1.	Yesterday I got a phone call from David Shinpaugh, a developer at Broadband Mechanics, a web development company that we're partnering with. Shinpaugh's main computer crashed on Monday morning, and in putting it back together he needed to download a new copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0b2/Win.
2.	We chose this as our initial deployment envrionment for the high-bandwidth interfaces for our new software primarily because it has excellent XML support and access to an HTTP client from JavaScript, in other words we chose it for technical, not political or legal reasons.We really can't do the project if Shinpaugh doesn't have MSIE 5.0b2.
3.	So, when he went to http://www.microsoft.com/ie/ he found, surprisingly, that there was no link to download the public beta of 5.0, which I had downloaded myself just a few days eariler after a fiasco installing a new version of Netscape Communicator, but that's another story.
4.	I checked it out myself, and there was reference to the upcoming final 5.0 release, in mid-March, but no way to download the beta! Wow. I figured there must be an interesting story behind this, so I asked David to post a message on our discussion group, knowing that a fair number of Microsoft people read our site, hoping that we could get to the bottom of the problem.
5.	http://discuss.userland.com/msgReader$3132
6.	This morning we got to the bottom of it, it involves a small company Blue Mountain Arts, who sued Microsoft, and got a restraining order and that's why our development project is in trouble!
7.	Here's an email from Will Friedman explaining what's going on.