The Cocoon Blog
The Internet as it should be: private, secure and virus free

If you are reading this, I hope it means you’ve either tried Cocoon already, or are considering it. Hopefully you’ve seen the great new features I’ve talked about here. While Cocoon isn’t perfect yet, the good news is Cocoon is protecting your privacy and making your browsing much safer from viruses or malware by keeping you safely behind our proxy servers and filters. For the things that still need improving, we have created a simple workaround, and are working hard at a permanent fix for you.

So let’s get to the bottom line – what isn’t ready for prime time yet? Well, right now, there are still file formats are not being transcoded yet. While I don’t have a list to share, when you run across one, we will warn you that it’s not been made safe by Cocoon.

If you see this, we are still working to transcode this file type into a safe format for you.

We warn you because these are files that would run on your hard drive if you open them – and potentially put your machine at risk. If you still want to download the file, you can “pause” Cocoon by unlocking it, downloading what you want, and then re-locking it to protect your machine and privacy once again.

What else should you be aware of? Well, we’ve found Google docs are a bit funky within Cocoon, but since they are fairly safe, you can just pause Cocoon with the unlock feature. There are also some issues with a few flash based form-filling pages that we are working to resolve.

For the most part, those are the big issues. We are still tweaking lots of little things, but what’s great is that during your normal browsing around the web, your computer will be safe from malware and you will be totally private with no one able to identify you via your IP address or location. Want to see that for your self? Go to www.whatismyipaddress.com with Cocoon off, and then with it on and note where “what is my IP address” thinks you are.

We’ll keep working to get more files transcoded to keep your machine safe. If you run into anything that doesn’t work, please let us know, it’s a big web out there, but we want it all to be private, secure and malware-free.

We are very happy to announce some great improvements in Cocoon with a new user interface for the Firefox toolbar add-on. These improvements include:

• Blue indicator bar alerting you when you are protected by Cocoon – note the lower screen shot below.
• Easily pause Cocoon by unlocking it, allowing you to control when you want to download something onto your hard drive.
• Set Cocoon to keep you logged in after you’ve closed the browser window.
• If you have several accounts, select the pushpin to choose which user name you want retained in the log-in bar.
• Improved “History” functionality and features

Cocoon locked and protected

Cocoon unlocked not protected

Our goal is to make using Cocoon so easy you’ll always browse with it on. Like with any protection device it only works when it’s being used, and now with the “unlock” feature there’s no need to log out of Cocoon, making it easy to stay private and protected behind our proxy servers. Just make sure if you do unlock it, you turn it right back on – and the blue bar is there to remind you.

In time, as we have more file types transcoded into safe formats, there will be less reason to ever turn Cocoon off. Eventually you’ll be able to view virtually any content without having it touch your hard drive.

Please let us know what you think of Cocoon. We appreciate all the feedback we can get as we continue to develop the product. In fact, several of the features in this release were directly influenced by user comments, so keep that feedback coming!