Category: Patents

USPTO’s new Financial Manager system is supposed to be a replacement to the much-loved system that came before, called Financial Profile.  For many many years FP would let the user do a search for transactions of interest and the search could, if desired, be carried out across all possible payment methods.

For our billing staff an example of a daily recurring task was to do a search looking for all of the payments that happened since two days ago, across all of our (approximately a dozen) payment methods.

With FP this was a matter of a few mouse clicks.

And of course what the designers of FM were supposed to do (but did not do very well) was to replicate the user functions of FP in FM.  Unfortunately when USPTO released FM, the FM system did not permit any search across all payment methods.  It meant for example that our billing staff were forced to do about a dozen searches each day instead of a single search, so as to identify all of the transactions that had happened in the past day or two.

One annoying aspect of FM was that when USPTO released FM, on April 8, 2016, USPTO shut down FP.  So if some important feature in FP was missing from FM, there was nothing the customer could do about it.  USPTO should have kept FP running in parallel with FM until all of the features of FP had been migrated over to FM.

I blogged about this search-across-all-payment-methods deficiency on June 29, 2016.

I am delighted to be able to report that on August 10, USPTO finally migrated the search-across-all-payment-methods feature to FM.

For four months (starting with the abrupt shut-down of FP), customers were denied the feature.  But now the feature is back.

This is a welcome development.

Now let’s hope that the USPTO folks can keep up the good work, providing for example the user features that I detailed in this blog article on June 22, 2016.

Some months ago I griped that the USPTO’s new Financial Manager system had a much-too-short sixty-day period for forcing users to change passwords.  (Fourth bad thing about FM, blog post of June 22, 2016.)

After this, some listserv members reported doing password changes and being told by FM that the next change would be six months in the future.  This sounded like good news to me.

I also found, as of a couple of months ago, that when the FM system would force me to change my password, I could simply “change” it to the same password that I was using before.

Now it seems there have been at least two customer-unfriendly steps backwards.  The time period for forced expiration of an FM password seems to have been cut back to a mere sixty days again.  And the system now refuses to let me enter the same password as before.  Indeed someone at the USPTO with too much time on their hands has gone to the trouble of coding this step so that I am denied the ability to use any of the previous twenty-four passwords that I have used before.

Again this makes things less secure, rather than more secure.  It guarantees that the user will have no choice but to write the password down and tape it to the computer monitor.

We customers are grown-ups and we can make our own decisions what sort of password we are happy with.  (It’s not good that the system imposes unnecessary requirements about the password having to contain a capital letter and lower-case letter and a smiley face and a punctuation mark and a numerical digit, and requiring that it be at least twenty-four characters in length, and so on.)

We can make our own decisions when we want to change our passwords.  (It’s not good that the system forces a change every sixty days.)

Back in August of 2014 I blogged about the urgent need for USPTO to use “https://” instead of “https://” in all of its servers.  In June of 2015 I noted that USPTO had made no progress on this, so I blogged about it again.  I am delighted to be able to report that USPTO has now made a baby step.  On August 11, 2016, USPTO made an announcement about this.

Continue reading “USPTO makes a little progress on web server security”

It will be recalled that USPTO had a massive systems crash on December 22, 2015 which shut down every one of USPTO’s external-facing e-commerce systems, including the EFS-Web system for filing of patent applications and the TEAS system for filing of trademark applications.

On December 23, 2015 USPTO purported to “deem” December 22 and 23 to be holidays.  The next day, I pointed out (see blog article) that USPTO probably lacked the power to do this.  I said that the USPTO needed to head over to Capitol Hill to get a special bill passed which would cause December 22 and 23, 2015 to be real holidays (for purposes of the USPTO).

It was, of course, only a matter of time before the USPTO’s power to “deem” a day to be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia would be tested in litigation.  And now that day has come. Continue reading “USPTO failed to go to Capitol Hill about the massive system crash”