Microsoft's habit is to release security patches on the second Tuesday of the month, and December 2011 was no exception. What was relatively unusual was that updates for the Mac versions of Office were part of this month's crop.

Specifically, there's an Excel update for Office 2004, a PowerPoint update for Office 2008, and a Word update for Office 2011. Each of the vulnerabilities provides an opportunity for remote code execution when a malicious document is opened.

Microsoft classifies each of these issues as important. The 2011 update includes other improvements, such as a fix for an issue that caused Excel 2011 to crash or freeze when opening certain workbooks.

Also new this week is iTunes 10.5.2, which "includes several improvements for iTunes Match and fixes an audio distortion problem when playing or importing certain CDs."

I haven't tried iTunes Match (there's no current indication of when it will be offered in Australia, though it accompanied the rollout of the iTunes Store in Brazil this week), but I have seen very mixed reports saying how well or how badly it works, including cases where all but one of the tracks in an album was matched. So any improvements will doubtless be welcomed.

You'd have thought that the basic function of playing or importing a CD would have been down pat by now, so who knows what's going on there?