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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 epitaxial on Monday April 24 2017, @02:44PM (1 child)
I don't have a lot of trust in HTTPS these days. I'm pretty sure the government has all the master keys anyhow so they can sign any cert they want and be the man in the middle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 24 2017, @06:01PM
This is about a government site. Of course the government has the certificates of that site.