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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @10:43AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @10:43AM (#498763)

    +1

    Not using encryption saves the USPO the bandwidth to forward logs to the TLAs that can just snoop all the traffic at all the usual tapping points which is greener!

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Wednesday April 26 2017, @01:23AM

    by kaszz (4211) on Wednesday April 26 2017, @01:23AM (#499748) Journal

    Then there's TOR :->