BLAH BLAH NEW UPDATED SUPER-UPDATE:
So there's been quite a bit of back-and-forth, and we got a bit lazy about keeping this thread updated. Here's the tl;dr...
- 1. we currently have katstorm.faith working properly via a... clever multi-proxy thing. It's slow, and it's not https'd currently; depending on how things go, we'll adddress both of those issues & get it out of beta-jail sooner or later (probably sooner).
2. Meanwhile, we're redirecting most of the other katstorm TLD's over to our baystorm.org "officially approved" tracker proxy (which is pretty damned funny: official tracker proxies... really?), because TPB folks are alot less dick-ish than the KAT crew has been of late - if I may be so blunt.
3. There was a #3, but it's been forgotten - whoops.
EVEN-MORE-LATEST UPDATE:
We're reconstructing the service using redundant domains katstorm.date and katstorm.xyz, as there's been some sort of fuckery wrt the katstorm.party domain itself (although the registrar, alpnames, seems to be doing their best to be stand-up - with the fuckery apparently coming down from the TLD organization itself). Currently both .date and .xyz just remap to this forum thread, but will be shifted over to the new site once we're ready.
Also we've written to the admins at kat.cr to see what's what, with the blockery coming from their direction. Sigh. Much block. So sad. Doge. Etc.
As to the rest of the trickery we're using to handle the cock-blockery from kat.cr... stay tuned!

LATEST UPDATE:
It appears that the admin(s) at kat.cr are actively blocking katstorm.party from connecting to kat.cr. At first I thought it was something happening on our end, but after reconfiguring katstorm to use GRE tunnels or haproxy instances running on other servers (which would cause the IP kat.cr sees katstorm coming from to be different than the IP katstorm's webserver is listening on), shortly after each attempt that exit IP would suddenly be unable to connect to any of the kat.cr IPs.
It's possible that one of our DCs is doing the blocking, but very unlikely since I tried several and they worked fine at first.
My guess is that the kat.cr admin(s) are blocking katstorm because we do a server-side thing that removes kat.cr ads for our visitors. That means kat.cr loses money because of us.... maybe?
In a short moment, we'll try to open a dialog with the admins at kat.cr to see if this is the problem, so we can get the block removed, maybe by simply allowing ads through. Dunno yet, we might just start proxying some other torrent site, or we might create our own.
I'll update this post as news becomes available.
In the mean time, if you still want to use kat.cr securely/anonymously, just get on CS first

here's the previous post...
For a long while, we were running an earlier version of our KickAss Torrents proxy on
Code: Select all
https://cryptostorm.is:8082/
and some other ports.
Since it seemed to be getting a good amount of traffic (and since the forces of censorship & media strangelhold seemed to be tightening around many of the other methods by which free access to KAT can be obtained by people seeking the ability to share digital data efficiently & cost-effectively ~ pj), we decided to replace it with a dedicated domain on a different server at katstorm.party.
At first it was running on an extra .eu server we had lying around (we usually have a few dev/test machines somewhere or other, helps when things move fast and we need extra capacity right away).
That was until this email from an anti-piracy company called comeso.org (or .de):
From: tracy@comeso.org
Dear sir or madam,
This is a notification of copyright infringement.
Ticket ID: (COMESOABUSE #5473)
We found cases of copyright infringements on the pages below:
Original Work: Session Keys Grand Y
Infringing URLs:
https://katstorm.party/e-instruments-se ... 86405.html
Original Work: Saint Seiya - Soul of Gold
Infringing URLs:
https://katstorm.party/anonimu-fansubu- ... 11888.html
Original Work: God Eater
Infringing URLs:
https://katstorm.party/horriblesubs-god ... 62544.html
https://katstorm.party/ohys-raws-god-ea ... 68073.html
https://katstorm.party/ohys-raws-god-ea ... 05371.html
Original Work: The iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls Second Series
Infringing URLs:
https://katstorm.party/horriblesubs-the ... 95369.html
I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above as allegedly infringing is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.
I ask you to take down this content within 48 hours and I would be grateful if you could send me a short message when you have accomplished the deletion.
To which I responded:
From: df@cryptostorm.is
The website https://katstorm.party/ doesn't host any content, it's a simple proxy to the website https://kat.cr/, so we have no control over the content.
If we took down the proxy, there are hundreds of others on the internet, all easily accessible via Google.
For example:
http://kickass-download.cf/
http://freeproxy.io/o.php?u=https://kat.cr
http://thekat.tv/
http://kickassto.co/
http://katproxy.is/
http://kat.cr.prx.websiteproxy.co.uk/
If you want the copyrighted materials you described to be removed from the internet, you would have to contact the people operating https://kat.cr/
To which Comeso responded:
From: tracy@comeso.org
Not my problem. You provide access to illegal content so you are 100% responsible for your "proxy".
Also other services similar to yours are able to block content that we report.
Since I didn't feel like dealing with this nonsense anymore, I passed it off to PJ

