Top 3 must-have Google Chrome extensions

The best Google Chrome extensions is, without any doubt, AdBlock [do not confuse it with his “little-big” brother AdBlock Plus]. I simply can’t live or even think to browse the web without having it installed anymore. Nowadays nearly all webpages are full of ads and there are so many types that you can even distinguish between them: banners, pop-ups, pop-unders, etc. and they all share the same aspect: intrusiveness. Not only, in fact they can even follow and track your browsing experience site-by-site without caring about your privacy and/or giving you to ability to opt-out from this process. Luckily AdBlock give you the possibility to block ads on all websites even before they get loaded from your browser and it also blocks companies which tracks you on the web [like Google’s DoubleClick] at the same time. Be sure to select EasyList and EasyPrivacy from the blacklists menu.

The second best Chrome extension in my opinion is Auto HD For YouTube by JRA Apps. This simple and lightweight extension makes your YouTube experience more seamless by automatically selecting the video quality you prefer for any videos you watch. If you’re like me in fact selecting video quality for each videos is a pain and if you’re also as lazy as I am sometimes you prefer watching a video at the ugly resolution of 240p instead of selecting 1080p or 720p and waiting for the YouTube player to reload the entire video from the beginning with the selected quality. This extensions also works with embedded videos, unlike other similar extensions.

The third best Chrome extensions is DoNotTrackMe by Abine. This extension, also available for Firefox, protects your online privacy by blocking nearly all tracking and advertising companies from seeing which sites you visit, videos you watch, purchases you make, etc.. If you use it in conjuction with AdBlock your browser will be able to protect your privacy from 99.99% of websites out in the internet. It needs no configuration  so it does the job for you right after you install it.

How to speed up Google Chrome by disabling useless plugins

Google Chrome has quickly become the most used internet browser surpassing Firefox and Internet Explorer and its user base grown seems unstoppable, and it deserves it. It’s a fast, safe and extensible internet browser compared to the second most used, Internet Explorer.

But, like any other PC and Mac software, it can become slow and unresponsive over time. Luckily there are a few ways to speed it up again and the most effective is by disabling installed plugins you don’t need.

When you installed Chrome on you computer for the first time there weren’t many plugins installed other than Chrome’s default ones but third party software [for example Adobe Reader, Quicktime, VLC Media player, etc.], already present on your computer or which you installed in a second moment, tends to install new plugins to better integrate with your browser without asking and, while this is a good thing for safe and good softwares its not so good with bad ones like viruses, adwares and/or plugins you don’t need.

You can think of plugin like toolbars, the more you have the slower your browser will be.

So how can we disable those plugins? It’s a simple thing to do, just follow those steps:

1. Launch Google Chrome
2. Once it’s launched type [or copy and paste] this in your URL bar and press Enter:

   chrome://plugins

3. Now you should see a list of the currently installed plugins, you can safely disable the ones you don’t need by clicking the Disable link under them.

I suggest you to disable third-party plugins like:

• Windows Media Player Plugin
• Microsoft DRM
• DivX Web Player [If you already have VLC and/or you never used it]
• iTunes Application Detector [100% useless]
• Chrome Remote Desktop Viewer [If you don’t need remote support]

Careful: Do not disable Default Browser Helper and/or Native Client or Chrome won’t work.

iPhone is too mainstream

Note to readers: I am not a hipster 😬.

By November 2013 over 421 million iPhones have been sold, with that number we can’t be wrong saying that nowadays the iPhone is in the hand of nearly everyone who have a smartphone and that’s a lot of [different] people. From the geek boy to the old woman, from the school girl to her grandma, they all have the same device. And they all keep downloading apps. In fact by October 2013 Apple announced that more than 60 billion total apps have been downloaded and there are more then 1 million different apps are in the App Store.

With so many apps we can easily imagine that while some of them are crafted with quality in mind, the majority are not. Before it wasn’t like this. I owned every single iPhone model since the original iPhone back in 2007, and I can easily remember how different the App Store was at the beginning. There were way less apps and it wasn’t full of stupid apps and games like today, and do you know what the reason of this “change in quality standards” is? People.

The biggest problem is that the most of users doesn’t even know what a quality iOS app looks like, and, since most of the people download pointless apps those are the results:

Seriously. How can an app like Pou be at the top positions of the most selled paid apps?.

We all know the only way iOS users can run third-party software on their devices is by using the App Store to search and download them, they can’t use any other store or website to do that, unlike Android. Also the App Store is totally under Apple’s control and for this reason it’s a completely closed environment, because they can decide which apps iOS devices can run or not and they can even pull them without any notice. Sure, this is made for security reasons and/or to defend already present apps from clones, but this behavior has a big downside in my opinion and I call it “software saturation“. With this term I mean that there are too many apps users can search for.

On the App Store those are confirmed facts:

1. The most downloaded apps are the one that are more present on the top charts since they have more visibility over the others.
2. Searching for apps doesn’t work anymore, there’s too of them.
   People doesn’t search anymore they simply download the most famous apps they find on the top 250 chart.

On the other hand OS X, Windows and Linux [even if they now have their own stores] have an open environment  and anyone can write their own software. In fact, if you’re like me when you need a new software for OS X, Windows or Linux you simply search it on Google or any other search engine and then you pick the perfect one for you needs from a majority of similar apps, simple as that, no “App Store” needed. In this situation, with no “charts” or “top downloaded apps” anyone can have the visibility they deserve for their work and, even if there are tons of similar apps no one gets unnoticed [if the software is well made off course] and for this reason there are no conditioning.

