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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: 2) by theluggage on Monday April 24 2017, @03:07PM (2 children)
Can anyone explain why there would be this seemingly backwards move to insecure communications?
Your department head just got a Strongly Worded Memo when it came to light that you'd been using a free SSL certificate from an Israeli company who aren't on the approved suppliers list, It costs $50 to get a commercial certificate and there's no budget line for that in the current project code, the person in IT who needed to approve the LetsEncrypt certbot client for installation wrote "you must be fucking joking" on the form (and immediately went on sick leave) and even if you wade through all this shit today it will come back and haunt you in a year or two when the certificate needs renewing so, frankly, fuck it.
Never underestimate the hassle that needing a $50 certificate can cause in a big, bureaucratic institution.
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Monday April 24 2017, @03:56PM
The hassle it caused in a ~200 employee business almost pushed me to drop the fight.
It took me weeks to convince upper management that a non-self-signed, non-CACert certificate would be better, if only for the end-user experience to our employees of not having to click through a bunch of browser safety checks. God I wish LetsEncrypt was up and running back then.
(Score: 2) by el_oscuro on Tuesday April 25 2017, @09:00PM
About 20 years ago, I worked on a government contract. I left for a different contract, then came back about 6 months later. Almost the second I got in the building, one of the senior accounting drones was waiting for me at my desk, with a list of long distance calls I had made during my previous stint.
I was an Oracle DBA and most of those calls were to Oracle support. A few were to my home voice mail. That was back with the phone companies had those shitty "in state" long distance rates for anything more then 10 miles away.
I calculated the total cost of my "long distance" voice mail calls and it was:
$1.25
I pulled some loose change out of my pocket and paid him. I wonder how much it cost the government to collect that $1.25?
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