As if president elect Obama doesn’t have enough to worry about with all the buzz over his Blackberry – and will he or won’t he get to take it to the White House with him – now folks all across the Internet are screaming because Obama was seen with – gasp – a Microsoft Zune MP3 player, instead of an iPod. Welcome to Zunegate.

A bizarre spam making the rounds in the form of a chain email claims that MSN Hotmail is running out of account names “because too many inconsiderate people are taking up all the names”. The email starts out by saying “Hey it is tara and john the directors of MSN, sorry for the interruption but msn is closing down.” (It isn’t.)

Microsoft has gone outside their usual patch release schedule and has released an emergency patch which everyone running affected versions of Windows is urged to get and install immediately.

If you get an email, supposedly from Microsoft, which says “Security Update for OS Microsoft Windows”, ignore it, delete it, and whatever you do, don’t install the “patch” which comes with it, which is, of course, really a trojan program just waiting to wreak havoc on your computer.

In a move that can only be described as, at best, disingenuous, Microsoft testified this week before the U.S. Congress that if Yahoo were allowed to partner with Google in a search advertising deal, it would, they implied, be an illegal monopoly. Oh, right, but if Microsoft buys Yahoo for the very same reason, that’s ok??

You can say one thing for Carl Ichan – he doesn’t give up. Icahn, currently embroiled in his own takeover bid for Yahoo’s board, is also fomenting Microsoft’s efforts to acquire Yahoo – or at least part of Yahoo – again.

Security researchers have discovered another Windows Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). Thankfully, though the severity of this vulnerability is high, the chance of a successful exploitation is rather low. It is, however, glaringly simple for the hackers to attempt an exploit.

Do you want to go boldly where noone has gone before? Would you like to make the journey without leaving your computer? Microsoft has just launched World Wide Telescope, a free online space telescope which, to quote Bill Gates, “is a powerful tool for science and education that makes it possible for everyone to explore the universe.”

A group calling itself “Friends of Yahoo” has initiated an online petition to stop a small group of hostile stockholders from forcing Yahoo to sell itself to Microsoft, and to “Let Yahoo Be Yahoo”. (Sign the ‘Let Yahoo Be Yahoo” Petition here.)

If you install Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (XP SP3) and either already have, or upgrade to, Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), you will never again be able to use IE6. That is the word on Microsoft Developer Network’s Internet Explorer blog, where Microsoft have just published an article on IE and XP Service Pack 3 that may cause you to think again before upgrading your version of Internet Explorer. Prematurely installing Service Pack 3 will block your ability to downgrade IE7/8 back to IE6, and as we’ve told you here, while IE6 is pretty stable, IE7 is fraught with peril.

Poor misunderstood and beleaguered Microsoft. Though at times they can appear to be their own worst enemy, at others they appear more to be the victims of others in the operating system ecosystem, over whom they have no control and seemingly little influence. Leading among the causes of Vista crashes are drivers by Nvidia, followed by drivers by Intel and ATI (now AMD).

If you have been experiencing Microsoft Vista problems – such as the infamous “nvlddmkm has stopped working” issue – you may need the Vista 940105 patch. While there’s been an outpouring of more than the usual amount of angst regarding Windows Vista problems lately, due to the incompatability of some Vista drivers, this isn’t a Vista vs XP issue, and in fact some problems with Vista are not Vista’s fault. In this particular case, applying the Vista 940105 patch should fix your problems. So instead of jumping on the “Vista sucks” bandwagon, try downloading the Vista 940105 patch.

Microsoft has announced this week a security hole in MS Word – well, actually it’s in the Jet Database engine, but that creates a vulnerability in MS Word, which attackers can exploit to gain remote access and control of your computer. Nearly all versions of Windows, including XP, 2000 (2K) and many Windows Server editions, are vulnerable. In fact the only versions of Windows not vulnerable to this attack are Vista, and Windows Server 2003 SP2.

According to a tip received by the Internet Patrol, the resident evil behind the throngs of social networking and other sites that are tricking people into logging into their AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail accounts, and scraping their address book, has a name, and that name is Sigma Visual Technologies. Sigma Visual Technologies provides software that allows sites to get their users to import and email all of their contacts in their address books. Put another way, it lets these sites scrape and spam your contacts. In your name!

Today was an eventful day for mobile handheld device owners. First, the RIM Blackberry network went down – again – leaving thousands of Blackberry users in the dark. Then, it was announced that Microsoft was buying Palo Alto-based Danger, the company behind the Danger Hiptop – more popularly known as the Tmobile Sidekick.