to be a full working site while in reality search is broken, and browsing past ~3rd page usually puts you back on the main. Then there is a distinct lack of advertising/popup spam = why would anyone run this out of goodness of his heart other than as a honeypot?

no profit motive

[ikeboy]

>Then there is a distinct lack of advertising/popup spam = why would anyone run this out of goodness of his heart other than as a honeypot?

Because it was built in 24 hours and they haven't had time to set those up yet, maybe? Just a guess.

[brad0]

It sounds someone's just serving up a scrape that was done before the original went down.

[forgotpwtomain]

I'm not a fan of US copyright law to say the least, but it's hard to feel any sympathy for these sites or their creators. Mostly they have derived multi-million dollar incomes from selling very shaddy adware or otherwise space for virus infested adds which they show to the users, 95% of who are there to download pirated content. This is probably an unpopular opinion here.

[ericjang]

I downvoted you for saying "This is probably an unpopular opinion here". Your opinion is valid enough, no need to qualify it or generalize the moral values of the HN community.

[daurnimator]

I recall seeing figures for other sites and they weren't making millions. Infact they were barely scraping by.

These sites seem to be run by idealistic individuals, rather than as a profit making enterprise.

[supergreg]

The worst are the sites that sell the ads and don't even have the torrents, they look like torrent or direct download sites and only have shady links that lead to more ads and no content so they don't even incur in facilitating piracy.

[janitor61]

Why do people assume these sites are honeypots? Would there be a point to the FBI operating a torrent site? I thought copyright violations were handled at the ISP level.

[jszymborski]

It's also a lot simpler and effective for anti-piracy agencies and LEOs to make honeypot torrent files or even just peer on existing torrents. You can monitor all the IPs in flagrante delicto that way... running a torrent site doesn't catch anyone red-handed per-se (particulalry with magnate links) and is a lot of overhead.

[chippy]

> Would there be a point to the FBI operating a torrent site?

Possibly for the same reason they end up operating other sites such as illegal pornography sites.

But why do they do that? Because these sites have users who sign in and upload things. In this case, they could have access to the releasers account details. usernames, emails, passwords. It's generally the releasers that are the same people or groups that do the ripping, who may have relationships with studios, networks, cinemas etc. Nothing major but it's a bit better than not having them.

Also, if a third party controls a server, they can, as Snowden has repeatedly shown, target specific users with malicious payloads. Even if they are using HTTPS.

[DarkLinkXXXX]

Yeah, I think it's much more plausible that people wanna serve you a bunch of ads and/or steal your account info.

[nxzero]

Any reason to believe this isn't a passive attack; aka: honeypot, watering-hole, etc.

[colejohnson66]

Why would they need to do this for a honeypot? Visiting a torrent website is not illegal. You /can/ download Linux ISOs from them.

The government could just upload a torrent and watch the connected IP list. Actually, they don't even need to upload a torrent. Just get a torrent and see who you connect to. Anyone you connect to is uploading that content.

[cinquemb]

As corporate copyright laws converge to more global uniformity, we're only going to see more resilient and ephemeral networks and data stores, esp as the technical means to do such expands to more and more people.

[p01926]

Does anyone know where to find a copy of the torrent DB? I think kat had copies on their app page, but the new mirrors omit this.

[lordnacho]

So, if you go on kat.am and search for something that isn't there, you get a bunch of porn links.

Is that the intended behaviour?

[known]

Kat.host

[meeper16]

AWESOME!

[sergiotapia]

All of these are honeypots.

[AnkhMorporkian]

What's the point of a torrent honeypot? It's incredibly trivial to track which IPs are downloading a torrent; operating the site which offers magnet links gives you no additional information whatsoever.