Here's his response to the above email:
From: pj@cryptostorm.is
Herr "Tracy" -
First off, my apologies if I have chosen an inaccurate honorific in my salutation; despite reading through the growing correspondence we've received from you thus far, I see no surname and cannot but guess at the appropriate term.
While we are heartened to hear of your "good faith beliefs" in various elements of consensus reality, it is unfortunately the case that personal beliefs rarely have the force of substantive justification for claims made under the legal systems of any of the possible jurisdictions covered under the activities being discussed - or alleged - in your correspondence thus far. Put another way, it may be the case that I have a "good faith belief" that our planet's sole moon is made of a particularly pungent French cheese. Alas, that belief won't get me a shot at winning a claim for all that delicious dairy product in a legitimate court of law. Nor will it, in fact, get me much beyond pitying stares from those with a more robust connection to objective reality.
In much the same way, your claims thus far teeter precariously somewhere between childish fantasy and delusional personal pocket-universe. In crassly quotidian terms, you've provided not one whiff of forensic or objective evidence in support of these fantastical assertions of some transgression of a right under (civil) law of some party which may or may not be in any legally substantive relationship with whoever you are. One finds it often to be the case that courts do, speaking in general terms, expect to be provided with more than flights of imaginary fancy when it comes to tort claims (or jurisdictionally equivalent legal assertions).
This is the place in this process where, therefore, we respectfully request that you provide to us substantive and independently verifiable forensic data to back up the oddly faith-based statements you've produced in early messages to our staff. We assume, given that you purport to do this for a living ("this" being some form of low-rent mercenary activity putatively on behalf of some kind of intellectual property "owner" somewhere in the world), you are familiar with the standards and expectations of digital forensics in the context of provisioning of network-based resources and claims made that such resources emanate from particular physical hardware devices under the custody and/or control of specific legal entities or individual persons. Because, obviously, if you don't know what you're doing wrt forensic standards one might well wonder if there's other "oopsie" holes in your knowledge praxis when it comes to other elements of your shakedown - let's be honest and call it what it is: extortion - attempt.
Once we receive those data - and don't stress over the method used to provide them to us, as we're pretty flexible in being able to accept most any commonly-supported format, channel, method, or encoding of said data - we will do our own close review to determine if they are congruent with your claims thus far.
If they aren't, we'll review our own legal rights to seek compensatory, punitive, and whatever other damages ("karmic retribution," perhaps?) duly-constituted courts of law might consider in the case of a lame-brained digital extortion attempt gone wrong.
It's worth noting, further, that such desperate ploys for easy money (or, worse yet, censorious removal of shared cultural patrimony) generally run afoul of criminal statutes in most every jurisdiction one might choose to visit on this beautiful planet of ours. Although we're somewhat well known for our tendency to avoid wasting LEO time on such picayune matters, one nevertheless remains aware that it's entirely possible some public prosecutor or similar figure will choose to take up such a criminal case and, as the saying goes, put your snarky ass in jail for a minute or three.
So there's that.
As to what is or is not "your problem," I'd personally suggest that you are underestimating the potential scale and scope of the set of things that could well become "your problem" as time goes by. The universe we share is funny like that: merely asserting one is free of problems isn't terribly effective in magically making any such problems vanish. Or so we've been told, for what it's worth.
While Goebbels was a big fan of "blocking content," we're not so much in that particular camp. Anyone holding one's breath for that to take place is likely to find themselves short of oxygen long before we start censoring packets coming across our network because some tinpot Torquemada decides to email us about his (her?) personal fantasies and other idiosyncratic belief quanta. We just don't roll that way, yo.
With... well, not so much respect as something more like contemptuous bemusement...
~ cryptostorm's contumacious network topologist-at-large, aka "pj"
After the above email was sent off, we never heard back from "tracy@comeso.org".
A week or so passes by, then suddenly the main cryptostorm.is IP gets blocked at the router/firewall by one of our longest-duration service providers, in Europe - folks we have worked with for years and who know our ways pretty well. (this is, incidentally, why we had a hiccup of about 36 hours in automated 'tokenbot' token deliveries - with that IP nullrouted, we also lost email comms on the box... and yes we're now separating out those two systems because redundancy & minimised cross-channel attack surfaces ~ pj)
So we contact them to see what's up, turns out they just received some correspondence from the CEO (one of them) of Comeso.org, a "Jan Wilkens". (I'm not yet finished checking into this putative "CEO," but look forward to publishing the results of our inquiries shortly

Jan's email contains basically the same complaints Tracy had about katstorm.party, but this time Jan is referring to the old KA proxy we still had running on:
Code: Select all
https://cryptostorm.is:8082
Since we've been with this particular service provider - the one housing the server on which this nullrouted IP currently lives - for quiet some time now, they didn't immediately kill the entire server, but they did firewall off the cryptostorm.is IP to prevent people from accessing whatever alleged "illegal content" was being passed through by our just-passes-along-packets proxy there. Even so, doing that also prevented everyone from accessing our main corporate website.
So I told respectfully requested of (~ pj

That made them happy, so they brought the cryptostorm.is IP back up.
Fast forward a few more days, the katstorm.party website that at the time was living on a different .eu-based server suddenly goes down.
We contacted the colo/DC provider from which we have purchased our rights to this machine to see what's up, and it's basically the same story as what the earlier service provider did.
So I go out and buy a couple of VPSes that advertise as being the type of provider that ignores all DMCA and related complaints. We decided as a team to seek additional network infrastructure via providers that are less easily swayed by false information pushed out by these worthless media cartelbots and their various assorted henchmen, toadies, and stooges. (~ pj)
I setup nginx on both VPSes (with no logging of anything sensitive like visitor IPs), then change katstorm.party's DNS to a round robin that switches between the two, and the rest is history

For the curious, the nginx.conf that powers katstorm.party is available @ our github katstorm repository, in full detail. Who knows... it might prove handy to others who face similar challenges.