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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: 3, Interesting) by Pino P on Tuesday April 25 2017, @02:47PM
Yes. One reason why it is better to stay with https, since the login already requires https.
Say a site relies on a third-party resources available only through cleartext HTTP. Running the whole site on HTTPS would trigger mixed content blocking when the site attempts to retrieve a third-party resource. I can't think of any such third-party resources presently in use on USPTO.gov, but until a few days ago, CanIUse.com's API was available only through cleartext HTTP [github.com]. And for a long time, ad servers were HTTP-only as well.
Who uses public proxies nowadays?
Mostly people in remote areas, where the ISP operates a caching proxy because its own upstream is slow and/or capped.