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KickassTorrents resurfaces online

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Re: KickassTorrents resurfaces online

#61

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 ju…

> 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.

Re: KickassTorrents resurfaces online

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: KickassTorrents resurfaces online

#63
post #6

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

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.

Re: KickassTorrents resurfaces online

#64
post #63
post #6

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

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…

and american tax payer idiots keep signing their checks.

Re: KickassTorrents resurfaces online

#65

> 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.

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.

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

Re: KickassTorrents resurfaces online

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Re: KickassTorrents resurfaces online

#67

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.

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.

Re: KickassTorrents resurfaces online

#68

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.

To catch those who upload the torrents?

Re: KickassTorrents resurfaces online

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: KickassTorrents resurfaces online

#70

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 ju…

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

https://www.tribler.org/

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