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2020-09-23T15:12:00.014+05:30

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2020-09-16T13:37:00.002+05:30

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How to Enable, Manage, and Delete Secret Conversations in Facebook Messenger (Updated Guide 2026)

2020-05-11T23:10:00.001+05:30

Want to keep your Facebook Messenger chats completely private and secure? Whether you need to send sensitive information, protect a private conversation, or automatically clear old messages, Messenger’s end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) features give you total control over your privacy.

This comprehensive guide covers how to enable and manage Secret Conversations, set auto-delete timers, safely delete chats, and essential Do’s and Don’ts for private messaging.

1. What Are Secret Conversations in Messenger?

Secret Conversations use end-to-end encryption (E2EE), meaning only you and the recipient can read what is sent. Neither Facebook, hackers, nor third parties can intercept or view your messages.

Important Update: Messenger now automatically protects most personal 1-on-1 chats with default end-to-end encryption. However, you can still manually trigger disappearing messages or start separate secret chats with custom timers.

2. How to Enable & Manage Secret Conversations

Depending on your mobile app version, you can start or manage secret chats using two quick methods:

Start from Chat Profile
Method 1
Open Messenger and select the person you want to message privately. Tap their profile picture or the info (i) icon at the top right, then scroll down and select Go to Secret Conversation.
Start from New Message
Method 2
From the main Chats tab, tap the Pencil icon (Top Right). Toggle the Padlock icon in the top-right corner to turn on secret mode, then select the recipient.
Manage Encrypted Storage & Keys
Account Settings
To manage your device keys or access encrypted history on a new phone, go to Settings > Privacy & Safety > End-to-End Encrypted Chats. Here you can manage your Secure Storage PIN or check active authorized devices.

How to Disable Secret Conversations

Because 1-on-1 chats are now encrypted by default, you cannot toggle off encryption globally. However, if you want to turn off disappearing message timers or remove an active secret chat thread, open the chat settings (info icon) and select Disappearing Messages > Off.

3. How to Set a Timer for Automatic Message Deletion (Disappearing Messages)

Want your messages to self-destruct after being read? Messenger allows you to set a disappearing timer.

Open the secret or encrypted chat.
Tap the contact’s profile picture / (i) icon at the top.
Tap Disappearing Messages.
Choose your desired timer (e.g., 5 seconds, 1 minute, 1 hour, or 24 hours).
Return to the chat. A notice will show that disappearing messages are on. Every message sent will automatically vanish once the timer runs out after viewing.

4. How to Delete Secret Conversations

Deleting a secret chat removes it permanently from your app.

Method 1: Delete an Individual Secret Chat

Android: On the main Chats list, press and hold the secret chat thread (marked with a lock icon) and tap Delete.
iOS (iPhone): Swipe left on the secret chat thread and tap Delete (Trash icon).

Method 2: Clear All Secret Conversations from Settings

Tap your Profile / Menu icon in Messenger.
Go to Settings > Privacy & Safety > End-to-End Encrypted Chats.
Select Delete Chat History or manage active sessions under Security Alerts to sign out unauthorized devices.

5. Do’s and Don’ts for Secret Conversations

To ensure your chats stay 100% private and safe, keep these critical guidelines in mind:

DO's

DO Set Short Timers for Sensitive Info: Use a 5-to-30-second timer when sharing temporary passwords, financial details, or confidential photos.
DO Verify Encryption Keys: If discussing highly sensitive topics, tap the user's profile icon in chat, select Verify Encryption, and compare the security numbers to ensure no middle-man is intercepting.
DO Set Up a Secure Storage PIN: Create a 6-digit PIN in Messenger settings so you can recover your encrypted chat history if you get a new phone.

