KickassTorrents resurfaces online | Hacker News Reader

KickassTorrents resurfaces online

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174 pointsnoxin79 comments

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

> 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.

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.

>> Attacking torrent sources isn't about recouping loss from piracy

Actually it's part of the battle preventing something extremly easy like popcorn time becoming great, easy, and safe - because if that happens, the media industry will be in big trouble.

The current spat of cheap Android boxes preloaded with Kodi (which itself isn't an issue) and all of the third-party stream-torrenting plugins (the real issue), are posing enough of a threat for big Canadian telcoms to go after them here. They're too easy to use, not to mention stream a lot of sports which is the last bastion for many cable companies to hold onto subscribers.

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

> That being said, the point of punishing criminals is to punish crime, not to end it.

No it's not.

Justice is not necessarily about revenge.

In some justice systems (like the US) it is, but in others justice is also about rehabilitation.

Another part of justice is deterrence. Please take a moment to consider how this is also different from revenge.

Revenge is a personal individual emotion that can sometimes be enjoyable. In my very personal opinion, revenge is not justice and only tangentially related to deterrence, and rehabilitation is the most important thing about justice.

> "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.

Cloudflare also runs a MITM operation on TLS connections.

Not relevant for the this site because the didn't even turned on HTTPS.

And for some strange reason ThePirateBay uses it.

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

Seems to work well for carder forums.

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.

> 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.

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

https://www.tribler.org/

Previous discussion on the arrest/takedown:

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

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

> 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.

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

It's sad, such a nice company, but they somehow cannot stop pissing people off.

I'm still pissed about a terrible interviewing experience I had with them.

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

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.

Tor especially.

I 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.

India, using a low grade ISP. May be it is that my ISP has very limited number of IP addresses, and he shares the same of IP with many users.

I have noticed the issue with IP addresses in Indian train ticket booking site also. Tatkal train tickets [1] open at a specific time of a day, and there is a huge rush to book tickets at that time. and the site allows only 2 tickets for an IP. Sometimes when I try to book Tatkal tickets, I would be denied because of some else already having booked from my ip. so I wondered whether my ISP has been lending some of it IPs for some automated train ticket booking brokers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatkal_scheme

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.

Does ADA mean that they can be sued over this? Or is that not how it works?

Section 508 violation?

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

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

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.

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.

And an FBI honeypot mixed in there as well.

Source?

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

torproject.org

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.

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.

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

I guess the main issue is actually distributing the tracker.

Zeronet has analogous functionality.

https://torrentfreak.com/play-p2p-impossible-shutdown-160301...

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

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

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.

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

>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.

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

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.

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.

Agreed. 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.

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.

I think that's true of smalltime private trackers, but kickass is huge. It has to be making a lot of money.

>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.

>thousands of users

You're seriously underestimating KATs size.

There's no chance they weren't making millions off of the site (and various other similar sites they operate).

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Kat.host

AWESOME!

All of these are honeypots.

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.

Exactly. 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.

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.

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.

To catch those who upload the torrents?

That'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.

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