
KickassTorrents resurfaces online - noxin
http://www.theverge.com/2016/7/22/12255426/kickasstorrents-alternate-sites-spring-up
======
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

~~~
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.

~~~
asdfzxc
I loved Kat and have used it countless times to get things I can't afford or
just can't buy even if I could because of where I live. I wish the founder
hadn't got caught.

That being said, the point of punishing criminals is to punish crime, not to
end it. El Chapo is a violent criminal. It is extremely optimistic to think
that putting him in jail ends drug trade. The point is to punish the crimes
that he had committed.

Finally, I agree that torrents will exist for a long time to come. And thank
God for that.

~~~
tn13
> the point of punishing criminals is to punish crime

True when the definition of crime and the procedures around punishing crime
borders on even serious crime I would question if the crime should be crime in
first place or not.

If USA had unleashed its capitalistic hounds and allowed Target and Wallmart
to deal in drugs El Chapo and many people like him would either be selling
tacos on a food truck (euphemism for honest hard working job) or be shot dead
in some alley as result of their non-lucrative crime.

Drug industry has been super innovative and invested their mental energies in
drugs. If the drugs are channelised they will get invested into something else
which might actually lead to good result.

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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.

~~~
Zarel
I'd guess they use it as a DDoS protection layer, and have more proxies behind
them.

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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/](https://www.tribler.org/)

------
reubenmorais
Previous discussion on the arrest/takedown:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12132849](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12132849)

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

~~~
icebraining
reCAPTCHA does have an audio option, and it seems to be accessible to screen
readers, as detailed in this blog post:
[http://terrillthompson.com/blog/682](http://terrillthompson.com/blog/682)

When the checkbox is clicked, a visual puzzle appears; right below, there's a
button that can be clicked to switch to the audio captcha. Here's a demo:
[https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo](https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo)

~~~
throwaway160722
Thanks! That should have been Cloudflare support's answer. I did not detect
the three pictograms as they were contrast-"enhanced" away. The non-visual
reCAPTCHAs I now get are even passable without sound.

------
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.

~~~
aw3c2
Source?

------
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
But there will be problems with those serving the web pages being served a
notice as they do today whenever someone torrents without a VPN. It isn't
inherently anonymity focussed like tor.

~~~
jeeceebees
IPFS works over tor! The implementation is pretty rudimentary at this point,
though.

I guess the main issue is actually distributing the tracker.

------
noxin
Same story at TorrentFreak: [https://torrentfreak.com/kickasstorrents-mirrors-
and-imposte...](https://torrentfreak.com/kickasstorrents-mirrors-and-
imposters-spring-into-action-160722/)

------
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.

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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.

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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.

~~~
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.

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

You really think people advertising adaware 'Improve PC performance now' and
'watch XXX live with donkeys' are idealistic individuals fighting draconian
copyright laws?

Also I don't know about kickass - but for example the /scrape endpoint is
blocked on the piratebay tracker (and most other 'commercial' trackers) --
meaning that you can't get basic statistics (like leechers/seeders) about a
torrent which is tracked by them without going through their advertisements.

~~~
icebraining
The common ad networks usually have TOSs banning torrent sites and such, so
unless you can bankroll the site yourself, you'll have to resort to shadier
networks.

By the way, TPB hasn't had a tracker for seven years now.

------
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.

~~~
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.

~~~
icebraining
I really doubt the scene members are releasing anything on public sites like
KAT. The users uploading torrent files to KAT are probably just users of
private sites where the original releases happen.

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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.

~~~
chippy
Operating a site gives more than just IPs. 1) To add a torrent to a torrent
site, a user has to set up an account - they get access to account information
and 2) even if the site is serving things via https, they control it, and can
send a malicious ad or inject some JS in the page to a targeted user.

------
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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

~~~
chippy
The website that users can log into, get JS to run on their computers and get
targets ads. Thats the benefit of a honeypot, not torrents.

~~~
AnkhMorporkian
Well that's just a scam. A honeypot, at least in common parlance on this site,
refers to getting a specific group of people to run/interact with something in
the interests of compromising their identity and/or blackmailing them. What
you're describing is pretty much just the MO of shady torrent sites.

