For a company that has written off trade shows like Macworld, it’s interesting that Apple will be officially attending the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas this Thursday. What’s even more interesting is that the conference is devoted to the hacking and security research community, a demographic Apple has always given little public attention to. Under the post-Steve Jobs reign of Tim Cook, Apple’s head of platform security, Dallas De Atley, will be giving a presentation on key security technologies within iOS.

Okay, so I was being sarcastic about the clever name. Nevertheless, the joint venture announced by Redbox and Verizon back in February has finally given birth to an official name, and that name is Redbox Instant by Verizon. Together, Verizon and Redbox plan on bringing yet another video on-demand streaming and download service to the market. As long as Verizon doesn’t screw it up with pricing, the Redbox kiosk/streaming combo could be a real winner.

Shortly after OS X Lion made its debut last year, we told you about a terrific utility called Lion DiskMaker, which creates bootable disks and drives in just one click. The free application just received an update that makes it fully compatible with OS X Mountain Lion.

I spent most of last week riding my loaded-up bike through the north of Spain, and as any self-respecting geek would do, I was carrying gadgets, including a power-hungry iPad 3, and a Changers solar-powered charger. I’m planning a longer post on how this worked out, but right now I’m going to tell you about a new accessory for the Changers charger which should make it even more effective on road trips.

(Editor’s Note: This post has been stickied to the top of the front page. There may be more recent news posts below it.)

As writers at Cult of Mac, we have one of the coolest jobs on the planet. We get to sit at home, in our  underwear, and talk about Apple and new technology all day. It’s an awesome privilege that we truly enjoy, but there’s been something missing on Cult of Mac over the last few years.

We have some amazingly passionate readers that love Apple just as much, or more, than we do. We’re lucky to have readers with great insights on the latest Apple news who are also creative and eager to share. You guys ARE The Cult of Mac, and we haven’t been great at providing a platform for you to gather, interact, and share everything you know and love about Apple. But we’re ready to change all that.

Today, Cult of Mac is proud to announce that we’re launching our new forums and they’re made just for you. A place where Apple fans across the globe can come hangout to meet other Apple fans and share their creative insights into all things Apple.

Despite being cleared by a judge in the United Kingdom, Samsung’s Galaxy devices haven’t had the same success in Germany. The Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court has ruled in favor of Apple and placed a ban on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 across the whole of the European Union. It has, however, cleared the Galaxy Tab 10.1N.

NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY. You’ve all read that sign, and you have all likely – being good obedient citizens – abided by the wishes of the museum or gallery which posted it. But why is it there? Why can’t you use your camera’s flash to take a photo of a painting or a sculpture? The answer, it seems, is as depressingly wrongheaded as you might suspect.

AT&T announced its financial results for the second quarter of 2012 today, and yet again the iPhone driving the company’s sales. Of the 5.1 million smartphones the carrier sold, a whopping 72.5% were iPhones.

If you have a huge stack of old negatives or slides, your best bet is to send them off to India. Seriously: there are services which will scan all your negs, let you choose which ones you actually want to keep via a web browser and then get the digital files returned to you. Apparently it’s pretty cheap.

Or you could do it yourself, with the iPICS2GO Negative to iPhone Scanner. It’s a black box which uses your iPhone 4/S’s camera to snap photos of your own old film and then feeds them into software to produce the photos

Apple has issued iWork.com users with a final reminder to warn them that the service will be closed down on July 31. The company states that as of this date, “you will no longer be able to access your documents on the iWork.com public beta site or view them on the web.”

PDF files are pretty much just pictures of documents. In point of fact, many of them are just that – scanned paper documents that are put into the PDF format, as it’s a fairly common one with free tools on all platforms. But what if you want to edit those PDF files? Or save them in a format that makes them easier to manage, like .doc or .docx files? There are many expensive options, like the fantastic Abbyy Fine Reader Express, available in the Mac App Store, but there are also two free, relatively painless ways to do this as well. Here’s how.

The App Store has had its fair share of apps and games that attempt to replicate a hit title that isn’t available on iOS — like the numerous Super Mario clones we’ve seen over the years. But MineKart 64 is a little different. It takes not just one, but two hit titles — Minecraft and Mario Kart — and fuses them together.

It’s literally Minecraft kart racing — what could be more enjoyable than that?

Only it’s not that at all. It’s actually a complete scam that you should avoid at all costs.

I’ve been a Viber user for sometime now, but I’ve always been frustrated with its lack of support for group messaging — something I believe every messaging app should do from day one. Thankfully, this is one of the features introduced in Viber’s latest update, available on Android and iOS today.

According to a new survey from Appcelerator, a mobile analytics and development company, developers for mobile platforms are moving to the enterprise market. When asked to choose one mobile operating system is best for the enterprise market in this year’s survey, the majority picked iOS (53 percent) over Android (38 percent). This is in marked contrast to last year’s survey, in which the platforms tied at 44 percent.

