September 1, 2018 is a big day. It is the day that everything changes for US utility patent applicants who are claiming priority from Chinese priority applications. Continue reading “September 1 and US utility patent applications that claim priority from Chinese patent applications”
September 1 and US design applications claiming priority from Chinese applications
There’s a big change that will happen four days from now for the US design applicant who claims priority from a Chinese design application.
SSL security ratings for some patent office web sites
Just now I tested the SSL security ratings for some of the law firms that obtain large numbers of US design patents for their clients (blog article here). This prompted me to look at some patent office web sites. Here are the results: Continue reading “SSL security ratings for some patent office web sites”
How good is your web site security?
(Update August 28, 2018: I am delighted to report that the firm mentioned below, that had had a “C” rating for their web site security, has today corrected the problem and now has an “A” rating.)
There are many ways that a web site could be insecure. One of the ways is to implement SSL (“https://”) poorly. It turns out to be quite easy to find out whether your SSL implementation is strong or weak. You simply plug your web address into the SSL tester provided by Qualys. Maybe your web site will get an A+ rating! Here are how some well-known intellectual property law firm web sites performed in this SSL test. Continue reading “How good is your web site security?”
A smart way to protect your web site — CAAs
Readers of my blog will recall that I have mentioned the importance of protecting your web site with SSL (meaning that the web site supports “https://”). The SSL protects the visitors to your web site, as well as boosting your Google search ranking. Now comes yet another smart thing that you should do to protect your web site — setting up DNS Certification Authority Authorization (CAA). CAA is a thing that does not cost you any money to do, and you only need to do it once. CAA greatly reduces the risk that a bad person could compromise the SSL protection on your web site.
Continue reading “A smart way to protect your web site — CAAs”
EFS-Web and Private PAIR are working again
There’s good news as reported by the members of the PAIR and EFS-Web listservs. EFS-Web and Private PAIR seem to be working again.
EFS-Web and Private PAIR are broken again
Yesterday at 4PM Eastern, USPTO posted a plan:
While systems have been coming back online throughout the day, we intend to take them out of service beginning at 10:00 p.m. ET tonight [yesterday evening August 21]. Our onsite experts will be working throughout the night to further optimize system performance. We anticipate that the systems will be back online tomorrow morning [today August 22].
I told USPTO that it would have been more user-friendly for USPTO to schedule this takedown for 12:01 AM ET. But the takedown proceeded yesterday evening as described in the posted plan. The systems are still down now, at 6:42 AM ET.
Maybe Private PAIR and EFS-Web are working again
Just now we went to EFS-Web and for the first time since August 14, it seemed to permit logging in to the ordinary EFS-Web system.
And we went to Private PAIR and it seemed to permit logging in.
In EFS-Web we then paid the Issue Fee in one of our cases using the online issue fee payment screen.
We then went to Private PAIR and obtained from IFW a copy of what we just filed.
We then clicked on the “Fees” tab in Private PAIR and it showed the fee that we had just paid.
Of course it is too soon to know whether this means the systems are back to normal. But it looks like maybe things are moving in the right direction.
Backwards progress — EFS-Web Contingency is broken again
This is quite discouraging. With less than an hour to go before midnight, EFS-Web Contingency has crashed.
No IFW?
Is it just me, or is there no IFW in the Public PAIR today?