http://www.t8o.org/~mca1001/crit/ms-palladium-whycached.html

Justification for copying

$Id: ms-palladium-whycached.html,v 1.8 2002/09/12 15:09:52 mca1001 Exp $

A little investigation of the use of Crit on Microsoft suggests that this is a software problem, possibly caused by the CritSuite not supporting HTTP correctly.

This is the charitable-to-Microsoft explanation, based on the fact that the CritSuite perl scripts are somewhat older than IIS 6 (the current server software on Microsoft's site).

Precedent for copying

Caching of copies of Microsoft's website is apparently perfectly acceptable.

Google have been doing this for some time. I would hyperlink the page, but I don't know how to break out of the CritSuite; apparently it isn't compatible with Google's highlighter. You get a looping redirect.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:K5fcJ4KY4yAJ:www.microsoft.com/PressPass/features/2002/aug02/0821PalladiumFAQ.asp+Microsoft+Palladium+Initiative+Technical+FAQ&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

The copy may go away

If the bug in Crit can be fixed, and Microsoft will play nicely and stand still while we criticise them, then this copy will become obselete. In this event, crit files pointing at it will need to be editted to point back at the original.

Those familiar with HTML will find this fairly easy - look for the

<link rev={comment|issue|support|query} href="URL#:words:(context)">

and edit the URL to point back at the original.

You will only be able to do this if they are stored on your own web server, or you have a username/password pair for the storage on crit.org.

Related discussion

Ross Anderson's TCPA / Palladium FAQ is the logical place to start, since it links to much of what others have said on the matter, including Microsoft.