We reported a few weeks ago that Apple had parked scads of cash overseas, some $74 billion in cash. Looking forward to tomorrow’s earnings report, however, it can be argued that their financial numbers could be much higher if the cash, mainly parked overseas due to potential tax liabilities in the US, were returned to US Apple coffers.

According to the Associated Press and reported by USA Today, Apple typically understates its profits when compared with other multinational corporations, due to this “phantom tax” liability, a tax they may never have to pay. Like many multinationals, Apple is counting on the US lowering tax rates in the near future, minimizing the amount of tax they’d end up owing if they brought that $74 billion home.

At a settlement conference last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook and executives from Samsung Electronic disagreed on the value of the opposing parties’ patents. The two world’s largest companies of consumer electronics continue to disagree as the trial here in the US looms ahead, scheduled for July 30 in San Jose, California. According to a report by wire Reuters, Cook participated in mediation with Samsung’s Vice Chairman Choi Gee-sung and mobile chief Shin Jong-Kyun last Monday in the San Francisco area to potentially resolve the dispute ahead of trial.

As if.

Following other recent celebrity Siri promos, film director Martin Scorsese has made his way into Apple’s latest TV spot. Scorsese is seen rapid-firing questions at Siri in a taxi cab, asking about appointments, the traffic, and where to find one of his friends.

This new ad follows much the same format of Apple’s other ads featuring Samuel L. Jackson, John Malkovich, and the infamous Zooey Deschanel “Is that rain?” ad.

You can view the newest ad after the break.

An interesting report comes from All Things D today, detailing a argument from Google against Apple. Unsurprisingly, the discussion revolves around patents, particularly standard essential patents (SEP). Basically, Google is suggesting that when technologies become popular enough, even if they are proprietary, they should become public standards, available to everyone.

Colligo Networks today announced a major revision of its award-winning line of iOS SharePoint clients. SharePoint has become an indispensible tool for many businesses. Having access to SharePoint resources on the iPad has become equally crucial to many mobile professionals.

Colligo Briefcase is designed to provide secure access to SharePoint sites, documents, and resources. The apps in the Colligo Briefcase lineup include core features like the ability capture, view, edit, and share files and list items. They also provide a range of ways to view SharePoint content, support for editing content in other iOS apps, and the ability to print to AirPrint-enabled printers.

All public companies are required to file congressional lobbying disclosure reports, which were released today for the second quarter of 2012. Interestingly enough, Google has once again outspent Apple by a margin of nearly 10 to 1.

As revealed by the reports, Google spent just shy of $4 million, coming in at $3,920,000, while Apple spent only $470,000 in Q2.

You already know that OS X is one of the most powerful and easy to use UNIX based OSes around. You wouldn’t be reading Cult of Mac if you didn’t. The thing that a lot of us don’t really know—or tap into—is the server version of OS X.

Sure it’s like OS X, but it also has all the power of an enterprise server behind it. Email server? Check. Calendar server? Yep. Document server, chat server, wiki…you get the idea. Anyway, it’s powerful stuff. And, so I’m told, pretty easy to manage. Pretty easy, not drop dead easy. Which means a few lessons and tutorials might come in handy just to make sure you get your OS X Lion Server set up the right way the first time. Hence today’s deal—OS X Lion Server Video Course – Cult of Mac Deals.

Last week, we reported on the IT migration that Australian airline Qantas was undertaking. That migration and overall technology upgrade includes replacing the airline’s 1,300 BlackBerry handsets with iPhones, swapping hefty pilot flight bags for iPads, and adding an on-demand entertainment system to is fleet of Boeing 767 aircraft that’s accessed using iPads provided to each passenger.

It seems that the migration strategy is even bigger than just those three components. The airline is also looking to overhaul its desktop systems as part of an upgrade to Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud suite. The migration will be completed in partnership with Fujitsu and will include both on-premise and cloud data stores as well as virtual desktops courtesy of Citrix. 

Apple’s new operating system, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is probably going to be released on July 25th. It’s packed with over 200 new features, but some of them are dumb while others are freaking awesome. What are you most looking forward to though? We want to hear from you, so jump over to this thread in the forums and tell us which features you’re looking forward to the most in Mountain Lion.

CLICK HERE TO TELL US WHAT YOU THINK IN OUR FORUM THREAD

If you thought the iOS App Store had issues with piracy, think again. The Google Play store, home to over 500,000 Android apps, is in a much worse position. Apparently, piracy on the Android platform is such an issue that developers are, in a sense, beginning to give up.

The developers behind Dead Trigger, an FPS available on both Android and iOS, have decided to give up the fight, and are now making the popular game completely free on Google Play, due to the outrageous piracy.

One of the best tools in a photographer’s editing kit is the crop. Finding the best part of a picture and cutting out all else is a fantastic way to make an ordinary picture into a great picture.

You can do this right on your iPhone or iPad with the Photos app. Here’s how.