14 DAY TRIAL // The team that runs IsoHunt, a search engine for torrent files, has launched an unofficial mirror for Kickass Torrents (KAT), the world's largest torrent portal that was shut down yesterday by US authorities.
The site, which is accessible at kickasstorrents.website, has been set up today and features an older copy of KAT's database.
The KAT mirror only features a listing of the site's torrents, but not its community, one of the site's strong points, which no other torrent portal had and which was the thing setting it apart from any other movie and software piracy haven.
"It’s not perfect but if users need to save and archive something it’s time. We don’t know how long it can last, but at least it’s something," the IsoHunt told VentureBeat.
Authorities arrested KAT admin in Poland, shut down the site
KAT's demise started after US agents began an undercover operation to gather information on the torrent portal's day-to-day operations.
After collecting data on the site's financial transactions and bank accounts, US officials issued an international arrest warrant for KAT's admin, Artem "tirm" Vaulin, 30, of Kharkiv, Ukraine, whom Polish authorities arrested yesterday.
US officials also seized KAT's domain names and US and Canadian servers, effectively shutting down the site, to the dismay and collective gasp of people all over the Internet.
Official KAT proxies stopped working after a few hours
The site has been down since yesterday, even if small proxies have continued to work for a while but have now stopped answering requests altogether.
The shutdown was so effective that even KAT's Dark Web .onion URL stopped working after a few hours.
In light of KAT's takedown, other torrent and streaming sites like Solarmovie have also announced they will be shutting down, scared of a possible prosecution.
Petition to get Vaulin out of jail
Besides putting the KAT mirror up, IsoHunt's team has also created two petitions, with Change.org and the White House, hoping to raise enough signatures to get Vaulin out of jail.
At the time of writing, the Change.org petition has 221 supporters while the White House petition only 69 signatures (100,000 needed).
Below is the IsoHunt statement, which appears the first time you access the KAT unofficial mirror.