You may look at an extension that turns text into various forms of structured gibberish as a silly toy. You may even be right! Sure, you can have loads of fun typing like an 3|173 h4(k3r, |)ud3! But in today’s paranoid Internet culture where everything’s monitored, censored, or scrutinized by various agencies and companies, it also makes good sense to have a simple method of “poor man’s encryption” handy.

Leet Key is a Firefox extension that can transform typed or highlighted text into not just ‘leetspeak’, but Rot13, Base64, hexadecimal, URL-encoding, binary, Morse code, DVORAK keyboard layout, and much, much more. It may have started out as a joke, but it is now a useful tool as well.

By activating the active editing feature, Leet Key will let you type normally but output in leet code, or most other codes! It colors the window green on black, to signify this is turned on. Other kinds of encoding can be done mostly through highlighting the text and right-clicking to select from the ‘leetkey’ menu.

It can also do on-the-fly AES and DES encryption, with a key which it prompts you for.

I say again, this has serious uses! You may want to obfuscate the punchline to a joke that might offend some people, or hide the spoiler to a plot while you review a movie (or a leaked Harry potter book). And how about hiding your email from spam-bots crawling around? Joe_user@hotmail.com becomes “4a 6f 65 5f 75 73 65 72 40 68 6f 74 6d 61 69 6c 2e 63 6f 6d”, which you can then hint is hex-encoded so the other (human!) party can get at it.

Remember, if cryptography is outlawed, gura bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir pelcgbtencul!

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