DON'Ts

DON'T Rely Solely on Self-Destruction for Trust: The other user can still take a photo of their screen using another phone or camera before the message disappears.
DON'T Forget About Screenshots: While Messenger alerts you if someone takes a screenshot in Vanish/Disappearing mode on mobile, it isn't always foolproof across desktop or web clients.
DON'T Share PINs or Recovery Codes: Never give your Messenger Secure Storage PIN to anyone—it grants full access to decrypt your chat archives

Managing Multiple Devices

You can still use Messenger across more than one device, but each device needs its own copy of the encryption keys to read your encrypted history:

When you sign in on a new device, you'll be asked to restore your encrypted chats using your Secure Storage recovery method.
You can see which devices are currently logged into your encrypted chats, and remove a device you no longer use, from Privacy & safety > End-to-end encrypted chats in Settings.
Removing a device there means that device can no longer send or receive encrypted messages until it's set up again.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I turn off default encryption for my personal chats? No — for personal one-on-one and group chats, encryption is now the standard rather than a setting you control. If you need to message someone without encryption, that generally only applies to business-style messaging that uses a different, non-encrypted system.

I don't see a "Secret Conversations" option anywhere — is something wrong with my app? No. That menu was removed because its function has been absorbed into default encryption. If your personal chats show "End-to-end encrypted" under the contact's name, you already have the protection the old feature used to provide manually.

Is this as secure as Signal or WhatsApp? Messenger's default encryption is built on the same Signal Protocol used by those apps, so the cryptographic guarantee for message content is comparable. As with any messaging app, though, encryption protects what's inside your messages — it doesn't erase metadata (like who you talked to and when), and it can't stop someone from screenshotting or forwarding a message once they've received it.

The Bottom Line

The manual, easy-to-forget Secret Conversations feature from 2020 has been replaced by something that mostly runs in the background. That's a real improvement for everyday privacy — but it does shift some responsibility onto you, mainly around setting up Secure Storage so you don't lose encrypted chat history when you change devices. Take a few minutes to confirm your recovery method is set, and you're set up for how Messenger privacy actually works in 2026.

How to lock your Facebook Profile Privacy Settings ( Updated 2026)

2019-12-02T23:01:00.000+05:30

How to Lock Your Facebook Profile Privacy Settings

If you are concerned about unwittingly over-sharing posts on Facebook, keeping your personal information private is key. Below are updated tips and step-by-step directions to lock down your Facebook profile and keep your account secure.

1. Lockdown Your Profile & Future Posts

To ensure non-friends cannot view your main content or future activities:

Open Settings & Privacy
Click or tap your profile picture (top right on web / bottom right on mobile) and select Settings & Privacy > Settings.
Navigate to Posts Settings
In the left menu, select Privacy (or search for Posts in Meta Accounts Center / Mobile Settings).
Set Audience to Friends or Only Me
Under Your Activity, find Who can see your future posts?. Change the audience selector from Public to Friends or Only Me.

2. Limit Who Can See Old Posts

Even if you set future posts to private, older public posts remain visible to everyone unless you restrict them.

Go to Settings & Privacy > Settings > Privacy.
Look for Limit the audience for posts you've shared with friends of friends or Public? under Your Activity.
Click Limit Past Posts, then confirm by clicking Limit Past Posts in the pop-up warning.

3. Control Audience for Individual Posts

You can customize post visibility on a post-by-post basis before publishing:

Click What's on your mind? to create a post.
Click the Audience Selector button right below your name (it usually says Friends or Public).
Select Friends, Friends except..., or Custom to choose specific people allowed to see or blocked from seeing that post.
Click Done / Save Changes and publish your update.

4. Hide Your Birthday & Age

Protect your birth date from public view for personal privacy and security:

Go to your Profile and click the About tab.
Select Contact and basic info.
Scroll down to Basic Info where your Date of Birth and Birth Year are listed.
Click the Audience icon next to your birth date/year and change it to Friends or Only Me.

5. Hide Your Friend List

To prevent strangers or non-friends from browsing your full network:

Open your profile and click the Friends tab.
Click the three dots (...) or the Pencil icon on the top right of the Friends section.
Select Edit Privacy.
Change Who can see your friends list? to Only Me or Friends.

