$|V_us|$ and $m_s$ from hadronic tau decays

Recent progress in the determination of |V_us| employing strange hadronic tau-decay data are reported. This includes using the recent OPAL update of the strange spectral function, as well as augmenting the dimension-two perturbative contribution with the recently calculated order alpha_s^3 term on the theory side. These updates result in |V_us| = 0.2220 +- 0.0033, with the uncertainty presently being dominated by experiment, and already being competitive with the standard extraction from K_e3 decays and other new proposals to determine |V_us|. In view of the ongoing work to analyse tau-decay data at the B-factories BaBar and Belle, as well as future results from BESIII, the error on |V_us| from tau decays is expected to be much reduced in the near future.