Friday saw the release of a critical out-of-band patch for Internet Explorer from Microsoft. The security update (MS12-063) addresses as many as five vulnerabilities, but none more important than the critical zero-day bug (CVE-2012-4969) that was made public by French researchers earlier this week, and one which even prompted Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) to issue an advisory requesting German citizens to stay away from IE. The Redmond-based company has also released a security update for Adobe Flash IE 10.

Kinect’s launch in late 2010 was accompanied by a lot of fanfare and excitement, all of which seemed justified initially as the motion-sensing Xbox 360 peripheral quickly became a huge sales success. Then millions of Kinect owners began waiting en masse for some top-drawer titles to come along and proverbially slap Kinect’s critics smack in the face. Sadly, those AAA Kinect titles, especially the much sought-after “hardcore” ones, never really arrived. But if you haven’t given up on your Kinect and are looking for fresh excuses to use it, Microsoft has just the thing for you: Internet Explorer for Xbox 360 with Kinect-enabled voice and gesture controls.