This article says that the Furby communicates in the same way. It would be interesting if the Furby was a vector for spreading messages via this virus. Very, very interesting.
Keep in mind - this is a PR move. None of these companies did anything before their backdoors were revealed. They are only writing this extremely-public press notice because they are getting called on their shenanigans.
Uh, MySql was acquired by Oracle, and Oracle has a big money-maker in their DB system. They have no reason to provide anything beyond the absolute minimum support for MySql.
I had an interview recently. In this interview, I was told that 9/10 of people interviewing for the position for which I was interviewing couldn't write a simple loop to reverse a string. I'd like to attribute that to performance anxiety, but I had office hours for Computer Science students. I know that isn't what it is.
Note that this was for a position asking for between 1 and 3 years of experience.