Re:“Users will only be able to view patents via HTTP. HTTPS ...
by i336_ on Saturday April 22, 2017 @08:41PM
(#14175754)
Wow.
Question: if it's really this bad, this site is going to have incredibly poor ratelimiting or per-IP analytics/access controls, if it has these things at all.
So, it probably wouldn't be too impossible for someone to build a new site (maybe even an API) that talks to this and prettifies the results, lets you copy URLs (most likely via caching¹), and so forth. (The case in point about my previous paragraph is that the new site would generally hitting the old one, possibly several times a second, from one IP.)
You'd just need a strong mind to handle the inanities of talking to this system. :P
¹ But with the caching thing, you'd absolutely have to have a disclaimer stating that the services don't replace the USPTO website, yada yada (along with some wording buried in a policy document that carefully points out that the data is cached). I mean you'd need that anyway, but yeah.
Question: if it's really this bad, this site is going to have incredibly poor ratelimiting or per-IP analytics/access controls, if it has these things at all.
So, it probably wouldn't be too impossible for someone to build a new site (maybe even an API) that talks to this and prettifies the results, lets you copy URLs (most likely via caching¹), and so forth. (The case in point about my previous paragraph is that the new site would generally hitting the old one, possibly several times a second, from one IP.)
You'd just need a strong mind to handle the inanities of talking to this system. :P
¹ But with the caching thing, you'd absolutely have to have a disclaimer stating that the services don't replace the USPTO website, yada yada (along with some wording buried in a policy document that carefully points out that the data is cached). I mean you'd need that anyway, but yeah.