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Collaborate Call for papers is open until Sunday October 14th - http://events.ioug.org/p/cm/ld/fid=15
Collaborate is an Oracle Technology and Applications conference put on by IOUG, OAUG and Quest. It is the largest independent Oracle conference, and we are planning on having a one-day track there. Collaborate is at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada from Sunday April 22nd - Thursday 26th, 2012.

Call for papers for Percona Live: MySQL Conference & Expo 2012 is open! They opened it on Friday, September 15th and the call will close on Monday, December 5th. The MySQL Conference & Expo is Tuesday April 10 - Thursday, October 12, 2012 in Santa Clara, CA.

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As per amorize.com MySQL.com was hacked and quote “infecting visitors with malware” .. true or false? …

More reading at krebsonsecurity.com too.

I'm looking forward to the upcoming Message Systems User Conference next month in San Francisco, not only for what looks like an excellent venue, but for the great set of quality sessions on the agenda.

There's a number of sessions I'm looking forward to attending, but I'd like to invite you to attend the sessions I'll be delivering next month (read to the end to save on conference admission):

What the Convergence of Data Security & Privacy Concerns Will Mean to Companies

The barrage of news stories about data breaches and privacy violations is taking a toll on consumer confidence.

What You'll Learn:

• Why data security …

MySQL 5.5 GA and MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Releases have delivered many new compelling features to the MySQL users and community for testing, feedback and use.

In addition, commercial customers have access to a number of commercial extensions already included in MySQL Enterprise Edition:

•    MySQL Enterprise Monitor
•    MySQL Enterprise Backup

Continuing the business model of MySQL, we are adding three new commercial extensions to MySQL Enterprise Edition:

• MySQL Enterprise Scalability
  • Thread Pool …

MySQL 5.5 GA and MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Releases have delivered many new compelling features to the MySQL users and community for testing, feedback and use.

In addition, commercial customers have access to a number of commercial extensions already included in MySQL Enterprise Edition:

•    MySQL Enterprise Monitor
•    MySQL Enterprise Backup

Continuing the business model of MySQL, we are adding three new commercial extensions to MySQL Enterprise Edition:

• MySQL Enterprise Scalability
  • Thread Pool …

OSCon Data and OSCon videos
The Technocation youtube playlist, as of the time of this publishing has 18 videos, mostly from OSCon Data, is at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE0AEC3980A198DA0

The O'Reilly YouTube playlist, as of the time of this publishing has 84 videos, from OSCon, OSCon Data and OScon Java, is at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=93FC98105B19725C

Note: There are no overlaps in the playlists, so that's over 100 videos from the week so far!

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XKCD (as usual) makes a very good point – this time about password strength, and I reckon it’s something app developers need to consider urgently. Geeks can debate the exact amount of entropy, but that’s not really the issue: insisting on mixed upper/lower and/or non-alpha and/or numerical components to a user password does not really improve security, and definitely makes life more difficult for users.

So basically, the functions that do a “is this a strong password” should seriously reconsider their approach, particularly if they’re used to have the app decide whether to accept the password as “good enough” at all.

Update: Jeff Preshing has written an xkcd password generator. Users probably should choose their own four …

This is a response on MySQL security: inconsistencies and Less known facts about MySQL user grants.

As far as I know the privilege to grant PROXY privileges is also not very well understood. I blogged about that some time ago.

In addion to the already highlighted issues with GRANT replication and grants can very well create an unwanted situation:

master> SHOW GRANTS FOR 'user'@'host'\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Grants for user@host: GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO 'user'@'host' IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD …

Reading MySQL security: inconsistencies I remembered a few related experiments that I did several years ago when I was studying for the MySQL certification. The first fact that came to mind is about the clause "WITH GRANT OPTION", which can only be given on the full set of options, not on a single grant. For example

GRANT INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on world.* to myuser identified by 'mypass';
GRANT SELECT on world.* to myuser identified by 'mypass' WITH GRANT OPTION;
show grants for myuser\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Grants for myuser@%: GRANT USAGE ON *.* TO 'myuser'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD '*6C8989366EAF75BB670AD8EA7A7FC1176A95CEF4'
*************************** 2. row ***************************
Grants for myuser@%: GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON `world`.* TO 'myuser'@'%' WITH GRANT …

Another week of industry hijinks has passed, which means it must be time for another edition of the Developer Week in Review.

Apple offers some cover

After developer complaints that Apple was leaving them out to dry, in regards to the Lodsys patent threats being aimed their way, the House of Jobs stepped up to the plate and announced that they considered iOS developers to be covered by the existing licenses granted to Apple by Lodsys for in-game purchases.

This is a bit of a good-news, bad-news story from an intellectual property perspective, as it doesn't offer any relief to non-Apple developers from the patents themselves. Apple paid off Lodsys, which in a sense increases the perceived validity of the patents. Other non-Apple-based developers (such as Valve's Steam), could find …