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KickassTorrents resurfaces online
- reubenmorais 10y agoPrevious 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
- drops 10y agoIs there a possibility of someone actually making a stable, long-term KAT mirror / follow-up without getting busted like the original one?
- ktta 10y agotorproject.org
- jeeceebees 10y agoThe 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 10y agoBut 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 10y agoIPFS works over tor! The implementation is pretty rudimentary at this point, though. I guess the main issue is actually distributing the tracker.
- thatcat 10y agoZeronet has analogous functionality. https://torrentfreak.com/play-p2p-impossible-shutdown-160301/ https://torrentfreak.com/play-p2p-impossible-shutdown-160301...
- orionblastar 10y agoBeware 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.
- speeder 10y agoThe 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
- StavrosK 10y ago> 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.
- csydas 10y agoTreaties. 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.
- supergreg 10y ago> "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.
- jsprogrammer 10y agoCloudflare also runs a MITM operation on TLS connections.
- TheHippo 10y agoNot relevant for the this site because the didn't even turned on HTTPS.
- mtgx 10y agoAnd for some strange reason ThePirateBay uses it.
- Zarel 10y agoI'd guess they use it as a DDoS protection layer, and have more proxies behind them.
- ScroogeMcDoug 10y agoSeems to work well for carder forums.
- nxzero 10y agoAny reason to believe this isn't a passive attack; aka: honeypot, watering-hole, etc.
- colejohnson66 10y agoWhy 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 10y agoOperating 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.
- Vexs 10y agoIn a similar vein, I've seen a lot of push in some communities to move to a zeronet-based torrent site.
- kilroy123 10y agoThat'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.
- AnbeSivam 10y ago> 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.
- michalskop 10y agoI used to have that for a very long time. (CloudFlare became the company I hate most on the net.)
- witty_username 10y agoIt works fine for me; it takes maybe 10-20 seconds to solve the CAPTCHA.
- the_mitsuhiko 10y agoWhere 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.
- Fej 10y agoTor especially.
- anexprogrammer 10y agoI use a popular VPN when out and about with the laptop. Even with a UK connection I get Cloudflare captchas probably 75% of the time on VPN. Not only does it trigger a captcha but a site that does so, if you're browsing a while, usually triggers another in 20-30 minutes. They don;t cookie the browser in any way, so if I happen to be browsing HN and go to 4 or 5 different Cloudflare links I get 4 or 5 captchas. Each with 20-30 minute refresh timeouts ticking. Mostly these days, unless it's a rare site that's worth the hassle, I close the tab rather than faff ticking boxes identifying road signs. So from this data point of one, Cloudflare costs sites traffic.
- rasz_pl 10y agokat.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 10y ago>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 10y agoIt sounds someone's just serving up a scrape that was done before the original went down.
- sergiotapia 10y agoAll of these are honeypots.
- AnkhMorporkian 10y agoWhat'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.
- xraystyle 10y agoExactly. If you want to see who's sharing a file you just join the swarm and look at the IPs in your torrent client. There's absolutely zero benefit to running a torrent honeypot. This is all civil copyright infringement anyway.
- chippy 10y agoThe 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 10y agoWell 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.
- supergreg 10y agoTo catch those who upload the torrents?
- AnkhMorporkian 10y agoThat's not illegal though. The people who are actually seeding the data, that's who the companies can go after, not the people posting files with metadata or magnet links. Sometimes (most of the time) those will be the same people, but that data is easily capturable via the aforementioned methods.
- lordnacho 10y agoSo, 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?
- janitor61 10y agoWhy 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.
- DarkLinkXXXX 10y agoYeah, I think it's much more plausible that people wanna serve you a bunch of ads and/or steal your account info.
- jszymborski 10y agoIt'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 10y ago> 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 10y agoI 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.
- meeper16 10y agoAWESOME!
- noxin 10y agoSame story at TorrentFreak: https://torrentfreak.com/kickasstorrents-mirrors-and-imposters-spring-into-action-160722/ https://torrentfreak.com/kickasstorrents-mirrors-and-imposte...
- known 10y agoKat.host
- forgotpwtomain 10y agoI'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 10y agoI 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.
- Meegul 10y agoAgreed. That's one of the things I love about HN in comparison with places like Reddit. The 'hivemind' is not nearly as strong here. There's certainly a general bias to what gets upvoted and what doesn't, but it's luckily not uncommon to see opposing opinions here. The empty echo-chamber that is Reddit gets tiring for someone who wants to actually think.
- daurnimator 10y agoI 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.
- rhino369 10y agoI think that's true of smalltime private trackers, but kickass is huge. It has to be making a lot of money.
- DarkLinkXXXX 10y ago>but kickass is huge. It has to be making a lot of money. That seems like a pretty fallacious leap to me. It may have a lot of users, but all those users add expense, and most of them are savvy enough to use an ad-blocker. Quite frankly, thousands of users does not a millionaire make. I'm sure we'll see more details in the upcoming suit though.
- p01926 10y agoDoes 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.
- cinquemb 10y agoAs 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.
- kilroy123 10y agoThis 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.
- mastax 10y ago> 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.
- icebraining 10y agoA decentralized torrent search network already exists, and it's actually funded by European public grants :) https://www.tribler.org/ https://www.tribler.org/