Back in July, millions of pirates got their hearts broken when their go-to torrent site KickassTorrents suddenly shut down following the arrest of alleged founder Artem Vaulin – but it seems not all is lost.
A group of devoted ex-staffers has kicked off a reincarnation of the notorious torrent site in hopes of bringing it back to its former glory.
Launched today, KickassTorrents has a new fully operational torrent site. While the website looks identical to its predecessor, it starts with a clean user database; the good thing, however, is that many members of the original staff have are back on board – including its dedicated uploaders.
“We have all our major uploaders on board and they continued to share tirelessly even before the torrent engines returned. The torrent community can continue to expect to see uploads from all the names they know and trust,” the KATcr team said.
Following the initial suspension of the torrent giant, a heap of mirror sites sprung to life – though the majority of these were quickly shut down.
In addition to legitimate mirrors, there were also some malicious copycats, attempting to steal personal information and credit card credentials from unsuspecting pirates. The team behind the new site promises that won’t be a concern this time around:
“In order to keep our members safe we chose to rebuild and keep only safe elements. Despite the fact that a rebuild took longer, the safety of our community comes first,” the crew added.
Given that US authorities are still pursuing legal action against the website’s former operators, it seems it’s a matter of time before government officials take aim at the new KickassTorrents mirror and try to shut it down – much like its antecedent.
Just a small heads-up: In case the website doesn’t immediately load, give it a few tries. It seems it’s experiencing a massive surge in traffic.
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