http://musicbrainz.org/ws/1/ will cease to exist soon

[mwiencek]

https://blog.metabrainz.org/2018/02/01/web-service-ver-1-0-ws-1-will-be-removed-in-6-months/

That didn't happen in August, but will likely happen soon. It should be relatively straightforward to adapt the code to use https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Development/XML_Web_Service/Version_2 (I see there are already many uses of /ws/2/ here, but still some /ws/1/ ones too).