I am just wondering why a Microsoft employee, whom I do not know, in a particular social networking venue (where Microsoft has established a public presence) told me he was going to "hack my hands off for having thieved his cookies." ??

Not being a part of the technology or software or internet business world, and being only a moderate user of the internet, I really cannot figure out where this came from or who this Microsoft person thinks I am, or who he is, for that matter. Someone named Rob, he said.

I do know that shortly thereafter, I experienced the worst crash imaginable from that networking site, that immediately 14 Microsoft "updates" dumped into my computer (I check for updates every day, and there is never more than zero to four at a time) and, thereafter, I was unable to get onto the internet at all and my computer force-dumped my memory and shut down every 15 minutes until someone I know who is involved in national level computer security took a look and fixed things up for me.

I have no strong feelings or even enough knowledge to have feelings about Microsoft (except I hate that I have to have two computers–one Apple and one Windows-based–to do everything I want to do). So I cannot imagine what prompted this threat and the subsequent activity, which may or may not be related, but is suspicious nonetheless. The threat alone is bad enough.

Could it be because I publicly expressed my hope that Yahoo! would find a way to innovate itself out of a hostile takeover? This was not even an articulation of support for Yahoo! specifically (much less a statement of oppostion to Microsoft), but rather an expression of spirit for the very substance of innovation, independence and competitiveness which, last time I heard, was the backbone of the capitalist system and the "American way."

So….what’s up, I ask?