Where for art thou Lion?

Apple today replaced last year's version of OS X with a shiny, new model. But in the process, it also quietly scrubbed that older version from its digital and physical stores.

Several readers have reached out to let us know that Lion, which was replaced with Mountain Lion today, can no longer be found on the Mac App Store. The same goes for the USB thumb drive Apple sold with a Lion installer for those who could not purchase it online. Links to Lion in the Mac App Store now show a warning message that the product is not available.

Apple confirmed the removal of the software this afternoon, and said that customers can still purchase a copy from its online store's telesales agents.

It's worth pointing out that this has long been Apple's standard operating procedure, going back to the days when OS updates came in disc form. The company typically pulls old versions of its software off shelves in favor of the latest and the greatest. And perhaps more important, the company is unlikely to want people mistakenly purchasing last year's software.

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Widgets can make toggling Wi-Fi, GPS, or ringtone volume quick and easy. But what if you want more options to help you skip through app menus or even the Settings area?

1Tap Quick Bar is an app that will let you customize shortcuts to be added to your notification shade. You can also personalize the look and feel of the panel that gets added -- meaning you get to pick all the shortcuts from a huge selection.

Here's a list of popular features from the developer:

• Direct dial
• Direct message
• 1-tap direct Web page launcher
• Application shortcut
• Application launcher
• Direct e-mail label
• New event, new message
• Hidden system activities
• Third tasks: ram booster
• Media control

Ready to set it up? Let's get started:

First you'll need to i... [Read more]

(Credit: Apple)

The iTunes U app update includes several new key features sure to enhance any student's or teacher's experience. Most notably, version 1.2 supports the ability to take notes while listening to, or watching, lectures and then search those notes later.

Users are also now able to search posts, assignments, and other materials in any of their subscribed courses.

And, as Tim Cook promised, Apple has gone more social, giving students the ability to share their favorite courses with family and friends using Twitter, Mail, or Messages.

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The update also helps teachers by adding the ability to create private course distribution, which allows teachers to invite students to subscribe to... [Read more]

LAS VEGAS -- From journalists hacking the press room Ethernet to RFID skimmers swiping your ID without even touching your credit card, the war stories you've heard about Black Hat and DefCon are true more often than not.

The best way to avoid getting hacked at the annual security conferences is to not show up. Go somewhere disconnected, like a nice mountain retreat, instead of hitting the paranoia pills with several thousand other security professionals and obsessives in Vegas' urban playground.

But if you must go to Sin City, there are some actions you can take to protect your data and identity from falling into the hands of those who are, shall we say, less than angelic. Here's our 12-step program to keep you safer and more secure at Black Hat and DefCon.

Before you go Back up your entire computer, and be prepared to do a wipe and restore when you return. For Windows, a tool like Easeus Todo Backup will let you create a disk image of your current computer. While it's true that Windows 7 comes with its own backup utility, CNET found it acceptable but nowhere near as good as Easeus' freeware.

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Whenever Apple releases a new version of its OS X operating system, it soon follows with updates to some of its popular programs for OS X. Today's release of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion (see here for CNET's full review) is no different, and Apple has made several updates available for its iWork productivity suite, its iPhoto consumer picture manager, and its iMovie home video editor.

The updates are available through Mountain Lion's Mac App Store, which Apple has unified for managing updates to both Mac App Store purchases and also other system updates in the new OS, replacing its prior Software Update utility. So far Apple has not released any standalone installers for these updates, so for now you can only access them through the App Store's update section.

iPhoto is now at version 9.3.2, and contains the following improvements:

• Supports compatibility with OS X Mountain Lion
• Sharing options now include Messages and Twitter
• Includes performance and stability improvements

iWork is now at version 9.2 and has the following changes:

• iCloud: store documents in iCloud and keep them automatically up to date across your Mac, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and the Web. Changes made to a document on one device will automatically appear on all your other devices. Requires iWork for iOS 1.6.1 or later installed on iOS devic... [Read more]

OS X Mountain Lion

Apple's latest desktop operating system flavor, OS X Mountain Lion, is now available in the company's Mac App Store. Apple announced yesterday that Mountain Lion would be available today.

The software will set users back $19.99 via the App Store. Those who bought the operating system at any point on or after June 11 will be eligible for a free upgrade to the operating system. Apple will also be bundling it in current Mac purchases from this point forward.

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Nobody ever said it was easy having two groups writing the same standard for building Web pages.

But what looked like new divergence between the two groups that create the HTML standard surfaced last week probably shouldn't be taken as evidence of new problems in the process.

HTML standard editor and Google employee Ian "Hixie" Hickson sent ripples across the Web standards world when he described an HTML standard "fork" that involves new separation between the versions of HTML maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and by the Web Hypertext Applications Technology Working Group (WHATWG). Specifically, where Hickson previously was editor of both organizations' version of the standard, he's now just editor of the WHATWG version, he said.

The changes mean "we are now independent of the W3C HTML Working Group again, while still maintaining a working relationship with the W3C," Hickson said.

Browser makers Opera and Mozilla founded WHATWG years ago when the W3C concluded HTML wasn't worth further development; the W3C got involved again after its alternative, XHTML 2.0, failed to catch on. The fruit of this work is HTML5, which technically refers to a new version of the Hypertext Markup Language that governs how programmers describe Web pages but which in practice also embraces a variety of other HTML and other Web standards.

Rela... [Read more]

Microsoft's BlueHat prize comes with $200,000 for the first place winner.

LAS VEGAS -- A year ago this week, Microsoft announced a startup-style contest with serious reward money called BlueHat to get security researchers to apply their expertise to innovative defenses. Today, the company revealed that the efforts of one of the three BlueHat finalists would be incorporated into its Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit tool.

Mike Reavey, the senior director of Microsoft's Security Response Center, explained that the BlueHat contest process was a big win for Microsoft. "In less than a year, we were able to solicit for ideas, receive them, implement them, and get them to customers," he said during a phone call with CNET last week.

The new version of EMET, as the tool is known, will soon ship with Return Oriented Programming (ROP) defenses "inspired" by the work of BlueHat finalist Ivan Fratric, Microsoft said in a press release announcing the tool upgrade. "ROP is an advanced technique that attackers use to combine short pieces of benign code, already present in a system, for a malicious purpose," Microsoft explained.

The ... [Read more]