Has YouTube become the biggest illegal download website?

The new version of the application you desperately need has just came out but you don’t want to buy it? You already tried searching on BitTorrent but the file you downloaded is fake and/or you still can’t find it? Do you need a serial number too?

No problem, all you need is a Google YouTube search!

I’m not joking, YouTube is full of videos with download links to Uploaded.to, Rapidgator, Zippyshare, MediaFire, you-name-it and serial numbers too, placed in the description ready for everyone to copy-and-paste.

Let’s try with iExplorer, a famous OS X and Windows software made by the guys of Macroplant that lets you manage your iDevice [iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch], move files back and forth, backup SMS messages and other things. It costs 34.99$ but you can get it free on… YouTube! Just search “iExplorer serial” and that’s the result:

I’ve hided the serial in the picture for legal reasons off course, but you can try it by yourself if you don’t believe me.

Downloading illegal software from YouTube can be easier and faster compared to BitTorrent because you won’t need any BitTorrent client installed on your machine and the download speed is around 120 kB/s using a free account on those file sharing websites. Slower compared to BitTorrent, but generally an app, like iExplorer in this case, is around 20 MB so it won’t take more than 10 minutes.

Sadly enough, that’s only a little part of a bigger story. In fact there also are nearly infinite extensions available on the web for all browsers [here’s a few examples: Chrome, Firefox] that let’s you instantly convert a video and download it in .mp3 and .mp4 [AAC] format so you can easily download music illegally.

Google recently discovered this problem and banned all .mp3 downloader from his Chrome Web Store, but the phenomena can’t be stopped in my opinion until they block 3rd-party extensions and/or scripts on YouTube and until they develop a filter for uploaded videos containing illegal links or serial numbers.

How to block ads and malicious websites using the host file

We all hate ads, don’t we?

Luckily nowadays there are many browser extensions like AdBlock and his brother AdBlock Plus that lets you block ads on the web using blocklists like EasyList. They do a great job and get better and precise in every new list and extensions updates, for example now both extensions can block ads in a page even before they get downloaded to help you save bandwidth and time since the page will load faster. But those are extensions of your web browser so they will need some RAM memory to work and also they could make your browser run slower, especially if you do some intense browsing and you have multiple tabs loaded.

Is there a way to block all possible ads, like AdBlock and AdBlock Plus do without extensions? The answer is: yes [of course] and you don’t need any additional software we just need the already present host file.

For the one who don’t know a host file is a file present in all OSs in which there is a list of websites who the user won’t be able to access. This is a [empty] host file:

So, for example if I don’t want the user able to access the New York Times website I just need to add it like this in the host file like this:

127.0.0.1            www.nytimes.com

and the website will be blocked. This principle can be used to block ads websites and already know malicious one [full of malware, viruses, etc.] but to be sure to block all of those sites you will need to add every single one of them to the host file and, trust me, there are a lot of them.

Luckly MSMVPS already did the job for us creating a host file with all those websites and they also update it once a month with newly discovered bad-websites and all the ads stuff. Here you can download the latest version:

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.zip

There are 3 different ways to install it, based on your operative system:

• Windows:

1. Right click and select “Run as Administrator” on the mvps.bat file
   It will do the job for you renaming the old host file to host.mvps for backup and replacing it with the new one.
2. Reboot

• Mac OS X:

1. Copy the HOST file and replace the one in private/etc/
   [If you need help to reach this folder press Command+Shift+G and write “private/etc/”, then press Ok]
2. Open the Terminal and paste this text to flush the DNS Cache:

   dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

3. Reboot

• Linux:

1. In the Terminal run:

   vi /root/update_hosts.sh

2.  Fill the file with:

   #!/bin/bash
   cd /tmp
   wget http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.txt
   rm /etc/hosts
   mv hosts.txt /etc/hosts
   cat ~/.etchosts >> /etc/hosts

3.  Make the script is executable:

   chmod +x update_hosts.sh

4.  Close the Terminal and re-open it and paste this:

   crontab -e

5. Enter this:

6. 59 23 * * * /root/update_hosts.sh

7. Done.

There you have it, now your OS will block those noisy ads for you and you won’t need any AdBlock extensions, also this will also add an extra layer of security to your system.

Which is the best blocklist for Transmission?

Transmission is, in my opinion, the best BitTorrent client for OS X and Linux [and did you know there’s even an unofficial Windows version too?]. Why? Because it’s super easy to use and configure and it’s not resource-hungry like some other one [someone said µTorrent for OS X?].

But it has a problem. Blocklists are damn hard to find.

Looking for a nice and complete blocklist for Transmission can be a pain, especially if you’re not sure of which one to pick. In fact there are a ton of lists all for different purposes and no one will give you complete bad-peer protection since one will shield your client from spammers, one from the US Government [really?] and no one from all those things combined.

If you search on Google you will find people recommending this website, called iBlocklist, which collects various block lists but there are to many of them and they all have the same problem I said before: no complete 100% protection.

Luckly John Tyree, a user from quora.com, created a GitHub project which combines all those iBlocklist lists in to a single one and he hosted the result here:

http://john.bitsurge.net/public/biglist.p2p.gz

simply add this URL in the Transmission preferences like this:

and the application will do all the magic for you combining the lists and adding those IP rules to the built-in firewall. Be sure to check the option below to make Transmission update the blocklist weekly for you so you won’t have to worry anymore. This works with all versions of Transmission and with all OSs.

If this post was useful to you feel free to buy me a beer 🍺! Thank you really much.