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“Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS will no longer work”

uspto.gov

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Re: “Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS will no longer work”

#111

Post by otoburb »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #99
otoburb wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The grandparent comment touches upon the reality of working in most large organizations. There tend to be silo'd teams, which in more concrete terms translates into the "application/website" team and the "networking" team. Sometimes, there's a "system administration" team sandwiched in between. HTTPS everywhere reduces the number of teams that used to, in the old "HTTP-only" world, serendipitously pitch in to help tr…

Having worked doing independent full-stack web design I'd expect an individual could, from scratch, set up a working system with load balancing and failover in perhaps 2-3 weeks ... an experience team should surely be able to do that in their sleep inside a week? What would be others expectation for such a service? USPTO do have a web team, yes? That site has been the same for over a decade AFAIR, what have they been…

The issue here is that even if you could do it, the question when working in a large bureaucracy is whether you're given the latitude to do so when teams are silo'd and responsibilities are split along very sharp fault lines.

So, even though you could setup a working system top to bottom from scratch, depending on which team you're attached to you'd have to design, explain/argue and work with other teams and their overbearing workloads and attendant baggage.

An experienced team with full ownership of load balancers, firewalls, hosts, security and applications could conceivably do this in their sleep inside of a week -- but few large organizations split their responsibilities in this manner.

I don't know anything about USPTO and am only making sweeping generalizations, but my experience with government and large network operators seems to generalize well (so far).

This is why I hope that other 3rd parties can somehow export USPTO data and make them available somehow. Not sure if this is a potential target for the Archive Team[1] or archive.org, although the missions aren't cleanly aligned to this particular need.

[1] http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

Re: “Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS will no longer work”

#112

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Eridrus wrote: post #65

Does anyone here actually read patent filings? I've been involved in writing a few and the result was useless drivel. Combined with the fact that there are penalties for willful infringement, I'm not sure what the benefit to reading patents in your field would be.

They are a public storehouse of technologies. We have a right to read them. Some are well written and have useful information for reproducing them rather than just a lot of BS fluff. I just ran across the TMDS encoding patents (DVI & HDMI signaling) a few weeks ago. My thought was "wow, this is a pretty good patent" and conveniently just expired.

Re: “Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS will no longer work”

#113

Post by vborinquen »

progval wrote: post #79
fiatjaf wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bizarre practice of assigning session keys to visitors and somehow storing the page they're viewing in the server instead of in the URL is pretty common in Brazilian government, which is dominated by Java programmers.

A Java app of my university does this too. Is this a practice shared by most Java programmers? How come?

God, what a retarded question. The mind boggles at its asking.

Re: “Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS will no longer work”

#114

Post by floatingatoll »

slrz wrote: post #83
cdcarter wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meatspinned quite a few coworkers using it. Don't do this.

Please provide rationale showing that the associated risks outweigh the immense fun of "meatspinning" coworkers. "Don't do this" is probably not very convincing.

https://it.slashdot.org/story/08/06/18/2213232/man-fired-whe...

Don't be the person that gets someone fired, arrested, jailed, and in lifetime legal trouble because some asshole thought it would be hilarious to display porn on their computer at work.

(Yes, I'm equating "meatspinning" to malware. Argue if you like about that, but the main point stands: If you meatspin someone, you're taking a chance of ruining their entire life. Don't be That Guy.)

Re: “Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS will no longer work”

#115

Post by fapjacks »

anigbrowl wrote: post #95
popey456963 wrote: post #4

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…

You think they have a free hand, but they don't. People who work are federal agencies are hemmed in by a thicket of rules that prevent them from just entering into an agreement with a private vendor who has not been through a qualification process. Likewise technicians and administrators are enjoined from spending money on their own initiative, eg you can't just see the problem, sign up for a renewable SSL certificat…

Totally this. I have childhood friends who now work in government IT and I just can't wrap my head around how these people get anything done in those kinds of environments.

Re: “Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS will no longer work”

#116

Post by thaumasiotes »

paulddraper wrote: post #104
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horses and cars were in use at the same time, just like HTTP and HTTPS; I'm not sure why their invention times are relevant?

Gunpowder and ICBMs were also in use at the same time I'm claiming the technological backstepping is not nearly as drastic as the GP implies.

But you listed a completely irrelevant gap. The gap of relevance is the one between automobiles and now, not the one between carriages and automobiles. If automobiles were the transport technology of 1890 and carriages were the technology of 1889, then devolving to carriages puts us back to 1889, regardless of when horses were invented.

Re: “Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS will no longer work”

#117

Post by jethrow »

jsolson wrote: post #89
pavement wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This practice has nothing to do with Java, at all. It is not an approach that was invented by Java, for Java, and it is not in any way unique to Java. Most web technologies support rendering a view based on a set of values residing in a database, and use the values to populate a template. The template contains placeholders reserved for values expected to originate from a database. The version of the page that appears…

What's being described above isn't simply template-based rendering (which, yes, essentially everything does), but the practice of building web-software like desktop software and keeping the state of the UI server-side. It ignores that browsers are capable of effectively forking the UI through (today) tabs and (historically) "Open in New Window". Interacting with such software is a profoundly unpleasant experience; th…

  What's being described above isn't simply template-based rendering
How are you able to draw that conclusion?

The GP didn't supply a link as an example. It is simply a non-specific anecdotal remark, with no further evidence provided.

Re: “Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS will no longer work”

#118

Post by Ben2Wilson »

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Re: “Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS will no longer work”

#119

Post by [deleted] »

progval wrote: post #79
fiatjaf wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bizarre practice of assigning session keys to visitors and somehow storing the page they're viewing in the server instead of in the URL is pretty common in Brazilian government, which is dominated by Java programmers.

A Java app of my university does this too. Is this a practice shared by most Java programmers? How come?

[deleted]
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