6. Limit Friend Requests

Stop unwanted friend requests from strangers:

Open Settings & Privacy > Settings.
Select Privacy and look for How people find and contact you.
Next to Who can send you friend requests?, change Everyone to Friends of friends.

7. Blocking Specific Users

Blocking completely prevents a user from viewing your profile, sending messages, or finding you in search:

Open Blocking Settings
Navigate to Settings & Privacy > Settings > Blocking (or Audience and Visibility > Blocking).
Add User to Block List
Click Edit next to Block users, then click Add to Block List.
Search and Confirm
Type the name of the profile you want to block, click Block next to their name, and confirm.

8. One-Click Profile Lock (Mobile Feature)

If the Lock Profile feature is available in your country/region, you can apply all major privacy protections in a single tap:

Open the Facebook app and tap your profile icon.
Tap the three dots (...) next to Edit Profile.
Tap Lock Profile and confirm by pressing Lock Your Profile.

Summary

Taking control of your Facebook privacy requires reviewing these settings periodically as features evolve. By setting your default post audience to Friends, limiting past posts, and restricting basic profile details like your birthday and friend list, you maintain full control over who sees your online footprint.

"Documents.library-ms" is no longer working - Windows 7

2015-01-25T14:40:00.002+05:30

When you double-click a library to view the contents, the following error may occur.

"<libraryname>.library-ms" is no longer working.

For example, the following error may occur when opening Documents library

"Documents.library-ms" is no longer working.

This library can be safely deleted from your computer. Folders that have been included will not be affected.

Similarly when opening the Music, Pictures or Videos library

"Music.library-ms" is no longer working.

"Pictures.library-ms" is no longer working.

"Videos.library-ms" is no longer working.

To fix this problem, open Windows Explorer, right-click on the corresponding library and choose Delete. Click Yes when asked for confirmation.

Note: Deleting a library does not delete the contents of the included folders. However, you may need to re-add or include your folders manually, if needed.

Then, in the navigation pane of Windows Explorer, right-click Libraries and click Restore default libraries.

This recreates the library that was deleted earlier. This option only restores the default libraries.

How to Change Or Fix A Bad File Association - Windows 7

2014-10-07T14:54:00.000+05:30

Fixing or changing a file association is very simple. For example, if you accidentally associated .pdf files with a program that cannot open them, you can change the association back to Adobe Reader (or another PDF reader that can open them). Simply follow this procedure:

Right-click the respective file, for example a PDF file.
Select > Open With from the right-click menu.

The > Open with window will open and now you can either pick a program from the list of >Other Programs or click the > Browse… button and find the application you want to open this file type with.

If you want to make the change permanent, check the box next to > Always use the selected program to open this kind of file.

Finally, click > OK and, given you checked the respective box, all your PDF files should now open with the program of your choice.

If you want to get an overview of all file associations on your computer or change several at once, you can go to > Start > Control Panel > Programs > Default Programs > Associate a file type or protocol with a specific program. Here you can browse all file types. Click on > Change program…to pick a new tool to open the respective file type.

Note that .lnk files should not be associated with a specific program (unknown application) and hence you cannot fix a broken .lnk file association this way!

How to Fix Temporary Profile in Windows 7

2014-05-27T15:44:00.001+05:30

Sometimes Windows 7 OS may not read your correct user profile properly, instead, load with temporary profile which will look completely different. If you are not aware of temp profile or missed to see the pop-up message at bottom right side of the screen, then really you will be surprised to see completely different and new desktop without your files,folders,shortcut icons and any customized settings.This guide shows how to fix temporary profile issue on Windows 7.

“You have been logged on with Temporary profile”- that’s the famous message from Windows 7. Even though this article was published back in 2010, I’m rewriting this again on August 2012 with more information, inputs, related links and the experience I had on this issue for last two years in domain and workgroup environment.

Why Windows 7 Loads with Temporary Profile?

