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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 fishybell on Monday April 24 2017, @03:56PM
The hassle it caused in a ~200 employee business almost pushed me to drop the fight.
It took me weeks to convince upper management that a non-self-signed, non-CACert certificate would be better, if only for the end-user experience to our employees of not having to click through a bunch of browser safety checks. God I wish LetsEncrypt was up and running back then.