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Users Will Only be Able to View Patents via HTTP; HTTPS will no Longer Work

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

martyb writes:

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: 2) by c0lo on Monday April 24 2017, @09:42AM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 24 2017, @09:42AM (#498739) Journal

    chances some zero day or physical interference is going to be used too, and https won't save you either. The price to pay is no caching.

    Mmmm... if I'm changing my tablet every 3-4 days and take care of it, you'll have a hard time even with physical access.

    Price for a new cheap tablet for me - $35 [aliexpress.com]. Price for you to pay someone to physically access the tablet - what the daily salary for an TLA agent nowadays?

    Then, of course, there's the much cheaper $5 wrench [xkcd.com] attack

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