Did You Know You Can Copy and Paste Images Directly into Gmail?

When reader Artem wrote in with this tip, I was pretty surprised—turns out you can paste images from the clipboard directly into Gmail with Ctrl+V or the context menu… but only in Firefox 4 at the moment. In Google Chrome, it works a little differently.

Update: after doing a little more testing, seems like if you do this in Firefox, this might not make it through to the receiver properly in some or all cases. It does appear to work with Chrome, however.

Copy and Paste in Firefox

Update: This Doesn’t Work Right. Skip down to the Chrome section.

If you’re in Firefox, you can take a screenshot with the print screen key, with a third-party utility, or with the built-in Snipping Tool in Windows 7 or Vista. Or you can even right-click an image in any browser and choose “Copy Image”.

Then you can either Ctrl+V or right-click and choose Paste…

And just like that, the image will be in your new email.

Copy and Paste in Google Chrome

In Google Chrome, it works a little differently—you can’t copy an image from the clipboard, but you can copy images within Chrome. Just right-click on any image, choose “Copy image”…

And then you can paste it directly into Gmail.

Hopefully it’ll all work seamlessly between all browsers at some point in the future. At least you can drag and drop images to Gmail from most modern browsers.

Courtesy: howtogeek portal

Beware! Two More Firefox Malware Extensions Found, with Full-Blown Trojans This Time

Last July, we pointed out that the Google Reader Notifier extension had turned into crapware, the NoScript add-on was hijacking another extension, and even the Fast Dial extension was spamming you—so it was only a matter of time before an extension came bundled with a full-blown trojan.

Last time, it was as simple as spam links showing up in your browser, and tracking the URLs you were going to—really frustrating and evil, but not necessarily the end of the world, since it wasn’t going to take over your PC.

The Mozilla Add-ons blog reported that two extensions contained nasty trojans that hijacked your PC.

Two experimental add-ons, Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader and all versions of Master Filer were found to contain Trojan code aimed at Windows users. Version 4.0 of Sothink Web Video Downloader contained Win32.LdPinch.gen, and Master Filer contained Win32.Bifrose.32.Bifrose Trojan. Both add-ons have been disabled on AMO.

If you’ve installed those extensions at any point, you should make sure to run a full virus scan on your PC.

Rant About Firefox Extension Security

Instead of ranting again, let me just quote what I said last time this happened…

What’s to stop yet another Firefox extension from turning into badware, sneaking in tracking codes, or stealing your personal information? It’s already happened with two of the most popular extensions… Somebody at Mozilla needs to do something about this.

The current process over at Mozilla is to run an automated virus scanner against the extensions, and as a result of this issue they have added more scanning tools to the process. This doesn’t solve the real issue, because any virus programmer with some skills can write a customized virus that doesn’t get picked up by any of the commercial virus scanning tools. Sure, some of the tools have heuristics that will probably detect rootkits and some of the nastier techniques, but it’s not going to prevent the issue entirely.

The real problem isn’t even a traditional virus, as far as I’m concerned. How difficult would it be for somebody to write a native Firefox extension that simply takes all your passwords and sends them to a rogue site? There’s no security layer to prevent add-ons from accessing your personal information stored in the browser, and no virus scanner is going to pick up a native Firefox extension since they are written in Javascript.

The Partial Solution

Nobody’s expecting Mozilla to scan through the source code of every single extension—that’s just prone to human error anyway. What would make sense, however, is to have some layers of security that prevent add-ons from accessing any of your personal information stored in the browser unless you specifically allow them to.

What Can You Do to Keep Safe?

You should always make sure to check the reviews on an extension before you install it—don’t just take somebody else’s word when they vouch for an extension… make sure to do your due diligence to check things out first. The same thing applies for any application, of course—if you’re installing applications without doing a virus scan, you’re leaving yourself wide open to having your PC hijacked.

 Please read: Security Issue on AMO [Mozilla Add-ons Blog]

Add Spell Checking to Your Favorite Windows Apps

Some but not all Windows apps have built-in spell checking of some sort. If you want to add spell checking to all of your apps (or a select group) then join us as we look at tinySpell.

Note: There is a paid version of this software (tinySpell+) available as well for those who want extra functionality.

tinySpell in Action

The installation process is simple and straightforward…as soon as you have finished installing tinySpell you will see your new “System Tray Icon”. You can see tinySpell’s “Context Menu” here.

Before going any further you may want to have a look through the settings to make any desired display modifications.

During our tests we found it very helpful to modify the Spelling Tip options…it will make for a much nicer and easier to read display when you have a spelling error.

Clicking on the Applications… Command in the Context Menu will bring up the following window. You can really finesse how active tinySpell will be here:

• Create a special list of apps that tinySpell will not monitor
• Create a custom list of apps that tinySpell will monitor

If you have any particular or unique words that you would like to add to tinySpell’s Dictionary ahead of time you can do that by clicking on the Dictionary… Command in the Context Menu.

Want to check the spelling of a word ahead of time or find that you are just curious about how it is spelled? Click on Open spelling window in the Context Menu to access a special spell check window.

For our example we misspelled “spelling” on purpose…notice that the word has turned red.

Clicking on the Check Mark Button will open a drop-down list with suggested spellings for the word that you are inquiring about. Click on the appropriate listing if you intend to copy and paste the word.

Next we moved on to Notepad. As we were typing tinySpell alerted us when we typed the word “app”. You will hear a small default system sound and see a small popup as shown here if tinySpell thinks a word has been misspelled.

The System Tray Icon will also change to a yellow color. You can access the list of suggested spellings by either left clicking on the small popup or the System Tray Icon.

If the word is a properly spelled “abbreviation” (or special/custom) like our word here you can select Add to dictionary.

Going further in our text document we once again purposely misspelled “spelling”…

Left clicking on the popup gave us access to the drop-down list of suggested spellings…

And clicking on the correct spelling automatically inserted it into our document in place of the misspelled word.

As you can see here tinySpell was even monitoring file names when we went to save the document. Very thorough indeed.

Conclusion

If your favorite app does not have built-in spell checking, then tinySpell will definitely be a welcome (and very helpful) addition to your Windows system. They offer a portable version as well so you can take it with you to any PC.

 Download tinySpell