KickassTorrents is back online or at least a stripped down version of the original KAT, the domains of which have been shut down by the U.S. government. While the KAT owner remains detained, a mirror of his shuttered operation emerged but as expected many of the old site's features are noticeably absent, a new report said.
Venture Beat said in a report that the resurrected KAT can be accessed through the domain address KickassTorrents.website and the site went up thanks to the efforts of the people behind torrent links provider isoHunt. The same group was responsible for the mirror site of The Pirate Bay, which surfaced following the extended downtime suffered by TPB in late 2014.
But isoHunt has made clear that what they put together is far cry of the regular KickassTorrents services prior to the crackdown that saw the arrest of the site's owners and the its eventual disappearance.
"There is no forum, no community and no support ... it's simply a basic mirror," Venture Beat reported.
The KAT mirror site, as it runs now, is admittedly incomplete, indexing only contents that were uploaded by users "from the last year to year and a half," the report added. It's very likely too that the mirror site could disappear anytime as the isoHunt team indicated: "We don't know how long it can last, but at least it's something."
The group also advised KAT users to start retrieving the files they can still rescue. "It's not perfect but if users need to save and archive something it's time," isoHunt told Venture Beat.
It goes without saying too that uploading of new contents cannot be accommodated by the mirror as the report noted that what the site at the moment is far from being robust, but certainly functional.
More importantly, isoHunt put up the KAT mirror in support of Artem Vaulin in the same way that the group had acted in 2014 when The Pirate Bay was taken down.
In a manifesto that greets users when heading to the KAT mirror, isoHunt said that Vaulin's arrest is tantamount to violation "of our rights." "Our freedom is to share the human right which Artem Vaulin has been providing to millions of users from all over the world," the group added.
"Kat.cr is a website we all know and love, and the world will never be the same without it," the group further declared.