After skipping the occasion last week out of respect for International Panic Day (what do you mean, you missed it? OH NO!!!!), we knew that we'd have to celebrate our traditional end o' the week Wildly Off-Topic Microsoft-Bashing Day today or else we'd be responsible for the deaths of literally thousands of viewers deprived of their life-sustaining dose of anti-Redmond vitriol for two weeks running. Usually the question for this segment isn't "What do we write about?" but rather "What don't we write about?" This week, though, there was a surprising dearth of highly-visible "Microsoft did something stupid and/or incompetent and/or evil but people keep buying their stuff anyway" stories in the popular press, and for a while we thought we'd have to resort to trying to work something up around faithful viewer MrP having notified us that, as reported by Ars Technica, the Redmond Scourge has managed to secure a patent for a "method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body."

Yes, Microsoft has patented a system of powering and communicating with wearable computing devices (like smart watches, etc.) by sending electricity coursing across human flesh "by coupling a power source to the human body via a set of electrodes"-- which, since it sounds like a method of torture long since outlawed in most civilized nations, is indeed potentially alarming enough to be decent Microsoft-bashing fodder. That is, it would be, if only-- torture associations aside-- it didn't sound so freakin' cool.

Luckily, we don't have to pretend that Microsoft's strap-a-car-battery-to-your-kiester-to-power-your-watch patent isn't all that and a bag of chips, because faithful viewer Craig Riha came through in the clutch with an Associated Press story about that old standby, the Rampant Windows Virus Thingy™. It seems there's yet another new one spreading holiday cheer as of last night, which "appears to take advantage of three separate flaws with Microsoft Corp. products," one of which hasn't actually been fixed yet. This virus is particularly juicy because it spreads from Windows server to Windows server, silently infecting Microsoft's web server software and secretly modifying web pages "so visitors get a piece of code that's designed to retrieve from a Russian site software that records a person's keystrokes and can send data back."

Think about that for a second. Remember last month when your Windows-using acquaintances were all crackin' wise 'bout yo mama because someone had finally found a Mac OS X security flaw that was actually worth worrying about? Well, whereas that flaw only made Mac users vulnerable to attack if they loaded a web page specifically constructed by a bad guy to exploit the hole, this latest virus means that Windows users can visit a regular trusted site they visit all the time and still wind up unknowingly sending all their passwords and credit card information to the Russian mafia. In other words, other people get infected, and your Visa bill shows up with seventy-two pages of charges to Sharper Image. We're no experts, of course, but it sounds to us like if that Mac OS X hole was a bad case of the flu, then this latest Windows virus is roughly equivalent to an infection by a mutant strain of bubonic plague crossed with flesh-eating bacteria and some cosmic variant of Space Leprosy. Now that's a security breach, officers.

Meanwhile, Microsoft's recommendation to users is to patch the flaws for which fixes are available and then, since one hole can't yet be plugged, "turn up security settings on Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers to the highest levels." Notice that they don't actually say that it'll help, which is presumably one reason why security bigwigs are offering a rather different bit of advice: switch to "alternate browsers such as Mozilla and Opera." Yeah, we bet that'll happen in droves.

Oh, and as if we actually had to say it, security experts note that-- all together, now!-- "the infection does not affect Macintosh versions of Internet Explorer." Why, you could have knocked us over with a feather...