At 10pm tonight, Tuesday April 8th, there will be a 45min outage of the Cyrus mail system.  This outage is needed to patch a critical security vulnerability which has just been discovered.  In order to mitigate this vulnerability a security patch must be installed which requires a reboot of all mail servers.  The mail servers will be restarted one at a time which will minimize the disruption of mail services.  Users will only lose access to their mail for a short period of time during the reboot.  Incoming mail will be queued during the reboot and then delivered once the server has been restarted.  No mail will be lost during this process and no user side action is needed.  Anyone who has migrated to Google will not be impacted by this restart.  We apologize any inconvenience.

The Model-Based User Interfaces Working Group has published two Group Notes today:

• MBUI – Abstract User Interface Models. Model-Based User Interface Design facilitates interchange of designs through a layered approach that separates out different levels of abstraction in user interface design. This document covers the specification of Abstract User Interface Models, by defining its semantics through a meta-model, and an interchange syntax (expressed as XML Schema) for exchanging Abstract User Interface Models between different user interface development environments.
• MBUI – Task Models. Task models are useful when designing and developing interactive systems. They describe the logical activities that have to be carried out in order to reach the user’s goals. This document covers the specification of Task Models, with a meta-model expressed in UML, and an XML Schema that can be used as the basis for interchange of Task Models between different user interface development tools.

Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity.

A security flaw affecting two thirds of websites is a reminder that the Web relies on a poorly resourced open source project.

Late yesterday we learned that a two thirds of the world’s websites have a major security vulnerability that could be used to crack encrypted connections and steal user passwords or a company’s encryption keys. The news set system administrators for the estimated 117,000 servers affected (including at major companies like Yahoo) scrambling to roll out a fix. It is also leading some people to ponder why the widely-used software in which the critical bug was found doesn’t get better support.

A security flaw affecting two-thirds of websites is a reminder that the Web relies on a poorly resourced open-source project.

Late yesterday we learned that a two-thirds of the world’s websites have a major security vulnerability that could be used to crack encrypted connections and steal user passwords or a company’s encryption keys. The news set system administrators for the estimated 117,000 servers affected (including at major companies like Yahoo) scrambling to roll out a fix. It is also leading some people to ponder why the widely-used software in which the critical bug was found doesn’t get better support.