Treaties. The nebulous amount of treaties across the world, specifically with the US can make it incredibly easy for just about anyone to be subject to its jurisdiction in some manner. As long as the US is politically active and persuasive enough to get foreign governments into these agreements, their reach will extend very far. As an aside, it's part of why Britain's EU Exit is such a mess; all the treaties and agreements formerly drawn up were based on Britain in the EU - those agreements were discussed for years before being agreed upon. There are thousands of discussion points and it takes a really long time.

As to why keep attacking KAT? (or any other torrent site for that matter?) To scare your average citizen. When Napster was huge in the US and the RIAA got involved, you'd have almost daily stories in newspapers or on TV about the RIAA suing college students, high school students, etc, with huge lawsuits. You'd think this would result in a revolt against the RIAA, but the reality is that these had sticking power in the US courts. Most US citizens, despite the relative wealth they have compared to other countries, could not pay off the few thousand dollar per song fines they would receive if sued. Most couldn't even afford a single $1000 fine. The idea for the RIAA/MPAA wasn't that you need to stop every download every - it's that you need to make a big enough splash to scare the majority of citizens into not downloading.

While many streaming and download services have arisen since that time, offering cheap and legal options for on-demand shows/music, the companies still would rather that stuff went back to the way it was, with only their authorized publishers being the source for media. Attacking torrent sources isn't about recouping loss from piracy - it's about recouping losses from the media conglomerates' inability to rapidly adjust to new technology, and the change in how many citizens choose to get their entertainment.

> If they keep doing that, they will end with random dictators pulling a Turkey and demanding arrest of political opponents that live in USA

And they just won't comply, because the USA does whatever they want without much regard for laws.

This is pretty much like the drug war. El Chapo's interview was extremely insightful in this regard. He basically asked if he going to jail had any impact on the drug trade in first place. The answer is resoundingly NO. There is a huge market for drugs and if not El Chapo, Chloe Epa would take it over. Same goes for torrents. They will always exist, American law thugs just want to justify their own existence jailing some.

They almost certainly did business with with US based banks, which, given that at least one of the charges is money laundering, is likely to be enough.

Story: https://torrentfreak.com/can-kickasstorrents-make-a-comeback...

And for some strange reason ThePirateBay uses it.

Cloudflare also runs a MITM operation on TLS connections.

Seems to work well for carder forums.

A decentralized torrent search network already exists, and it's actually funded by European public grants :)

https://www.tribler.org/

> Eventually, I predict there will be a decentralized torrent site. Using magnet links and just file names. Nothing hosted anywhere.

There's probably other versions of this but I know of 'Play' on zeronet (which I won't link because piracy, it's easy enough to find). It's a fairly elegant version of what you described.

And an FBI honeypot mixed in there as well.

The future is an IPFS mirror where the entire magnet list and web frontend are peer to peer. When everyone can host the site individually on their own computer there won't be a way for authorities to seize servers or domains.

torproject.org

That's really the only solution. A decentralized torrent site, that only hosts names and magnet links.

However, there needs to be some kind of control built in. That way there isn't spam and abuse. Not sure how you would accomplish this.

Then there would be another weak link that authorities would likely target - trackers and servers running trackers.

>Then there is a distinct lack of advertising/popup spam = why would anyone run this out of goodness of his heart other than as a honeypot?

Because it was built in 24 hours and they haven't had time to set those up yet, maybe? Just a guess.

It sounds someone's just serving up a scrape that was done before the original went down.

I downvoted you for saying "This is probably an unpopular opinion here". Your opinion is valid enough, no need to qualify it or generalize the moral values of the HN community.

I recall seeing figures for other sites and they weren't making millions. Infact they were barely scraping by.

These sites seem to be run by idealistic individuals, rather than as a profit making enterprise.

The worst are the sites that sell the ads and don't even have the torrents, they look like torrent or direct download sites and only have shady links that lead to more ads and no content so they don't even incur in facilitating piracy.

It's also a lot simpler and effective for anti-piracy agencies and LEOs to make honeypot torrent files or even just peer on existing torrents. You can monitor all the IPs in flagrante delicto that way... running a torrent site doesn't catch anyone red-handed per-se (particulalry with magnate links) and is a lot of overhead.

> Would there be a point to the FBI operating a torrent site?

Possibly for the same reason they end up operating other sites such as illegal pornography sites.

But why do they do that? Because these sites have users who sign in and upload things. In this case, they could have access to the releasers account details. usernames, emails, passwords. It's generally the releasers that are the same people or groups that do the ripping, who may have relationships with studios, networks, cinemas etc. Nothing major but it's a bit better than not having them.

Also, if a third party controls a server, they can, as Snowden has repeatedly shown, target specific users with malicious payloads. Even if they are using HTTPS.

Yeah, I think it's much more plausible that people wanna serve you a bunch of ads and/or steal your account info.

Why would they need to do this for a honeypot? Visiting a torrent website is not illegal. You /can/ download Linux ISOs from them.

The government could just upload a torrent and watch the connected IP list. Actually, they don't even need to upload a torrent. Just get a torrent and see who you connect to. Anyone you connect to is uploading that content.

What's the point of a torrent honeypot? It's incredibly trivial to track which IPs are downloading a torrent; operating the site which offers magnet links gives you no additional information whatsoever.

Does ADA mean that they can be sued over this? Or is that not how it works?

reCAPTCHA does have an audio option, and it seems to be accessible to screen readers, as detailed in this blog post: http://terrillthompson.com/blog/682

When the checkbox is clicked, a visual puzzle appears; right below, there's a button that can be clicked to switch to the audio captcha. Here's a demo: https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo

Section 508 violation?

It's sad, such a nice company, but they somehow cannot stop pissing people off.

I use a popular VPN when out and about with the laptop. Even with a UK connection I get Cloudflare captchas probably 75% of the time on VPN.

Not only does it trigger a captcha but a site that does so, if you're browsing a while, usually triggers another in 20-30 minutes. They don;t cookie the browser in any way, so if I happen to be browsing HN and go to 4 or 5 different Cloudflare links I get 4 or 5 captchas. Each with 20-30 minute refresh timeouts ticking.

Mostly these days, unless it's a rare site that's worth the hassle, I close the tab rather than faff ticking boxes identifying road signs.

So from this data point of one, Cloudflare costs sites traffic.

India, using a low grade ISP. May be it is that my ISP has very limited number of IP addresses, and he shares the same of IP with many users.

I have noticed the issue with IP addresses in Indian train ticket booking site also. Tatkal train tickets [1] open at a specific time of a day, and there is a huge rush to book tickets at that time. and the site allows only 2 tickets for an IP. Sometimes when I try to book Tatkal tickets, I would be denied because of some else already having booked from my ip. so I wondered whether my ISP has been lending some of it IPs for some automated train ticket booking brokers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatkal_scheme

Tor especially.