Encrypt Facebook Group Communication With Encrypt Facebook

Social networking sites may use the contents that you post on their sites in a variety of ways. They may sell them to advertisers, use them to personalize advertising on their sites, may report them to local authorities or ban your account.

Encrypt Facebook is a new Google Chrome extension that offers an ingenious way out for users who want to communicate on Facebook privately. The idea is simple: All messages are posted in encrypted form on the site, and saved as thus in the Facebook database. Facebook cannot read the contents, and the same is true for third parties requesting access to the contents.

The setup process is divided into three steps:

• Create a Facebook group or use an existing one
• Install the Google Chrome extension, and configure it
• Create a security key that is used to encrypt and decrypt the contents that get posted.

The biggest hurdle to setting this up correctly is getting the security key to all participants. Only those with the correct key can read the encrypted data on Facebook, and can post protected contents on the site that are readable by others.

You need to click on the extension’s icon in the address bar to set it up correctly. Here you are asked to enter the Facebook Group page url and the encryption key.

Once done, you can write posts or reply as usual on that group page. Your contents are automatically encrypted whenever you finish writing the message. A click on post adds the message to the site

Group users visiting the page with the extension and correct encryption key installed will see all messages in decrypted form. Everyone else with access sees only the encrypted messages.

The extension uses an AES 256 key to encrypt the messages. The key is stored locally.

The extension has primarily been created for users in oppressive or corrupt governments to allow citizens to communicate freely without fear of repercussion.

Two issues need to be mentioned. It first needs to be noted that the key is posted in plain text on the local system. Anyone with access will be able to access the group messages as well, provided that the group is known and accessible.

Facebook may also notice the garbled contents on their site and put an end to it when they discover it.

Chrome users can download the extension from the official Chrome Web Store.

Make The Most Out Of Pinterest With These Browser Add-ons

Web browser add-ons can improve your Pinterest experience significantly. Let me give you a quick overview of what the service is about. Pinterest lets you pin photos and videos to online pinboards. These are publicly accessible, and all Pinterest users can comment on them, share them or pin them to their pinboards as well. Links to the original site the photos or videos were found on are retained, which makes it a visual bookmarking service as well.

There are three options to pin photos or videos to your own pinboard. You can use the bookmarklet and run it on the page that contains the photo or image, paste the web address of the page on the Pinterest site into a form, or pin an item that has been posted by another Pinterest user.

When you look at browser extensions, you will notice that Google Chrome got the bulk of it, while both Firefox and Opera only one each. Lets take a look at the add-ons:

Pinterest Add-ons

Pin It Buttons – Instead of having to use the bookmarklet, these extensions add a button to the browser that you can click on to pin a photo or video on that website. Chrome: One Click Pinterest Button, Opera: Pinterextension

Right-click Pinning – These add a right-click context menu option to pin the selected item to one of your Pinterest pinboards. Chrome: Pinterest Right click, Firefox: Unofficial Pinterest Addon

Keyboard shortcuts – Adds a shortcut to pin items on a page with a keyboard shortcut. Chrome: Pin It!

Image Zooming – Lets you zoom in on images right on the Pinterest website without having to click on the item. Works similar to Hover Zoom. Chrome: Pinterest Zoom

, Pinterest Image Expander, Pinzy

Pin Screenshots – Lets you pin screenshots of web pages that you are currently on, or upload photos from your desktop to pin those. Chrome: Screen 2 Pin

Closing Words It is interesting to note that there is no userscript, and only one Firefox add-on available for a popular service such as Pinterest. Google Chrome on the other hand has been blessed with extensions in comparisons. Is it because many developers are using that browser now? What’s your opinion here? Also, let me know if you come across other add-ons for Pinterest. And if you are not currently a user, you can grab your Pinterest invites here.

Chrome Comment Save Keeps A History Of All Your Web Comments

Keeping track of all the comments that you leave on the Internet can be quite the daunting task. While some plugins, like Disqus, allow you to keep track of comments that you left on sites that use the commenting plugin, there is nothing available that is working on all sites out there.

That leaves you with third party tools or a really good memory. Comment Save for Chrome is one of those third party tools that keeps track of all comments that you leave on the Internet. It is like your own personal commenting history.

The extension keeps track of all your comments directly after installation. There is no need for configuration, it works right out of the box. Comments are saved in realtime, which means that you can use it for restoration purposes as well. That’s useful if the comment won’t post for whatever reason, for instance if the browser hangs or crashes before you were able to post it, or if you have accidentally opened another link in that tab.

Comment Save adds an icon to Chrome’s address bar that displays the last comment that you wrote.

Here you can copy the last comment made to the clipboard, click through to the page you left the comment, or open the history of all your recent comments.

The Chrome extension keeps track of comments indefinitely. You can change that by enabling the timed deletion option which configures the add-on to delete comments automatically once they have past a select timeframe.

