Mirrors and translations

I don't mind people distributing free copies of documents available from my server. However, I do mind people distributing documents that are no longer available from my server. After I remove or update a document, I don't want old versions running around, and I really don't want any confusion over which versions are old. Make sure that your mirrors are kept up to date, and make sure that each document is properly timestamped. (This means that the modification time announced by your server is the same as the modification time announced by my server when you obtained the document.)

I also don't mind people publishing translations of HTML pages available from my server; I appreciate the work that has gone into these translations. Please make sure that a message such as ``translated to Sanskrit by V. S. Apte, 2000-12-24'' appears next to my name at the top of the translated page, and please watch for updates of the original pages. It is a good idea to keep copies of the original pages and use a tool such as diff to see what has been updated.

Warning to mirror operators: URLs of the form ftp://cr.yp.to/whatever are going away. URLs of the form ftp://ftp.cr.yp.to/whatever will last somewhat longer, but eventually I'm going to eliminate all FTP service. This does not mean that HTTP crawling is encouraged; I'm going to start supporting low-bandwidth update notifications before I disable FTP service.