You may have heard of the Heartbleed bug affecting secured websites, e-mail and other Internet services over the past two years.

The bug is indeed serious, and widespread. You should carefully assess any sites you visit for whether they were vulnerable in the first place, and if so, when they got patched. For any site found vulnerable and later fixed, you should consider changing your password for that site. (If a site is still vulnerable, do not sign in or change your password until that problem is fixed. And always choose a unique password for each site or service, so that a password compromised by one provider does not provide someone with a master key to your identity anywhere else.)

Washington Apple Pi has carefully reviewed and tested its various services and confirmed that they were never affected by this bug. Our servers make use of the default versions of OpenSSL supplied by OS X, and these did not contain the errant code. For more information, join our discussion on the TCS.