Obviously, your profile (the files and folders located under C:\Users\user_name) is corrupted. There is another chance which is a delay in reading your profile files due to Antivirus scan or something else during boot up. Usually after typing your user name and password Windows tries to read and load your profile, if it gets corrupted or delay in reading, Windows will load with temp profile to give temporary access on computer.

How to Fix Windows 7 Temp Issue on Workgroup and Domain Environment

1) Before do anything, restart the computer 2 or 3 times to see whether it’s going back to your old correct profile. Go to next step if this doesn’t work.

2) Rename the temp profile registry and revert back the old registry settings for the correct profile. This method works most of the time for me in Workgroup and domain environment.

a)      Log in with temp profile.
b)      Start registry editor by typing regedit in find box of Windows 7.
c)      Navigate the following location.

d) You will see similar keys under profile list, but one with .bak, as shown below.

e) The key with .bak is for the correct old profile. Currently your Windows 7 computer logged in with fresh (temporary) profile with same key. So, rename the new profile key ( which is not having.bak) and remove .bak from correct profile key. See below.

f) That’s it. Log off and log in (or restart) with your user name and password. You must get your correct profile with icons and profile settings back in Windows 7, if you are lucky enough.

Still if Windows 7 computer loads with temporary profile and creates a registry key with .bak, that means user profile is really corrupted and Operating System is not reading it properly.

3) Few times this method worked for me, repair the corrupted files. Usually the corrupted ‘Ntuser’ files cause this issue. So, run the check disk for partition which is having user profile.

After restarting for check disk, if you see corrupted entries and repairing process inside your user profile folder, then you can hope for good news here. If it finds and repairs any files especially Ntuser files, you may get your old Windows 7 profile back.

If above steps do not help you out, then we need to create a new profile with new user name.

Basically we need to create a new user account, login with it and transfer the data from old user profile to new user profile. It is easy in workgroup environment as you can create new user name locally, but it is tricky in domain environment. Because, the existing user account is already there on domain server and nothing wrong with it. Also, creating a new different domain user account will cause issues on corporate emails, domain groups membership and shared permissions.

So, we need to treat both cases separately.

4) Create new user name in non domain (workgroup environment) from control panel or computer management. Make sure to add the new user to administrators group.

a) My Documents (Music, videos and downloads)
b) Desktop
c) Favorites
d) Any outlook PST files (find more information about location of PST files here)

But Microsoft suggests to copy entire old user profile (except 3 files) as shown in this official site link.

5) New user profile in domain environment.

Since we can’t delete and create new domain user account for this purpose, we will play around with client computer only. Let’s completely remove the user profile and re create again.

Copy the important user data (a to d in above step 4) or entire folders from corrupted profile to new location. Double-check that you have copied all required folders and files from old profile, because we are going to delete it now.

Go to Advanced settings of System as shown below, click on Settings (user profiles), select the corrupted user profile which is not loading properly in Windows 7, then press Delete button. Delete button will be enabled only if you login with different user account.

This will remove the entire user profile and related user SID from computer including the registery keys we talked about earlier. You can cross check the proper removal of user account (SID) by checking the C:\Users folder. Once it is remove properly, restart the computer and login with same user name (which was not loading earlier). The computer should create a new user profile as this is the first time the user is logging on. You need to copy back your old important data to new profile and set email outlook etc..if required.

I hope these tips help to fix temporary profile issue on Windows 7.

Ankit Fadia Hacking Ebooks Collection

2014-05-14T18:00:00.000+05:30

Ankit Fadia (born 1985) is an Indian independent computer security consultant and author. Fadia describes himself as an ethical hacker, and has written several books on the topic of computer security.(line copy pasted from wikipedia.org). He stared web-site at age of 14, hackingtruths.box.sk. and also at age of 15, ankit fadia written book on ethical hacking made him youngest author to be published by macmillan, india. Today we are providing you this collection which contains a number of hacking tutorial by Ankit Fadia. So read and learn hacking. enjoy .!

