JetLib News

Worried about whether or not your favorite Web site is supporting the Stop Online Privacy Act? A new Chrome extension seeks to lift those fears.

After installing No SOPA, users get a warning message reading “SOPA Supporter! This company is a known supporter of the dangerous ‘Stop Online Piracy Act’,” every time they visit a SOPA-supporting Web site.

Congress could resume debate on SOPA as early as Jan. 17, and the Senate could vote on the measure as early as Jan. 24. SOPA would block access to sites accused of violating U.S. copyright laws. The measure has been called Draconian by opponents who say it would fundamentally change the free-flow of information across the Internet. Proponents, ranging from the NBA to Universal, say the measure is needed to block sites which flagrantly flaunt copyright laws and make content available for free without paying copyright owners.

“Boycott? Nasty letter time? You decide,” Andy Baird and Tony Webster, the extension’s creators, wrote on the extension Web site.

Hackers have already been working on other fixes to use if the law passes, including a satellite network and a Firefox add-on that directs the browser directly to a blocked site’s IP address. Such extensions are being created in part to show the regulations, if passed, will be ineffective in stopping traffic to blacklisted sites.

Evernote has expanded its read-later browser extension, Clearly, to Firefox. The extension first launched on Chrome in November. Clearly slides in a cleaned-up view of Web articles without ads or navigation, making content more pleasant to read. It automatically turns multi-page articles to single pages.

It’s also a content shifting tool. Clicking the Evernote elephant icon in the sidebar saves the cleaned up version to your Evernote account so it can be read on all devices. The article viewer also comes with three themes, and beyond that, all the fonts, colors and alignments can be customized.

Evernote thinks big, which is why it made our top 10 consumer Web products of the year. It wants to be a 100-year company, a cloud-based desk drawer for all our little files. It has recently shipped some interesting, unusual applications, including a food scrapbook called Evernote Food and a name remembering app called Hello.

Clearly brings Evernote into an increasingly crowded market dominated by dedicated read-later services like Instapaper and Read It Later. Like Clearly, Read It Later turns all articles into single-page views, but Instapaper intentionally doesn’t, in order to respect the revenue decisions of publishers.

Evernote Clearly could gain significant traction if users find they enjoy having all their cloud-synced stuff in one place, instead of having a separate app for reading. Content shifting is a new trend, and Evernote, whose basic service is free, is well positioned to introduce the behavior to new users.

Chrome and Firefox are the next biggest browsers after Internet Explorer, so Evernote Clearly is now available to a sizable chunk of the market. Chrome actually surpassed Firefox for the first time this month, only three years after launching, but Firefox renewed its search deal with Google yesterday, giving it a new lease on life.

You can install Clearly for Chrome or Firefox.

Do you use a clean-reading service? Which one do you use?