I’m not sure what I’d do without World Star

I had my own brief moment of crisis the other day, when the company that hosts my own blog tried to charge my credit card for another year's worth of hosting. Because I'm a professional hip-hop blogger, which is to say a fucking loser, the TIs at MasterCard were like, "Hold on a sec, bro! How in the fuck are you trying to spend $135 in one day? Don't try to say it's because your grandma died, and you have to buy a new suit, because the one you used to wear in high school doesn't fit your fat ass anymore, like you did when we had to call your house back in 2001. How many times is your grandma going to die?"

No, really, that's more or less what they said, and that's how tight a leash they must be keeping people on, now that we have a black president.

Fortunately, I was given a seven day grace period before they pulled my shit altogether. and in that time I was able to get it to go through on a different card.

If I hadn't, people might have suspected that my shit got shut down by the Department of Homeland Security, even though I'm not in the business of bootlegging people's shit. It sounds like that may have been what happened yesterday, when World Star experienced a period of downtime, and everyone (on Black People Twitter) feared the worst. Except, of course, that there might be legal concerns as to how World Star gets its content - let alone the actual nature of the content.

It's never been clear to me whether or not what World Star does really is illegal. Er, illegal enough that it might one day get shut down by the Department of Homeland Security or some shit, like OnSmash. I remember one time my old friend eskay complained, via semi-public email correspondence, that World Star somehow steals bandwidth from YouTube and other video hosting sites, but I might not be smart enough to understand how all of that works. Doesn't YouTube host videos for free anyway? And it could just be that eskay is just jealous that, as one of the guys from Grandgood recently broke down, World Star's popularity compared to Nah Right is roughly comparable to, say, Nah Right's popularity compared to my own blog. Which is to say that World Star is more popular than Nah Right (or any other hip-hop site, for that matter) by orders of magnitude. It must be amongst the most popular sites on all of the Internets.

You'd think that if World Star's basic business model is so illegal, the TIs would have shut it down a long time ago. (That is, unless it's part of some overall conspiracy to keep black people mired in poverty, which I of course wouldn't doubt.) It's not like the "intelligence community" isn't aware of World Star. Lest we forget, it only took like a matter of hours for them to track down that guy Trashman, or whatever his name was, after he claimed to have tampered with bottles of Gerber baby food. It was on the O'Reilly Factor and everything. Plus, I think I once read, on one of these troof-oriented sites where I get my news, that several employees of one of these intelligence agencies had to be disciplined, after it was determined that they were spending most of their days sitting around looking at Internets pr0n, including (if they're lucky) World Star's legendary cam hoo-er videos - which I, as an expert on the topic, consider amongst the very best pr0n in all of the Internets, and which, I'll have you know, were created specifically for World Star, rather than just stolen from some other site.

And so what if they were? The other day, I visited the new, improved (in the sense that it's less illegal) OnSmash, and while I noticed that there weren't any direct links to illegally download music, which would have been too convenient, they've still got that same video player. The videos, apparently, weren't the issue. It was the mp3s. Furthermore, I flipped through the search warrant that the Department of Homeland Security used to seize the old OnSmash domain name, mostly to see how much more money they made than I do, and I don't seem to recall it saying anything about the videos one way or the other. If it did, there probably wouldn't be any videos on the new, improved OnSmash. Indeed the new, improved OnSmash seems designed very specifically to avoid the offenses cited in the aforementioned search warrant. So, for example, instead of clicking on a direct link to one of these sites like Rapidshare to download some garbage by Trey Songz (nullus), you click on a link to a separate page, which explains that you're now being redirected to another site, like, in many cases, Nah Right, where you can click on a direct link to one of these sites like Rapidshare to download some garbage by Trey Songz, thus incriminating Nah Right rather than OnSmash. I'm not sure if I'd like this new system, if I were one of the sites being linked to. But maybe they'll get lucky, and the Department of Homeland Security won't bother looking into the new site by the same people they're prosecuting. It could happen: So far they haven't bothered shutting down the new dajaz1, which is the same thing as the old dajaz1 except at a slightly different domain; and they didn't bother shutting down Nah Right in the first place, even though it does the same thing as those other sites, and it's way more popular. Hmm...