KickAss Torrents (Photo : Facebook)
Anti-piracy authorities have once again made its pangs of regulation be felt after it takes down the Somali internet domain of KickassTorrents. The popular torrent site was forced to transition back to its Tongan domain earlier this week.
Regular visitors of the kickass.so domain was greeted by an "Error 404" after the site was taken down by authorities, since then the website has switched back to its previous domain kickass.to which uses a Tongan top-level domain.
The website has been using the Somalian domain since November and it has been the website's practice to rotate between different top-level domains in order to evade crackdown imposed by authorities.
The torrent indexer is considered as one of the biggest torrent site in the world next to The Pirate Bay and the site was even ranked by online analytics company Alexa as the world's 68th biggest website, according to Time.
The website was founded in 2008 and since then it has already experience several domain changes, most notable of this were in 2011 when the United States Department of Justice targeted major torrent sites like Demonoid and Torrentz.
The .SO registry has seized the kickass.so domain along with the scam site kickasstorrents.so most probably due to complaint from copyright holders although the registry declined to make a comment about the situation, according to Torrent Freak.
The takedown action is reminiscent of the same registry attack that was imposed on The Pirate Bay when it lost several of its domain including thepiratebay.sx and thepiratebay.ac after charged with similar copyright complaints.
Presently, the .so domain of KAT is unavailable but the team confirmed that it is working around the clock to migrate back to the .to domain.
