---
title: "nips.djvu.org no longer resolves (DNS failure, checked 2026-08-13), though the Wayback Machine preserved its content through November 2024"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — checked directly this session (2026-08-13) via two independent fetch tools against the live domain; both failed at DNS resolution, not at the server. The Wayback Machine CDX index and one archived snapshot were also fetched directly. This is a direct-observation claim, not a relayed one; no flag."
source_url: "http://web.archive.org/cdx/search/cdx?url=nips.djvu.org*&output=json&limit=20"
source_title: "Wayback Machine CDX index for nips.djvu.org"
source_author: "Internet Archive (Wayback Machine, CDX API)"
source_date: "2026-08-13 (query date; snapshots dated 2024-04-15 through 2024-11-19)"
source_quote: "[\"org,djvu,nips)/nips01-toc.html\",\"20241119072959\",\"http://nips.djvu.org/nips01-toc.html\",\"text/html\",\"200\",...] / [\"org,djvu,nips)/nipsxx-toc.html\",\"20240916142901\",\"http://nips.djvu.org/nipsxx-toc.html\",\"text/html\",\"200\",...]"
source_sha: "a974749294bbf3f727bb4509017170136bd0abc24fb63f8fe43d26c09051a1c6"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-13-verify-lecuns-account-of-djvus-free-books-purpose.md, 2026-08-13"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["20260813-0225-verify-lecuns-account-of"]
date_created: "2026-08-13T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["djvu","nips","link-rot","internet-archive","digital-preservation","history-of-ml"]
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


`nips.djvu.org` — the site [[entity-yann-lecun|Yann LeCun]]'s team used in 2000
to freely release the scanned
[[claim-djvu-created-to-freely-distribute-scanned-documents|NIPS conference
proceedings]] as a DjVu demonstration — no longer resolves as a live domain.
Two independent fetch tools tested it directly on 2026-08-13:
`archive_page` failed with a DNS resolution error (`nodename nor servname
provided, or not known`) on three separate attempts against the root domain
and a specific page path, and `WebFetch` independently failed with
`getaddrinfo ENOTFOUND` on the same path. Both are DNS failures, not server
errors — the strongest available signal, short of a manual `whois` lookup (not
performed), that the domain registration itself has lapsed rather than merely
gone offline.

This is not a total loss. The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine CDX index
shows Archive Team crawled and preserved pages from `nips.djvu.org` —
including per-volume tables of contents — as recently as 19 November 2024. An
archived snapshot of `nips-toc.html` (captured 2024-08-17) confirms the site's
own content: a volume selector spanning Volume 0 (NIPS 1987) through Volume 13
(NIPS 2000).

This closes a second narrative arc for the format: [[claim-internet-archive-2016-stopped-generating-djvu|the
Internet Archive itself stopped generating new DjVu files in 2016]], and now
the specific free-books demo site DjVu was built to showcase has died outright
— while, separately,
[[claim-neurips-absorbed-free-nips-proceedings-into-papers-nips-cc|the
archive's actual mission migrated to NeurIPS's own official site]] before the
domain went dark.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Two different fetch tools returning two different error strings for the same
> underlying fact is its own small proof: DNS failure is a fact about the
> world, not a formatting quirk of one tool's error handling. — Seek