Contains :

1 . Ankit Fadia Hacker's Guide
2 . Untold Windows Tips and Secrets(Ankit Fadia)
3 . Base64 Encoding Torn Apart
4 . Batch File Programing - Ankit Fadia
5 . Closing Open Holes
6 . Defacing Websites A step Process By Ankit fadia
7 . Dos Attacked
8 . Ankit Fadia - Encryption Algorithms Explained
9 . Firewalls - How to unblock it??
10 . FTP Exploits By Ankit Fadia.pdf
11 . Gathering info on Remote Host
12 . Hacking into Linux
13 . More Password Cracking Decrypted
14 . Removing Banners from your sites
15 . Sendmail and Beyond
16.SSL Torn Apart
17.Tracing IP,DNS,WHOIS-nslLookUp
18.Transparent Proxies in Squid
19.Transparent_proxies_with_Squid_By-Ankit Fadia
20.Truths!!!--What They Don't teach in Manuals!!!

Click on the download button to download :

Outlook PST Repair Tool

2014-02-01T22:52:00.000+05:30

Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair is a powerful tool to repair corrupt or damaged Outlook PST files. The software helps you accomplish complex PST recoveries in easy way when Outlook's built-in 'scanpst.exe' fails to fix issues, such as header damage, file oversize, or malware attack. In addition to repairing PST files, the software allows users to recover information that has disappeared from their Inbox or even the Deleted Items folder.

Product Features

Securely repairs corrupt Outlook PST files
Support for MS Office 2013, MS Office 2010 (64 bit version)
Saves email message as MSG, EML, RTF, HTML, and PDF file
Restores emails, contacts, calendar, tasks, attachments, notes, and journal
Recovers information from password-protected PST files

Stellar Phoenix Outlook PST Repair Software offers helpful features that will bring benefits to your everyday business life:
1.Comprehensive log icon creation process.
2.Comes with PST icon search option.
3.Mails’ icon previewing.
4.Lets users save PST files to your chosen icon location.
5.Encrypted icon of PST files recovery.
6.Selective icon recovery support.
7.Fixes large icon of files with PST formats.
8.Saves electronic mails in diverse icon formats.
9.Updated GUI feel and appearance.

This application program allows you to choose particular items you want to save coming from fixed items’ list. With the help of this software package you are able to seek needed subject, date, recipient or sender. As soon as the process gets completed, the PST file recovered is effortlessly imported to your Outlook account.

Use Whatsapp on Your Computer

2013-07-28T20:24:00.002+05:30

Use WhatsApp On Computer.

Unfortunately if you dont own a Smart phone then you might not be able to use whatsapp. But don't worry today we Will learn How to use WhatsApp On PC as well.
You can Use it On both Windows and Mac.

To Run Whatsapp on Pc, We will Require Android Emulator, Android Emulator Helps us to Run Whatsapp on PC.

Step 1: Youwave And Bluestack Are the Two Android Emulator which enable us to Run Whatsapp or any other Android App on PC.
http://www.bluestacks.com/

Step 2: If you Go for Bluestack then Download and install it, then run the Bluestack and Click on " Apps " Then Click on the Tab " Social " and select " Whatsapp " and Install it.

Step 3: If you Go for Youwave then just download and install.
Now download Whatsapp.apk and move the downloaded file to PC directory.

To Check PC's Directory, Open Youwave click on help > Instruction. Now move your

whatsapp.apk file in to that directory . Then Click on View then Redraw Icons.

Step 3: If you Go for Youwave which I am Using On My PC then just download and install.

Now download Whatsapp.apk and move the downloaded file to PC directory.

To Check PC's Directory, Open Youwave click on help > Instruction. Now move your

whatsapp.apk file in to that directory . Then Click on View then Redraw Icons.

- See more at: http://www.geekofreak.com/2013/04/how-to-use-whatsapp-on-pc-for-windows.html#sthash.Xq8TtGED.dpuf