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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 c0lo on Monday April 24 2017, @01:04PM
Next time, when your tiny brain can't make sense of it, you only need to ask.
You see, when all connections are encrypted, there's little to jump in the eye of NSA when somebody really need private communication, 'cause everybody uses encryption by default.
If all the traffic is plain, any encrypted communication becomes immediately visible and suspect, even when legit.
I'm sorry if your job becomes harder now, but cheer up... you have grounds to ask for a raise if that's the case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0