Link Rot Rescue Project

The Problem

Much of what is published on the web eventually disappears due to “link rot”—a phenomenon where links become dead or content is removed from centralized servers. For independent journalists like Brandon Tauszik, this vulnerability became a reality when a major project commissioned by the International Committee of the Red Cross was terminated by an IT sweep without notice. Traditional web archiving often lacks the integrity to prove that recovered content is the exact, original version, leaving freelancers’ digital legacies at risk of being lost to time or subject to denialism.

The Solution

Starling Lab collaborated with Tauszik to deploy a “future-proof” workflow based on the Capture, Store, Verify framework. The team first converted his dynamic, dependency-heavy websites into portable static sites managed on GitHub. To establish a cryptographic “root of trust,” digital fingerprints of these sites were signed and registered on the Avalanche, Numbers, and LikeCoin blockchains. For long-term preservation, the assets were archived in “cold storage” on the Filecoin distributed network and distributed via peer-to-peer protocols like IPFS and Hypercore. This approach replaced fragile “location addressing” (URLs) with “content addressing” (CIDs), ensuring that the correct, original version of his work can be retrieved and verified independently for decades.