21–30 of 172 posts
Also, at the bottom of the page "This page is owned by Service Desk." What does that mean? And it's legal to publish a .GOV site using Drupal?
In patent search, there is no "search" box. Instead, the "quick search" forces you to specify two (and exactly two) text queries on the database columns with obligatory boolean operation.[1] Even if you happen to find an interesting patent, good luck linking to it (which should be the number one service they provide - GET individual patent documents). The page showing the patent document has a dozen cryptic query parameters in the URL, some of which relate to the search query you used to find the patent! No "make shareable link" button to be seen, either.
And don't get me started on the trademark search, or Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS), as they like to call it.[2] When you navigate to the front page, you get a private session identifier - in your URL of course! And when you search for a trademark ("simple search" is intuitively known as "New User" here) and select a TM to view, you would be excused of thinking that the short URL in your browser address bar is the linkable URL of this entry. But no - it's just your session identifier along with the document's index in the results of your last search query.
When you leave the trademark site or just click "Logout" (since you're a kind person - they after all ask you "logout when you are done to release system resources allocated for you"), that URL is gone in the wind. If you shared a link to that trademark to your friend, they only get this very helpful page:
This search session has expired. Please start a search session again by clicking on the TRADEMARK icon, if you wish to continue
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well if you put on your tinfoil hat - maybe someone wants to track who's viewing which patents, which they can't do when it's encrypted. You're right, it doesn't make any sense to do this, so there must be an ulterior motive.
If that were the case and USPTO were in on the trick, why the need to drop HTTPS? They'd have that data already, so could just share it directly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well if you put on your tinfoil hat - maybe someone wants to track who's viewing which patents, which they can't do when it's encrypted. You're right, it doesn't make any sense to do this, so there must be an ulterior motive.
If that were the case and USPTO were in on the trick, why the need to drop HTTPS? They'd have that data already, so could just share it directly.
I'm just playing Devil's advocate here.
Edit: the PDF attachment URL's are very predictable, they're the number of the patent in a weird order + a page number, e.g.: http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/10/292/096/2.pdf
Back of the envelope calculations say all PDF's should only take 1 - 6 TB's (assuming 100kb to 600kb in PDF's on average). Seriously, why hasn't anyone mirrored this?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well if you put on your tinfoil hat - maybe someone wants to track who's viewing which patents, which they can't do when it's encrypted. You're right, it doesn't make any sense to do this, so there must be an ulterior motive.
If that were the case and USPTO were in on the trick, why the need to drop HTTPS? They'd have that data already, so could just share it directly.
Why on Earth could they possibly feel it necessary to do this? The United States Patent Office doesn't have a complex system of sub-domains or even an EV license, if money were the object then they could just go with Let's Encrypt (not to mention the current license continues until 2018 anyway). The amount of computing power it takes to encrypt with SSL is minimal, especially if you use some of the newer systems like…
I would assume that they do it because HTTPS does complicate the pipeline on several different levels. If you want to tcpdump the https traffic, for example, you need to do SSL/TLS termination at the load balancer to get something readable. Most web servers don't make it easy to inject on the other side of the decryption; I remember having to enable some very verbose debug logs in nginx to accommodate this. Third-par…
I know you were only trying to coming up with some kind of reason but, there just isn't a valid one.
https://securityheaders.io/?q=www.uspto.gov&followRedirects=...
HSTS is 1 year at the time this comment is posted. They're in for some pain.
The USPTO databases have to be one of the most torturous services to their users in the whole of internet. The UI of both the patent and trademark search is archaic, but not in a HN way but in a really bad way. In patent search, there is no "search" box. Instead, the "quick search" forces you to specify two (and exactly two) text queries on the database columns with obligatory boolean operation.[1] Even if you happen…