The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office today published two Apple patent applications titled 'Guard system for portable computer disk drive slot' and 'Method and apparatus for binding user interface objects to application objects.' The former, which was initially filed in mid-2005, relates to a guard system for the disk drive slot on Apple notebooks. The latter, which was originally filed this past August, describes a graphical user interface accompanying functionality for binding Web page definitional elements to a back-end state with custom logic. Both patents accompany two additional Apple patents published today describing a cryptographic system for small devices such as iPods or cellular phones and secure Bonjour networking.