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posted by n1 on Monday April 24 2017, @07:31AM   Printer-friendly
from the one-step-forward,-two-steps-back dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by zocalo on Monday April 24 2017, @08:56AM

    by zocalo (302) on Monday April 24 2017, @08:56AM (#498722)
    Unlike some public companies that have responded to requests for customer data with a legal counter challenge, I can't imagine the USPTO putting up much of a fight, if any, in the event of a request for access logs. That narrows things down a little more by removing the targetted retrival of information and really just leaves wholesale data gathering as the sole valid reason for the tinfoil hat wearing members of the peanut gallery.

    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...
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    UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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