Kickass Torrents Plays Cat-And-Mouse After Domain Seizure
The Kickass Torrents site went down Monday when its Kickass.so domain was banned by the “.so” Somalian registry officials. Down, but not out. Kickass resurfaced later in familiar waters under its old “.to” domain and appears to be fully functional.
Wired UK reported the Kickass take-down via domain seizure, but later updated the status at 2 p.m. local time that Kickass was back up and running.
“It appears that Kickass Torrents has reverted to its former “.to” domain, with no loss in functionality. Perhaps not such a hurdle, after all,” the update read.
“Whether this is a stopgap measure remains to be seen though — the site was previously targeted for takedown requests through that URL, so further ‘relocation’ efforts may occur.”
The “.so” registry also took down the scam site Kickasstorrents.so, according to TorrentFreak. While the site isn’t affiliated with Kickass Torrents, both sites are believed to be targets of copyright complaints, although this has yet to be officially confirmed.
Kickass Torrents had only been using the “.to” domain since November. Kickass has had a history of switching domain names. The U.S. Department of Justice pursued several popular torrent sites in 2011, including Torrentz and Demonoid. Kickass made the pre-emptive move to relinquish its “.com” domain in exchange for a “.ph” extension in order to evade U.S. authorities.
The latest internet piracy crack-down follows in the wake of The Pirate Bay’s near month-long absence after police raids seized several of the site-operators’ computers. Since then, Kickass Torrents has taken the lead as the number one torrent site by total number of visitors in 2015. Pirate Bay (copies and clones) slipped to the number four position behind Torrentz and ExtraTorrent.
Kickass was founded in 2008 and receives around one million visitors daily. Kickass is ranked No. 68 in the world by Alexa for internet traffic, and No. 43 in the United States. Kickass is also popular in India, where it ranks No. 23 and receives nearly 18 percent of the site’s traffic. But the U.S. is still the site’s most popular audience, responsible for 23 percent of the site’s traffic and ranked No. 43 in the nation overall.
The Inquisitr reported in 2013 that Kickass Torrents’ Philippines domain had expired on January 12. It was later updated that the site was accessible through its previous dot com account, but later reverted to safer waters at kickass.to – where the site currently resides after yet another game of cat-and-mouse with internet authorities.
