Dear OGF group members and participants,
First, a quick apology before an update about the mailing lists. I had hoped to use this time of year to send a positive message of encouragement and thanks for all you have done over the past year to advance our community and its associated workshops, group meetings, preparation of documents and other activities.
Please take this as a first draft of that message. We really have done a lot, despite not meeting in a dedicated conference this year. Much of the progress has been in individual groups, and I hope to get together with Jens Jensen as VP of Standards and Wolfgang Ziegler as VP of Community to compare notes and send out a more coherent summary shortly.
For now, though, it is my duty to report to you that the annual Christmas hackers have been at it again. Despite repeated hardening of our OGF resources, and a large amount of work that has been done by several people including Andre Merzky and the operators of our hosted OGF services at Indiana University, it seems an annual ritual that a new wave of attacks comes about this time of year, forcing us to spend some of our personal holidays fending off and dealing with a new wave of mischief.
This time it was a wave of mailman email list subscription spam, which caused a denial of service on the OGF mailman lists and caused us to lose all messages sent between December 17 early and now. A set of updates and new mitigations has been put in place, and the offending user patterns have been banned from all lists. If you are receiving this message now, it is an indication that the mailing lists are working again and we encourage you to re-submit any messages to your favorite list that may have been lost over the past three days due to this denial of service.
It remains only to thank you once again for all you have done for the Open Grid Forum and to encourage you to continue to make progress going forward. behind the scenes, some exciting developments have taken place to set in place some better tools for integration of OGF tools and processes into the open science, open source and open access communities. I hope that over the next year you will begin to see the fruits of this labor, much of which has been done by Andre and others with input from several others, including the GFSG.
Have a great holiday period, and please look for another update on OGF matters from all of your OGF officers sometime soon!
Alan
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Alan Sill, Ph.D
Vice President of Standards, Open Grid Forum
Interim Senior Director, High Performance Computing Center
Site Director, National Science Foundation Cloud and Autonomic Computing Center
Adjunct Professor of Physics, TTU
