As merlyn points out, it's probably a state checker. looking at the long id parameter in both URLs, I would suspect that that's an obfuscated code that included the time when the code was generated; the server can determine if the time now and the time the code was generated was recent enough to allow the request. This is basically what I'm building into a site with some dynamic and restricted content to prevent bookmarking or linking to such content, but also to protect those users that might be using shared machines (so if a malicious user on that machine finds my site in the history logs, they won't be able to access the previous user's session unless they log in again).
Probably in the case of this first script, being logged in may not be a necessity and thus the code is ignored.
