TorrentFreak

When it comes to online piracy, copyright holders have an obsession with Google. Every month the search engine is asked to take down links to millions of URLs to help stop the unauthorized distribution of their work. Strangely enough, many copyright holders fail to target the root of the problem as they don’t make the effort to send takedown requests to the originating websites.

KickassTorrents has been unreachable over the past hours due to DNS issues. The problem appears to be limited to the United States, Canada and Brazil. Kat.ph returns no DNS records at all in these regions, but it’s unsure what’s causing the trouble. TorrentFreak asked the KickassTorrents team for an explanation and we will update this [...]

In a surprise move the popular BitTorrent site KickassTorrents moved to a new domain today. The immediate effect of the switch is that after the ISP blockade last week, some UK users are once again able to access the site. This is the second domain change in two years for the infamous torrent site. Previously, KickassTorrents traded its .com domain to prevent it from being seized by U.S. authorities.

Earlier this month the major labels of the UK recording industry succeeded in having three major torrent sites blocked at the ISP level. KickassTorrents, H33T and Fenopy all disappeared from the screens of users not using a VPN or proxy, yielding some interesting results on the way. Data provided by Google suggests that not only did the blocks encourage a large fresh interest in other torrent sites and BitTorrent in general, official media outlets received more interest too.

This week several of the largest Internet providers in the UK started to block KickassTorrents, Fenopy and H33T, but this doesn’t mean that the sites have become entirely inaccessible. As a direct result of the blockades several proxies for the banned sites are now being overloaded with traffic..

BT, Virgin Media, O2 and Be There have started to block access to three of the world’s largest BitTorrent sites. The blockades were put in place following a High Court order earlier this year, which ruled that KickassTorrents, H33T and Fenopy were facilitating copyright infringement. With the sites no longer accessible, hundreds of thousands of UK BitTorrent users will be looking for a new hope, or options to bypass the filters.

KickassTorrents is down, possibly because the domain name expired. People all around the world are unable to access the second most visited torrent site since an hour or so. TorrentFreak contacted the admins to ask for an explanation, but we have yet to hear back from them. Interestingly, KickassTorrents either shows a “bad gateway” message [...]