I was asked by a colleague to help them extract some text from a page that had been “protected” by a form of HTML encryption – the type of thing where the page is encoded by javascript and only displays if you’ve got scripting enabled.

Of course, getting the text out was trivial. There are several methods, but probably the simplest is to use Firefox to save the page to disk – when you do that, Firefox saves the decrypted text along with the script and you can then just copy and paste. But that doesn’t stop people selling HTML encryption systems, and making inflated claims for its efficacy.

So, as a quick test, I Googled for html encryption and picked the first snake oil salesman on the list where I could find a demo of their product at their site. Then I grabbed a copy, decrypted it and put it on one of my own sites. You can see the plain text version here, just to demonstrate how easy it is. It took me about five minutes. And they want to charge you $39.95 or $69.95 (for the “professional” version) to buy their snake oil. Anyone who falls for this is about as stupid as it gets.