Mystery of the Luxembourg Web
Discovered in 2018, as a result of a language detection analysis by Internet Archive on all homepages in their web archive. Finding websites in Luxembourgish language is not as straightforward as might be the case with other languages. Usually we can exclude around 85% of websites as falsely identified as “Luxembourgish”. So this finding was among the rare 15% of the hidden Luxembourg web. However, it seems we are stuck outside the actual content of the website.
In October 2020, during the online WARCnet meeting at the University of Luxembourg, Kees Teszelszky launched a Twitter Challenge around web archeology, aiming to find the most interesting, quirky and strange discoveries from old websites, titled “Raiders of the Lost Web”.
WARCnet ChallengeParticipants were encouraged to share their discoveries, method and story on Twitter. We took up this challenge in the form of the story you find here below:
demCarlosainhiem.com
Carlo’s shirt
Who is Carlo?
Why does it have a website?
Maybe Sonic’s thought bubble will clear things up:
Happy Birthday! However, if you want to access your site, let’s test how fit your memory is at age 50!
A celebration – a challenge, what comes next?
Test your memory… and maybe find the code…
Empty entry field.
Button to enter.
Nothing else.
But what is the code?
It’s not “Code”, neither “Carlo”, nor “Sonic”
Back to the beginning:
Who is Carlo?
The result from the Whois Lookup only leads us to further disappointment.
All of the data is REDACTED FOR PRIVACY
A conspiracy?
Without any further clues, generations of web archivists will suffer defeat facing this enigma. So close to entering demCarlosainhiem.com and yet so far away…
What magic and wondrous lands could lie behind the gates of the “Enter” button, forever concealed and protected by the unknowing. Under the watchful gaze of Sonic the Hedgehog. Waving his gloved hand in contempt.
Will we ever find the code?
Well… as it turns out… Dem Carlo säin Hiem won the challenge, which is great!
Still, we are nowhere closer to knowing the identity of Carlo, the secret of his shirt, or the code to enter the website.
If you are out there. If you have further information or clues that could lead to the solution, please come forward. Help us solve this mystery of the Luxembourg Web.