Free Wi-Fi while you're waiting for your flight? Sounds like a great way to save money, and kudos to Google for offering it at many U.S. airports during the holidays. Unfortunately, Google's generosity may also lure identity thieves and nefarious hackers to the nation's terminals to prey on clueless travelers.

Public hotspots, which by nature are open and unencrypted, are notoriously insecure. Information you transmit via laptop, smartphone, or gaming device may very well fall into the wrong hands. There are ways to stay safe, however. We asked Edgar Figueroa, executive director of industry trade group the Wi-Fi Alliance, for some hotspot safety tips. They are:

"Green" is the new "black, "flat" is the new "up" and the watchword for 2010 is "apps." And there's no need to wait for Black Friday; it's here already.

That's the state of the consumer electronics market now--and where it's headed in 2010--according to Consumer Electronics Association officials at Tuesday's New York preview of the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Sales of Verizon Wireless and Motorola's Droid on opening weekend came nowhere near the iPhone's debut numbers, but thanks to some recent history, we know that comparing anything to Apple's smartphone just isn't fair.

Verizon Wireless sold 100,000 Droids in the phone's opening days, Broidpoint AmTech analyst Mark McKechnie told Bloomberg. That's nothing compared to the 1 million iPhone 3GS models Apple sold during that phone's opening weekend in June, but McKechnie is optimistic for the Droid's future.

A serious flaw that allows for drive-by-download attacks picks up a patch in today's regular monthly patch batch from Redmond, as do critial flaws in Microsoft Office. Network attack vectors of most concern for business networks get shored up as well.

The most important patch, MS09-065, closes a hole that could allow an attacker to take control of a vulnerable system if you view a specially crafted Embedded OpenType font. The patch is rated critical for Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003, and important for Vista and Server 2008.

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all trying to be the better Santa Claus this holiday season, offering free Wi-Fi in a variety of venues.

The motivator in all this gift giving, perhaps, is Microsoft, which in September started giving away free Wi-Fi at hotspots around the United States on one condition: You must use Bing to search the Web at least once. It's not clear where the Bing hotspots are, exactly, but there are reportedly thousands of locations involved. JiWire, a mobile advertising network that's partnering with Microsoft on the deal, told MediaPost that "the campaign has performed well above average and Microsoft plans to continue the promotion."

In a world where computing goes "cloudy," can Firefox survive? What if Chrome OS successfully merges browser with operating system to create a new Google world order?

This is all highly speculative, but on Firefox's fifth birthday, I fear for the browser's future. (I am not alone; Tony Bradley also worries over Firefox).

In New York City last night, chip maker AMD previewed some snappy Windows 7 PCs to be shown in January at CES. Specifically, AMD gave a sneak preview of Dell's Inspiron Zino HD portable home theater, set for official announcement this Thursday, while also displaying an 11.6-inch Acer Ferrari One netbook that might cross the Atlantic to US shores in 2010.

Demon's Souls is hard. Harder than sailing through Nintendo's Punch-Out!! cheat-free. Harder than solving a Rubik's Cube blindfolded. Harder than luring CBS to feature you for ranking "top Guitar Hero III player in the world." Harder than scoring a fabled 3,333,360 points in Pac-Man…

Users who want the Mac OS X experience on a netbook budget have figured out how to hack the Mac OS X operating system to force it to work on netbooks based on the Intel Atom processor. The latest update to the Snow Leopard update removes support for the Atom processor and puts an end to the 'hackintosh'--at least for now.

Why would Apple do such a thing? Is Apple so bent on maintaining draconian control of the Mac OS X software and the hardware platform it runs on that it would risk the customer backlash that might come from breaking hackintosh netbooks? Well, yes and no.

Google's gift of free holiday Internet access at 47 U.S. airports only points out how backward those airports are. Don't they understand Internet access in public places is supposed to be free?

The scale of Google's announcement turned Yahoo's "free Internet in Times Square for a year" promotion, also announced Tuesday, into another example of how out-classed Yahoo has become.

LinkedIn and Twitter announced a partnership on Monday allowing you to push your LinkedIn status updates out to your Twitter account or pull your tweets into your professional profile. Twitter co-founder Biz Stone called it "bringing the peanut butter and the chocolate together to make the perfect combination."

Amazon released a Kindle for PC app, available as a free 5.17MB download for Windows 7, Vista, and XP. Much like the Kindle for iPhone app, Kindle for PC syncs your Amazon e-book downloads and shows them on your computer for convenient reading either when you're away from your svelte e-book reader or if you chose not to buy it in the first place. A Mac version, Amazon says, is "coming soon."

Though not necessarily revolutionary, the Kindle for PC app does the job. Among other benefits, it syncs your last read page with Whispersync, syncs Kindle notes, and promises to utilize Windows 7's touch technology, allowing readers to pinch-zoom, and, in future releases, turn pages with finger swipes. Amazon is reportedly working on the ability to create notes and highlights on your PC and a search function. What you can't do is view blogs, newspapers or magazines -- not a big whoop given you'll be at your computer, but still...