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A Long Bet Pays Off - Internet Archive Blogs

Husky

THE Prey 2 fanatic
Today I read a very interesting blog post on the Internet Archive.

11 years ago, on the site longbets.org, a friendly wager was made between two mavens of the web: Jeremy Keith and Matthew Haughey.
The bet, to be revisited a decade and a year later, would be whether the URL of their wager at Long Bets would survive to a point in the semi-distant future.
That is, this day, February 22nd, 2022, (2/22/2022).
As of this writing, the URL absolutely has survived.
The bet was won just yesterday, as Long Bets kept all of their old bet URLs alive. You can view the bet here:

Keith's Argument​

"Cool URIs don't change" wrote Tim Berners-Lee in 01999, but link rot is the entropy of the web. The probability of a web document surviving in its original location decreases greatly over time. I suspect that even a relatively short time period (eleven years) is too long for a resource to survive.

I would love to be proven wrong.

Haughey's Argument​

Though much of the web is ephemeral in nature, now that we have surpassed the 20 year mark since the web was created and gone through several booms and busts, technology and strategies have matured to the point where keeping a site going with a stable URI system is within reach of anyone with moderate technological knowledge. My oldest sites are going on 13 years old at the time of this bet and the original URL scheme still functions via 301 redirects to a final format we selected about six years ago.

Detailed Terms​

On February 22nd, 2022 from 00:01 UTC until 23:59 UTC,
entering the characters http://www.longbets.org/601 into the address bar of a web browser or command line tool (like curl)
OR
using a web browser to follow a hyperlink that points to http://www.longbets.org/601
MUST
return an HTML document that still contains the following text: "The original URL for this prediction (www.longbets.org/601) will no longer be available in eleven years."

A 301 redirect from www.longbets.org/601 to a different URL containing that text would also fulfill those conditions.

If those conditions are met, Matt wins.

If those conditions aren't met, Jeremy wins.
 

DanteFox

Member
So you're telling me that as recently as 2011 there was any question as to whether a url could survive 11 years? I feel like I'm missing something.
 

nush

Member
There's still a few websites I visited back in the late 90's still active. What a stupid bet and why is this news?
 

ShirAhava

Plays with kids toys, in the adult gaming world
This whole thing reads like chain mail spam you'd get in your yahoo or aol email in 2002

neat I guess?
 
simpsons-nerd.gif
 

diffusionx

Gold Member
The publishers of those catalog's are getting more and more aggressive.
I'm thinking Nintendo's win versus Vimm has caused a domino effect, unfortunately.
It’s not even really a “win”, let’s be real, Vimm was clearly copyright infringement and there is no case otherwise. I think Nintendo was more or less ok with these sites provided they flew under the radar but as soon as they start making the rounds on TikTok it’s over.
 

West Texas CEO

GAF's Nicest Lunch Thief and Nosiest Dildo Archeologist
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