Bellingcat Data Digging: Solving the 111. Country Collapse Challenge

Collapse Challenge

The Challenge Scenario

The prompt for challenge 111, titled Country Collapse from the Bellingcat Data Digging series, presented an intriguing historical investigation:

In late 1996, the official website of the Lisbon World Fair (Expo 98) listed its first group of more than one hundred participating countries. Before the fair opened its gates in May 1998, one of those registered countries ceased to exist. The assignment was to identify the exact name of the removed nation as it was spelled on the official web page at that time.

The challenge description provided two essential leads: Looking beyond the standard Wayback Machine. Translating the word archive into Portuguese.

Decoding the Hints and Finding the Archive

The word archive translates to arquivo in Portuguese. Combining the event name with this term, I executed a focused web search for: Lisboa Expo 98 arquivo.

The search immediately directed me to Portugal’s national online preservation service, arquivo.pt, which maintains comprehensive historical records of Portuguese web properties

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Exploring the Historical Snapshots

Armed with the right archive repository, I began sifting through preserved records of the original expo98.pt domain. Many of the oldest crawled snapshots from 1996 were incomplete, broken, or returned under construction notices.

Navigating through the timeline index to late 1996, I discovered a fully intact capture recorded on 4 November 1996 at 10:40:40: http://www.expo98.pt:80/en/participantes/paises.html

This document displayed the English language announcement celebrating the achievement of reaching over one hundred registered nations prior to the official deadline

Spotting the Typo and Finding the Solution

Historically, Zaire underwent a complete political overhaul and name change in May 1997, becoming the Democratic Republic of the Congo before Expo 98 opened. While standard diplomatic registers spell the country as Zaire or Zaïre, standard variants failed validation because the challenge strictly requested the exact spelling used on that specific web page.

Carefully inspecting the participant paragraph on the archived page revealed a distinctive typographic error in the list: ...Croatia, Algeria, Zairie, United Arab Emirates, Italy...

The webmasters had mistakenly typed the country as Zairie. Submitting this exact string resolved the challenge successfully.

Solution: Zairie

Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to Miguel Ramalho for designing such an engaging and educational challenge. Another massive thanks to Bellingcat and the entire Data Digging project for continuously providing the community with outstanding open source intelligence challenges.