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New firefox extension: Quick ROT-13/47
ROT13 (that is, ROTate by 13 places) is a very simply substitution cipher that is often used in online forums, games and chat rooms. The idea was invented by Julius Caesar over 2,000 years ago (it was ROT3), but has been popular on the WWW since the '80s.
It works by rotating each character in a string of text by thirteen alphabetical characters, wrapping over to the beginning if necessary. For example:
Hello --> Uryyb --> Hello
As demonstrated above, one of the cool things about this simple technique is that it is it's own inverse. That is, applying the same filter twice will yield exactly what you started with. This, of course, makes it totally useless as a production-level encryption algorithm, but very handy for non-critical uses such as games and puzzles.
A very-similar alternative is ROT47, which applies the same concept to a larger range of characters in the ASCII set (94 to be exact: 33 to 127). This allows us to include several additional characters such as exclamation marks, commas, etc.
I've written a Firefox add-on, which allows you to select some text on a webpage, right-click it, and then generate the ROT13 or ROT47 substitute. From here you can re-apply the cipher and/or copy the new value to your local clipboard.
Please check it out and let me know of any problems you run into. Thanks!
Official download: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/125128/
Or view/modify the source code: http://github.com/buntine/Quick-ROT13/