Ed Bott

I’m going on vacation for the next week or so. I’ll be off the grid—literally out of range of most forms of communication.

While I’m away, you can catch up on what I’ve been doing lately, with a 20% discount on the new, significantly expanded edition of Windows 8 Head Start, which covers the Consumer Preview release. The book is available in DRM-free PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats, which will work on any Kindle, Nook, iPad, or PC.

You can buy the new edition directly. The normal price is $9.95, but while I’m away you can use this code to get a 20% discount: BottNet20. (It’s OK—this BottNet is perfectly safe to join.)

That purchase gives you all three formats in a convenient single download, with EPUB and MOBI files optimized for different devices and a PDF format that is ideal for reading on a PC or Mac.

Microsoft will have one final beta—a Release Preview—in early June, and I’ll have a free update shortly thereafter to help you make sense of the changes. That update will be available exclusively to buyers of this book.

Questions or comments? Leave them here, but don’t expect an answer for at least a week. See you then!

If you missed my webcast last week, you can catch the replay here:

http://learn.gotoassist.com/042412-NA-G2A-IT-WBRARC-SM

(A brief sign-up is required in exchange for free access to my presentation, which is about 45 minutes long including Q&A.)

If you have any questions or comments I didn’t answer here, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.

A big thanks to GoToAssist for their sponsorship.

Klout is an online service that purports to rank your influence in social media, based on your activity on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media sites.

It has the germ of a good idea. I check in occasionally because the results are occasionally interesting and sometimes outright hilarious. In the latter category: Klout says, and many of my friends agree, that I am an expert on Typos.

So today, when I signed in after receiving a weekly summary email from Klout, I got a pop-up window asking me to connect with my Facebook credentials. Fair enough—if it’s going to assign me a score based on my Facebook activity, it needs to see what I’ve been doing, right?

But this is what I got instead:

Yes, Klout had gone through my Facebook address book, found 50 names that didn’t appear to already have Klout accounts, and offered to send a “Klout request” on my behalf. I clicked Cancel.

It offered to do the same thing yesterday, and I clicked Cancel then too.

At least they asked, and to their credit it was clear exactly what they wanted to do.

I hate this crap. I am annoyed when one of my Facebook friends spams me with requests like this. I would be horribly embarrassed if something like ever went out under my name.

So, Klout, please tell me you understand that this is really stupid behavior and you won’t do it again.

Until you do, your Klout score has dropped to 0 for me.

PS: Yes, I know about Klouchebag.com.

This morning on Twitter, a group of us were talking about Microsoft’s just-announced plans for Windows Live.

During the course of that conversation, several of us who are in the business of blogging started an animated conversation about how we create and publish blog posts.

So my question to you is this: What tool (or tools) did I use to create this blog post? Can you tell from what you see on this page?

I found a graphic on Apple’s website that needed fixing:

Here’s the long version:

Flashback malware exposes big gaps in Apple security response

Apple’s been astonishingly successful with its Mac hardware in recent years. The dark side of that success is the attention they’ve begun to attract from online criminals.

Apple and its customers got a hint of what was in store with last year’s Mac Defender outbreak. This year, a much larger and more disturbing outbreak has infected more than 600,000 Macs with a piece of malware called Flashback.The entire Flashback episode has in fact exposed Apple’s security weak spots.

A lot of what Apple is learning about security today will show up in future editions of OS X and iOS, as the company presumably gets smarter about writing code. But what about the 60 or 70 million current Mac owners?

They have a right to expect much more of a security response from Apple than they’re getting now. As an Apple customer myself, I believe Apple deserves four key criticisms of its current approach to security.

Pretty tough dilemma for Apple, actually. In order to deal with current security threats, they have to communicate about them with customers. But a key piece of the Mac image is that this just doesn’t happen to them.

So far, protecting the Apple brand has won out over protecting Apple’s customers.

The new, significantly expanded edition of Windows 8 Head Start is all done and ready for you to read. This book isn’t a “gee whiz” overview for Windows newbies; it’s a thoroughly tested, carefully edited, and professionally produced guide written especially for the millions of enthusiasts, developers, and IT pros who’ve downloaded Windows 8 looking for a head start on Microsoft’s new operating system.

It’s available in DRM-free PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats, which will work on any Kindle, Nook, iPad, or PC.

If you bought the previous edition, this is a free update. Go to FTDXBooksOnline.com, log in to your account, click your order history, click the order number for your previously registered purchase, and download the new edition. (You’ll find instructions for adding it to your device here.)

You can buy the new edition directly from us for $9.95:

That purchase gives you all formats in a convenient single download, with multiple EPUB and MOBI files optimized for different devices.

If you own a Kindle device, you can get the Kindle edition from Amazon.com:

The Amazon download is also DRM-free, and you can download it directly from Amazon onto any Kindle device you own, with no restrictions. Register your purchase at our website to download the other formats.

The new edition is now available on the Nook store as well. Look for it on Apple’s iBookstore very, very soon. I’ll update this post when it’s ready.

Thanks for your support.