A few years ago I started a little (huge) project on MusicEdMagic called the Music Composer Database.  I spent countless hours collecting information and integrating it into a great program that was created by a grad student over at MIT.  My intent was to create an easy to use and navigate place for people and students to find resource information about all of the major composers of history while not directly giving away the answers.  In other words, I didn't want to make things too easy for my students but yet I wanted to give them an alternative to Wikipedia.  Well, after months of work on it I was fairly happy with the results and posted it online to fairly good reviews.  Now though, almost a year later, Google as one-upped me.

Today's topic may be a rather strange thing to be discussing on MusicEdMagic, but it potentially affects a large number of users of the site.  Many viewers of MusicEdMagic also use the online videoconferencing program Skype for giving music lessons or for simply making cheap phone calls.  Infoworld announced today that the first known Skype trojan horse virus has been seen "in the wild" as a piece of malware that allows an evildoer to intercept and record any calls made over Skype by an infected computer.  Apparently the virus started out as a program written for the Swiss government (WHAT???) to use for remote spying.

InfoWorld is saying that the virus is considered a very low grade threat, and anti-virus companies are sure to be writing new updates soon to capture the little bugger, but it is still just another reason to avoid visiting untrusted web sites.  For those that crave even more security for their computer think about installing something like NoScript for Firefox (a program that allows you to turn javascript on and off for individual web sites to prevent accidentally getting infected by a rogue web site).

Let's just hope that if one of MEdM's viewers does get hacked that the only thing the hacker gets is audio files of someone giving a beginner oboe lesson!