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 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".