The very same page lists all the comments that have not been deleted yet. You see the page title, the actual comment and the date and time it was posted by you. A click on the page title opens the page in the same browser tab.

You can furthermore delete comments selectively here, and configure filters to prevent the comments from being recorded on select websites.

Comment Save should work on most Internet sites that allow you to post comments. Chrome users can download the extension from the official Chrome Web Store.

ProxMate Unblocks Access To YouTube and GrooveShark

Depending on the country you are currently in, you may be blocked from accessing part or all of a website. One prime example is the US-only service HULU which blocks all users except those coming from the United States. The popular video hosting service YouTube on the other hand blocks users from specific countries from viewing the videos on the site. This basically means that while a video may be blocked in your country, it is accessible in the majority of other countries.

The Firefox add-on and Google Chrome extension ProxMate looks and feels like an advanced copy of the Grooveshark Unlocker, an extension that unblocks access to the Grooveshark site if it is blocked in a country.

The browser add-on adds two features on top of that make it more practicable. It first can unblock blocked videos on YouTube, so that they become accessible again. It detects blocked contents on YouTube Video pages, channels and search, enables the proxy and reloads the page to unblock the contents on the site.

The second new feature allows users to change the proxy server. This can be useful for privacy reasons, and in situations where the default proxy server may have been blocked or is not functioning anymore.

ProxMate works right after you have installed it in the Firefox web browser. Instead of seeing a screen like the following one that is telling you that you cannot watch the video,

you can watch it just fine with ProxMate enabled.

Please note that while this works automatically most of the time, you sometimes may need to reload the page a few times before the video starts to play.

You can change the proxy server in the settings. Here it is also possible to disable the add-ons functionality on select supported sites.

ProxMate is available for Firefox and Google Chrome. The extension can be useful if you like to access the Grooveshark website or encounter videos on YouTube regularly that are blocked in your country.

Update: Grooveshark Updater also came with options to change the proxy server in the add-on’s settings.

Tab Notifier Informs You Of Website Updates

If you are the kind of person who likes to spend time on social networking sites or messaging services like Facebook, Hotmail or Google Mail, you probably noticed that page titles change whenever updates are available on the site. Tab Notifier now uses those information to notify you of updates on those sites.

The browser add-on, available for both the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browser, monitors all browser tabs automatically from the moment it has been installed. It cannot notify you of updates if a website is closed though, which means that it is best for users who have their messaging and social sites up whenever the browser is up and running.

Tab Notifier can display notifications even if the browser is minimized or not visible on the screen.

The extension watches all open tabs but the active tab by default. This behavior can be modified in the extension options to a more stricter policy. Instead of watching all sites, it is possible to configure the add-on to watch only sites listed in the settings window.

Notifications furthermore can be configured to close automatically after a set amount of seconds, which may be useful for users who receive many throughout the day.

A right-click on a web page and the selection of the configure tab notifier for site context menu option displays a site specific configuration menu. This overrides the global extension settings so that it either offers to run a whitelist or blacklist of sites.

Advanced users can use regular expressions to fine tune title matches for specific sites. This can be useful if a site uses different page titles instead of just one (or to be only notified if the notification count reaches ten or more messages).

Notifications are displayed in the lower right corner of the screen, and not in the browser window. Firefox users can download Tab Notifier from the Mozilla Add-ons repository, Chrome users from the developer’s website. Apple Macintosh users need to have Growl installed to use the extension.

Page Snooze For Chrome, Hide Inactive Tabs

If you are like me, you have some tabs open in your web browser of choice that you do not use regularly. For me it is most often program website or service tabs that I want to write about, but cannot at that point in time. It happens that I keep those websites open in tabs for a week or even longer periods, which does not make that much sense from a usability perspective. An alternative would be to bookmark the website, but that would mean that I would have to remember that I bookmarked it.

Page Snooze for the Google Chrome web browser adds another option to the Internet browser. The extension hides inactive tabs for a certain amount of time on a special page, before it pushes them again to the tabbar of the browser.

Chrome users have two options to work with the extension after installation. They can first and foremost right-click on any page to select the new Page Snooze option in the context menu, or click on the extension’s address bar icon instead.

The context menu displays different inactivity periods, from 5 seconds to up to two weeks. The tab is automatically removed from the tabbar once a selection has been made.

The address bar icon on the other hand will always hide a tab for one week. The tab is automatically added to the tabbar again after the selected time period.

The icon furthermore indicates the number of tabs that are currently hidden in the browser. A right-click and the selection of options displays the list of tabs that are currently hidden in the browser.

Each entry displays the website’s favicon, page title and the date and time it will be moved to the tabbar again.

Google Chrome users who would like to try Page Snooze can install it from the official Chrome Web Store. It could prove useful to Chrome users who know that they do not need to access specific tabs for a specific amount of time.