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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, @05:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @05:55PM (#498960)

    Incorrect, the information may be public but who is looking at it and reviewing any given documents should NOT be public knowledge. If I'm working on some new wireless tech patent I don't want some big company to be able to record the various patents I'm looking into to then undermine my efforts. I think that is the real reason behind this switchover.