The USPTO (Patent and Trademark Office) has updated its Public Patent Application Information Retrieval (Public-PAIR) service so that it no longer supports HTTPS (secure) access. From the announcement with emphasis added:
Public PAIR Maintenance and Outage
The USPTO will be performing maintenance on the Public Patent Application Information Retrieval (Public Pair) beginning at 12:01 a.m., Friday, April 21 and ending at 2 a.m., Friday, April 21 ET.
During the maintenance period, Public PAIR will be unavailable.
Immediately after the maintenance, users will only be able to access Public PAIR through URLs beginning with HTTP, such as http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair. Past URLs using HTTPS to access Public Pair, such as https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair, will no longer work.
Can anyone explain why there would be this seemingly backwards move to insecure communications?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NCommander on Monday April 24 2017, @08:29AM (1 child)
Taking the argument one step further, a mass dragnet of internet traffic can't work if you can't tell what's in it. Granted, due to the fundamental nature of IP networks, you can always tell X talked to Y and got this DNS name, but you can't tell if he was looking to file a patent, review a bunch of other ones, etc.
Tin foil aside, the push to mass-encrypt the web wouldn't have taken off if there wasn't a feeling that it was necessary.
Still always moving
(Score: 4, Insightful) by zocalo on Monday April 24 2017, @08:56AM
Or maybe it's just technical. Something along the lines of budgets are tight, malicious traffic is up, and they can't effectively filter hostile HTTP traffic without either; a) forcing traffic to HTTP so they can do packet inspection with what tools they have, or; b) making cuts elsewhere in order to afford the necessary upgrades to HTTPS filtering. Sure, it might only mean a bunch of reverse proxies and their installation, but once you've allowed for all the pork you're going to be talking some serious money there...
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!