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I think everyone is missing a key point. They won’t last 2000 years, or even 100. Tech aside, nature will wear them off long before then.
We have clay tablets that are 3,000 years old and still readable. Those qr codes aren’t etched deep in granite but some will survive through luck.
And data it links to is perfectly safe in the cloud! /s
A graveyard full of dead links. How spooky.
i have one of those already. my bookmarks file on the home pc, which began life ~ early 2001 and has thousands (10s of thousands… probably) of entries. it’s been ‘de-duped’ a few times over the years, but i’ve never ran a dead-link checker on them.
I have one from 10 years ago that’s probably half dead. Websites just love changing their path structures and breaking every link and bookmark that pointed to them.
our small biz website is over twenty years old. it’s been through numerous designs, several different backends, moved servers five times… url schemes change, site organization and content changes… but every single url that once existed and no longer does today, has a redirect to the relevant existing page. every. single. one. it’s an ‘automatic’. it’s something i’ve always done dating back to the earliest of early days of http
I do the opposite. I’ll move an entire directory just because the URL looks a bit nicer and break every old link. I don’t want a billion old redirect entries bogging up the codebase. Fuck it, it’s my site
I’m sure funeral homes won’t forget to renew the domains. Should have just encoded text.
Afaik, these pages have a comment function where the visitor may express their condolences or alike. I.e. the web page not only contains content but serves a purpose.
Which won’t be very useful when the domain doesn’t work or sends them to a sports betting website.
Ok so include the URL in the text too. Keep the obituary encoded.
A qr code can hold data itself, like 3 kb. Using it for text and pictures is kind of redundant though since you could also just carve the picture and text on the tombstone.
Using it for an URL to be able to store more data seems like a bad idea for other reasons. The oldest still active URL is 35 years. Who knows what happens once the owner dies or just decides to stop maintaining it.
Also, for the relatives. Having to maintain the online page seems like a burden and an obstacle to letting go.
A subscription service etched in literal stone targeted at the emotionally vulnerable. Not even death will stop these techbros exploiting corpses for money.
Doesn’t have to be a URL. You can encode any data.
No subscription required.
Of course, it’ll erode over time.
I think you may be vastly overestimating the storage capacity of a QR code and the goodwill of any company attempting this. You’re not fitting obituaries in that, certainly not any image.
We finally managed to crack the code! It’s an ancient dialect that hasn’t been spoken for millennia and we don’t know what it means, but at least we can decipher the image now!
We believe it was a religious enchantment of sorts. It reads: https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
