hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr2458.txt

Episode: 2458
Title: HPR2458: Chrome Plugins You Must Have
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2458/hpr2458.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-19 03:28:53

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This is HPR Episode 2458 entitled Chrome Plugins You Must Have.
It is hosted by Opera Zero R and is about 11 minutes long and carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, I go over my current list of Chrome Plugins and how I secure my browser.
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Hello and welcome to the episode of Packer Public Radio.
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I'm going to be going over Chrome and the extensions and plugins that I have around ad blocking, enhancements, downloaded tools and all that good stuff.
Back up and management of that.
So first things first, you're going to want to get some kind of either free or paid backup solution.
Amazon used to be free for $60 a year unlimited and they have since discontinued or about to discontinue that program.
So anyways, you're looking anywhere from $10 a month to $5 a month for a store like Dropbox or Amazon.
So get yourself a cloud account.
If you're not backing up your stuff in the cloud, then there's not a whole lot of point in all this.
First thing is getting that all set up.
Second is kind of deciding what browser you're going to use.
I'm using Iron Portable which is kind of like a non-Google Chrome if that makes any sense.
So it has some anti-Google stuff in it but it doesn't have all the stuff supposedly that Chrome has.
And it's a little more lightweight, right?
So that said, I do have some issues around having to set my agent tag as Chrome even though it's ironed.
So it won't work on some things like Slack recently.
Did that where if you weren't running the right agent tag, it would value out.
So anyways, you can use agent tag tools for Chrome.
So first things first.
Last past is what I used for a password manager.
There's hundreds of passwords managers out there.
You got a little last past password one and a couple of other local ones that are pretty popular.
Pretty straightforward.
You don't have a password manager.
You should be using one.
UBlack Origin is basically an ad-bockler that's pretty standard.
Pretty round the middle at this point.
They're users of ad-bock plus or ad-bock edge.
You should probably move off of that and something like UBlack Origins.
Another one we got here is Turbo Download Manager.
I'll link to the show notes and all these to a post blog post I did for LinkedIn.
So Turbo Download Manager basically allows you to multi-threadedly download something with Chrome.
And this is the only plugin that I found for Chrome that has multi-threaded downloads.
Most of them are single-threaded, meaning that you can't swarm the downloads.
So for example, you're downloaded a 15-gig file.
It'll chop it up into four parts or however many parts that server will let you download.
So by default it's like three.
So in examples of YouTube, if you use the YouTube downloader and you use multi-threaded download,
you can pretty much download a YouTube video and faster than you can even begin to stream it right.
So I don't even watch YouTube videos generally from YouTube.
I'll just right-click download and download it real quick using the download manager.
And a few seconds and then pull it up and I can do whatever I want to with it using the LC and move back and forth.
Get them all is essentially the same kind of thing but it's a little less around multi-media or streaming media.
Get them all will pull links too.
For example, it's kind of neat.
If you're in a directory with a bunch of zip files or for example with a bunch of executables,
you would download those. You can put some filters in there.
It's sort of similar to download the mall.
But download the mall is a Firefox extension that I was pretty used to and happy with.
Now a more recent one that I ran across which is used for some of these NTSP streamers or RTSP streamers.
XEXTM3U or M3U8 streams.
Basically a multi-cast stream where it chucks it up until the bunch of little files.
So some of these downloader websites or video websites like cartoons.me or NMS or whatever they are now.
Kiss cartoons, all those types use the same type of way to stream.
And you can use this stream download of HSLS video saver or HDS video saver and it's an Adobe.
And it's kind of like a chopped similar to what YouTube does with its splicing.
They will chop it up into little pieces to make it instead of one giant file.
You get a bunch of little piles.
The cool thing about this Adobe HSLS video saver is that it will download all or a bunch of threads at once.
So for example, if it's a one hour long movie, you can download the 720p version in about 10 seconds.
It's pretty insane.
So a lot of these websites don't necessarily block multi threads.
So you can just have 5 threads, 10 threads open at full speed and pull down something that would take you normally with one thread a while to download using this video saver.
You can pull it down really quickly.
Paper monkey and I'll go over that one.
It's essentially a JavaScript hotness for adding kind of making your own plugins for different types of sites.
And it does a number of other things.
But generally speaking, it's kind of like a hook for writing almost your own plugins sort of in a JavaScript language.
Privacy Badger is around privacy if you ever used ghostry.
You should probably switch off of that and try something out like privacy badger.
Magic actions for YouTube is actually one that I ran into probably a couple years ago.
This one's awesome because it does a number of things.
One of the coolest ones is that it actually will have different themes.
You can have like a dark theme.
You can also remove comments.
You can remove related videos more importantly by default.
It actually removes the annotations.
And also you can set a bit stream.
So if you really don't want to receive 1080p every time you can do 720 and set that as your default.
And it will stream that if that's an option.
So that's a pretty cool one.
So now I'm going to go into that grease monkey or tamper monkey scripts.
That are part of tamper monkey.
Hmm. This first one.
Usually is the first one as anti ad blocker.
So I'm going to try not to blow your mind here.
But there's ad blockers, right?
Then there's anti ad blockers that are on a number of websites where they say turn off your ad blocker.
So there's a bunch of scripts out there.
And what this anti ad blocker does is kind of ingest some of those techniques that those anti ad blockers use.
And allow you to view this site as if you were not using an ad blocker, but still block the ads.
So it's an ad blocker blocker blocker, right?
And there's a video in there and then the links and how to do all that stuff.
So that's a pretty cool grease monkey script.
The only other one I use right now, I think, is YouTube links.
And YouTube links again.
Works great with you.
Multi-threaded downloader.
And you can right-click whichever bit stream you want.
So if you want to download the 1080p version and an MP4 or whatever.
Sometimes we'll be missing the sound.
So usually I'll stick with MP4.
And some of the other bit streams, some of the other streams for whatever reason are missing audio.
But with YouTube links and the multi-threaded downloader makes YouTube a pretty usable experience.
That's pretty much it for the Chrome plugins that I'm using now.
What I will say is it's becoming kind of one of those watering hole attacks.
So there's actually a way.
And I'm dying here.
There is a way you can actually start Firefox where I'm sorry.
You can actually start Chrome in a sandbox mode or non-sambex sandbox mode.
So by default, if you start.
You try to run as the service for or iron as a run as a different user,
it will pop up errors and crap out because it's trying to do some sandboxing.
I don't need a sandbox because my sandbox is actually a different user.
So what I do is I run as for a slice user internet and save those credentials because I don't care about those credentials on my local box.
And I will run the dash, dash, no dash sandbox option.
And that will throw me into that internet user which has non administrative access.
So the way my gaming machine works is I have all I have admin access for my gaming machine.
But my browser runs as internet with iron and the no sandbox option which sounds counterintuitive right?
You're turning off the same box.
But what you're actually doing is making it kind of even more better sandbox than you would normally have.
So there's common issues around that where you have to have like a common save file path.
So I'll have everything in a download folder on the C-Root.
And I'll manage, stop that way.
So that way I can look at a binary if I need to or I can drop and trade files between the admin user and the internet either.
So there's some risk there right to having a bunch of plugins running.
And to mitigate that risk you can run it as a different user, as a non administrator user, and kind of go from there.
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