One of the changes that 5.5.27 brings in an extension to the mysql-test-run script — the driver script of the mysql-test suite — which makes it look for test cases in a new directory. In addition to the usual location (that is, the mysql-test/ directory in the source tree), it will now look for test cases in the internal/mysql-test/ directory. Does this mean that test cases are no longer open source? Oracle did not reply to my question. But indeed, there is evidence that this guess is true. For example, this commit mail shows that new test cases, indeed, go in this “internal” directory, which is not included in the MySQL source distribution.

It’s difficult to find anything more valuable to external developers than test cases. But arguably the revision history is. And it seems that Oracle is going to keep this information to itself too. Public MySQL trees on launchpad with the revision history are not being updated.

Beginning Aug.30, the online auction site will ban the sale of curses, spells, hexes, magic, prayers, blessing services, magic potions, healing sessions and more.

“Disgusted” wrote: “Ebay bans alternative religious items. But! Not for Christians. Holy water and other sundry ‘holy’ items are discriminately allowed. … Hm. Let me get this straight. Some guy in Rome wearing long robes can wave his hand over some water and imbue it with something, and then it’s very ‘powerful?’ How is that different from any other magical item previously sold on ebay?…”

“Ecuador requested some guarantees from Sweden that he wouldn’t be extradited to the U.S., and they rejected any commitment in this sense,” Patino said.

The decision from Ecuador comes a day after officials claimed that UK authorities threatened to raid the Ecuadorean embassy to nab the WikiLeaks leader if the country didn’t hand over the fugitive.

On Thursday, Patino expressed outrage over the unprecedented threat and said that the UK had no right to interfere in the right of an individual to request asylum and the right of Ecuador as a sovereign nation to grant that asylum. No country, he said, had the right “to blackmail or threaten in any way” the sovereignty of any other country.

German data protection officials today accused Facebook of “illegally compiling a vast photo database of users without their consent” and demanded that the social network destroy its archive of files based on facial recognition technology, the New York Times reported.

Facebook claims it doesn’t have to do that, in part because the data collection is legal in Ireland, where Facebook’s European operations are based. “We believe that the Photo Tag Suggest feature on Facebook is fully compliant with EU data protection laws,” Facebook said in a statement issued to the Times.

The owner of Surfthechannel.com - a site that provided links to illegally copied TV shows and films - has been sentenced to four years in jail.

Surfthechannel.com had acted as an index of professionally made online videos - both legal and illegal - encouraging its users to send in new links and check that they worked.

However, it did not host the video files itself, but instead pointed visitors to other sites including Megavideo and China's Tudou.

He was arrested after Fact and the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) hired a private investigator who took photographs of Mr Vickerman's home and computer equipment in July 2008 after pretending to be interested in buying the property.

In a pair of Twitter posts on Monday, Dotcom suggested that both Megabox and an unnamed additional service would launch "this year."

Last December, Dotcom described Megabox in a guest post for TorrentFreak as a service that would allow recording artists to sell music downloads direct to consumers and keep 90 per cent of the earnings.

Google has announced that it will soon penalize sites that are repeatedly accused of copyright infringement. But one site in particular doesn’t need to worry: Google’s own YouTube. It has a unique immunity against the forthcoming penalty.

Since Google doesn’t seem to disclose the number of YouTube takedown requests it has acted upon (I have asked for a figure), there’s no way to assess YouTube against the other sites on the strikeout list above.

There’s no way to treat YouTube — or Blogger — like any other site in the search rankings, when those sites have special takedown forms that don’t allow their alleged infringing activity to measured up against other sites.

It appears to have leaked online after it was uploaded to Facebook by the director of engineering Andrew Bosworth and (presumably mistakenly) set to allow for public viewing. It was deleted "seconds later," according to the anonymous donor, but not before they had scraped a copy and published it online via Imgur.

As we often hear from Facebook itself, users must take responsibility for what they share online.

Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results.

In fact, we’re now receiving and processing more copyright removal notices every day than we did in all of 2009—more than 4.3 million URLs in the last 30 days alone.

The court actually ruled that the feds violated wiretapping laws, but then there were questions of what the court could actually do about it. It turned into a wrist slap for the government, with it being ordered to pay $20,400 to each of the two lawyers who represented Al-Haramain.

That got overturned. The appeals court has basically said that even though Congress passed a law that said the feds could not eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant, it didn't waive sovereign immunity rights for the government, which lets the government basically wave away any lawsuits. And thus, the government can ignore wiretapping lawsuits -- even in the one and only case where there's clear evidence of it violating the law.