Today was Microsoft's final Patch Tuesday of 2009. Microsoft released a total of six new security bulletins, the most urgent one affecting a zero-day flaw in Internet Explorer for which exploit code already exists.

Barring any urgent security issues or exploits circulating in the wild to force an out-of-band update, the total number of security bulletins for 2009 is 74--a 5 percent drop from the 78 security bulletins released in 2008.

The Wireless Home Digital Interface (WHDI) Consortium announced on Tuesday that their wireless technology specification has finally reached a completed state. The new standard will give consumers the ability to transmit high definition (HD) content around their homes wirelessly.

The WHDI, which is a formed alliance between Amimon, Hitachi, Motorola, Sharp, Samsung and Sony, was first revealed in the summer of 2008. This Tuesday, just a mere year and a half later, the group revealed that the impressive video technology, which promises to wirelessly deliver uncompressed HD content with ease, had reached version 1.0.

Five of the largest U.S. newspaper and magazine publishers have announced plans to develop a new digital e-reader format that would meld the visual esthetics of print with the rich capabilities of online media, including video, social networking, touch input, and games. A joint venture of publishing powerhouses Time Inc., News Corp., Conde Nast, Hearst Corp., and Meredith Corp., the project will launch next year. It's designed to offer a superior user experience to current e-readers such as the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook, which are fine for book-reading but ill-equipped to handle video, high-resolution color images, and other media elements that today's Web-browsing readers take for granted.

The new digital format is targeted at a new generation of touchscreen-equipped smart phones, e-readers, and tablet computers, including the just-announced Fusion Garage JooJoo (previously known as the CrunchPad), and the anticipated-but-unannounced Apple tablet, which many industry watchers expect to debut sometime in 2010.

The ratings scandal that led Apple to purge 1,000 iPhone apps underscores why the App Store user review system needs repair.

To recap, iPhoneography reader SCW accused app developer Molinker of writing hundreds of phony five-star reviews of its own products. SCW wrote a long letter to Phil Schiller, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, and Apple removed all of Molinker's apps.

The day has finally arrived. Let the trumpets blare and confetti rain from the sky. With three weeks to spare, Google has met its self-imposed deadline and the beta version of its Chrome Web browser is now available for the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.

The Google Chrome Web site will autodetect the operating system you are using when you visit and offer up the options appropriate for that platform. So, don't bother visiting from your Windows system to try and download the Mac version.

Last week was a busy one for acquisitions: Apple bought Lala, a streaming music service, and Google acquired AppJet, makers of realtime collaborative text editing software EtherPad. Google announced that the AppJet developers (many of whom previously worked for Google) would be joining the Google Wave team, improving the services offered by the new Wave product.

When Google acquires a company, it tends to immediately suspend new account creation for the acquired company's products. Users of EtherPad faced a similar situation, and rather than rejoice at the news that their favorite collaborative text editor had been bought by Google and would no longer allow users to creation new pads, EtherPad's users revolted.

Zero-day flaws that allowed for attacks against Internet Explorer 6 and 7, disclosed in late November, pick up critical patches in today's Patch Tuesday, as does Microsoft Office Project and Server 2008.

The cumulative IE update, MS09-072, shores up five different security bugs affecting IE 6, 7 and 8. While publicly available exploit code for the IE 6 and 7 zero-day didn't always trigger a successful attack in lab testing, Microsoft assigns this patch a 1 rating on its Exploitability Index, which means the company believes consistent attacks are likely. At least one of the flaws could be attacked by simply viewing a poisoned Web page.

Seagate jumped into the SSD (solid state drive) market today with the unveiling of its Pulsar drives. SSD drives have been a growing segment, but Seagate adds significant credibility and opens up new possibilities for the nascent technology.

There are dozens of players in the SSD market, but none of them have the name recognition and instant credibility of Seagate.

Google's limited launch of its Goggles visual search app has plenty of people wondering when they'll be able to try out the new tool. Google Goggles, released to Android users on Monday, allows you to search on your cell phone simply by snapping photos: You point your phone's camera at a place or object, and it delivers detailed information to you within seconds.

So far, the Goggles app is available only in the Android Market, leaving iPhone and BlackBerry fans empty-handed. But there's good news today for the non-Android crowd -- it'll just require some patience.

There's been a lot of noise over the last few days about Apple's purchase of the online music-streaming service Lala. No one's quite sure what this means for the future of Apple's iTunes music service, or Lala's own service. Most are speculating that Apple may be moving into the cloud to compete with subscription services from competitors like Rhapsody and Napster. Or that Apple will follow Lala's current format where you can actually own a cloud-based version of a particular album or song at a reduced price.

My take? If Apple really is heading for the clouds they can't stop at music streaming, because the real killer Web application would be online video streaming.

Samsung has revealed a bit more about Bada, a new mobile phone platform that's supposed to bring apps to cheaper smartphones.

More often than not these days, I find myself clicking Google's Show options link when looking at a page of search results.

As you probably know, doing so reveals a handy sidebar with filters like Recent results and Timeline.