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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @04:42PM (1 child)
Honestly, I'm starting to find this guy amusing. Isn't it comforting that some trolls never change?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @05:58PM
Well he isn't wrong per se, its just that there is no simple way around preventing groups of humans from colluding to screw over others. That requires constant vigilance and proper legislation.
The "series of contracts" is basically what we currently have, the troll is just naive enough to think that separate business entities could magically solve societies problems through "natural selection". Darwin would be so fucking depressed to see how his work has been co-opted for bad social policy agendas.