The continued reliance on the Wayback

[aminaas1576]

They both recall the start of the world wide web, as well as internalizing the rules and mores that followed its birth. They were well-qualified to debate on the longevity of URLs and the position that a specific URL would hold across time.

That said, Keith was skeptical. Haughey was optimistic.

Like a lot of its neighbors, Bet #601 is too clever by half; the bet states that it is won or lost depending on the availability of the bet at the URL the bet is hosted at. That is, two situations exist to judge the outcome: Either the URL 1 exists, at which point the bet is lost, or it does not exist, at which point the bet is won.

(Strikingly, if the bet had been won, the Internet Archive would phone number library possibly be the only place to browse the site in its original form, where it would have then helped prove the funds should go to Bletchly Park Trust. Machine as the vault of the Web’s lost memories would have persisted, in a very sharp and slightly less financially-beneficial way. Such is the price of memory.)

For the record, here are the statements made by each bettor about their arguments for the wager:


Jeremy Keith
Jeremy Keith:
“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.