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Though there was no new development there was one bug report (http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=44426) opened that is worth noting. The W3C receives a large number of requests every day for the same DTDs, XML Schemas and other XML resources. They've observed that this happens in large part because applications are not using XML Catalogs or grammar caching facilities such as the ones provided by Xerces. They're appealing to us for help. We plan to review their thoughts/proposals.
GHOP
We recently participated Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest and engaged with a couple of students on some small tasks including a new logo for the project (designed by Ashley Morgan).
Cryptography
We are not aware of any cryptographic code in the Apache Xerces distributions.