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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: 3, Informative) by isostatic on Monday April 24 2017, @11:15AM (7 children)
Why? What actual, real-world problem that attackers have actively exploited in the past and that needs to be dealt with is being prevented here?
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/07/06/23/1233212/ISPs-Inserting-Ads-Into-Your-Pages [slashdot.org]
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday April 24 2017, @12:34PM (6 children)
And what does that have to do with someone subtly modifying claims in patent documents as the OP suggested? Have ISPs been caught doing that?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @12:43PM
Do you really trust ad-pushers not to write code that deletes sections of pages by accident?
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday April 24 2017, @01:43PM (2 children)
Looking for a new ISP based on the TOS was awkward when I learned that my ISP was doing AD injection. Most others did not support HTTPS at the time, but my ISP did. Obviously, they understood the power of the dark side.
They could have easily made it look like all of their major competitors has egregious terms.
Then there is the unsecured AP problem. Many "Free" APs tamper with the Internet to varying degrees.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @05:57PM (1 child)
Err, what? Your ISP does not need to support HTTPS, it only needs to support faithfully transporting packets according to the internet protocol specification. Only the server and the client need to support HTTPS.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:39PM
Your ISP does not need to support HTTPS, it only needs to support faithfully transporting packets according to the internet protocol specification.
An ISP in a remote area whose upstream is slow and/or capped [codinghorror.com] would have an excuse to charge subscribers extra for "faithfully transporting packets according to the internet protocol specification" as opposed to running HTTP and HTTPS through the ISP's caching MITM. It'd be listed on subscribers' bills as a "Cache Miss Surcharge".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @02:06PM
http://www.dailytech.com/Best+Buy+Sued+Over+Bogus+Web+Site/article7450.htm [dailytech.com]
Not really the same, but had they not been caught you could image them extending this to traffic flowing over their in-store wifi. Never trust a business to put the customer's interest first. Business is all about money and any action that appears to indicate otherwise has a hidden financial motivation. If any business, be it a retailer or an ISP, has a financial advantage in alerting your traffic and can get away with it you know damn well they will.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:34PM
And what does [inserting advertisements into pages delivered through cleartext HTTP] have to do with someone subtly modifying claims in patent documents as the OP suggested?
The technical ability to perform one implies the technical ability to perform the other.
Have ISPs been caught doing that?
Not yet.