Spotify and Hulu has teamed up to bring students affordable entertainment. Their new student bundle nets students both Hulu and Netflix in a single $5 package.

The package includes Spotify Premium and Hulu’s Limited Commercials plan. If you’re subscribed to Spotify Premium Student already, you can tack on the Hulu for free. The vice versa is true if you have an active Hulu Limited Commercials plan subscription.

While the current deal is only available to students, Spotify and Hulu are looking into some sort of plan for all users as well. Spotify’s own ventures in a video platform hasn’t done well, so a tight partnership with one of the [...]

Internet security has become one of the most prevalent issues in the past few years and while not as popular as it should be, one of the best ways to stay safe online is to use a VPN service. In this article, we’ll discuss what a VPN is, why you need a VPN service, and how to choose a good VPN provider.

 

What is a VPN

A VPN is an acronym for Virtual Private Network. As its name implies, VPNs were originally designed primarily to allow users to connect computers in different locations onto the same “virtual” private network. At first, corporations adopted VPN technology to allow its employees to use a shared drive or an intranet service [...]

If you’ve ever tried watching a few hours of YouTube in the dark, you’ll know that the bright white background color YouTube uses is downright painful to the eyes. This is why competing online video services such as Netflix or Hulu uses a black background.

Because of this, users have been requesting a dark theme from YouTube for years and while it hasn’t been officially released yet, it’s being rolled out to select users as part of a beta test.

Of course, if you’re like me and can’t wait, turning it on only takes a few quick steps.

 

Enable YouTube’s Dark Theme

YouTube’s Dark Theme is actually a [...]

Generally speaking, Steam download speeds are pretty good. Steam was originally built as a game distribution platform, so by design they’re supposed to have a lot of capacity. For the most part, you should be able to max out your internet connection without any issues. However, if you’re not getting the maximum download speeds you’ve come to expect when downloading that new copy of Elder Scrolls Online, here’s a couple ways to try to speed up the download process.

 

Change Your Steam Download Server

By default, Steam selects the closest server to your location rather than by choosing intelligently based on the server load. As a [...]

One of the biggest benefits to Intel’s latest Kaby Lake CPUs is that it supports built-in DRM as well as dedicated 4K video processing capabilities. As such, only those fortunate enough to own Intel’s latest and greatest were granted access to Netflix’s glorious 4K video library, until now.

Tucked in with Nvidia’s latest 384.76 GeForce Game Ready Drivers is support for Netflix 4K streaming for all of Nvidia’s latest 10-series Pascal architecture based GPUs. However, there are a couple caveats.

First, you’ll need to download the Windows 10 Netflix App. The app features stronger forms of copyright protection than the web browser [...]

On Tuesday, a massive Amazon AWS outage caused a four hour outage for many popular sites such as Spotify, Netflix, Reddit, Pinterest, and others. As it may seem that the only thing that could cause an outage like this is like a massive DDOS or other major issue, the truth behind the matter is slightly a bit more embarrasing.

According to a statement recently issued by Amazon, the AWS outage was actually nothing more than an OSI Reference Model Layer 8 issue, or human error. It appears that in the process of removing a small set of servers from Amazon’s billing system, the Amazon AWS employee in charge of the operation fat fingered the command, instead removing [...]

Charter Communications has been sued by the state of New York. The reason? Slow internet speeds.

The lawsuit, which simply seeks full restitution, was filed by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who told customers that “The allegations in today’s lawsuits confirm what many of you have long suspected… Spectrum-Time Warner has been ripping you off.”

According to the lawsuit, Charter’s recent acquisition, Time Warner Cable, had been ripping off customers since 2012 by selling them higher speed internet services than it could actually deliver. As a result, more than 640,000 customers received slower internet services than were [...]

OK Google

Several years ago, Amazon unveiled the Echo, a smart speaker designed to use Amazon’s Alexa AI (Artificial Intelligence) platform to help make life easier for its customers. While the Amazon Echo’s functionality was relatively basic when it was launched back in 2004, its functionality has improved significantly over the years as newer functionality and additional compatibility with services have been added.

As Amazon’s Echo has been in the market relatively uncontested for the past two years, it was about time someone else jumped into the smart speaker game and who else is more appropriate than Google who revealed back in May that they had their [...]

For those who constantly go over their data limits every month, AT&T is launching a new data saving feature they’re calling Stream Saver to help video streaming customers stay under their data limits.

According to the recent announcement, Stream Saver will limit streamed video to 480p, or standard definition thereby reducing the amount of data used when streaming video. AT&T will begin activating the new “free and convenient” feature for their postpaid and GoPhone customers, and will begin sending out notifications when the feature is active. Customers who wish to opt out can do so on AT&T’s myAT&T site or Premier for business [...]

Is your internet down today? You’re not alone. A massive DDOS attack against DNS provider, Dyn, has taken down a number of the world’s largest websites including Reddit, Twitter, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon, PayPal and more.

 

What is a DNS?

How did this happen? Well in order to understand how this happened, one must first understand how a DNS works. When any device is hooked onto the internet, it gets an IP address which is a number such as 172.0.0.1. This number identifies your computer to the world, but if you’re say Netflix and you want people to find you as netflix.com rather than 52.26.74.145, you need someone to translate [...]