Hulu now lets you create profiles, including for kids – here’s how
Taking a page from Netflix’s playbook, Hulu is finally letting its users create multiple profiles.
Each Hulu account can maintain up to six individual profiles that will serve up tailored recommendations and remember viewing history. Every profile also has its own Watchlist, which makes it easy to keep track of all the shows and movies you’re watching on the video-streaming service, as you can manually add any show, episode, clip, movie, or trailer to save for later.
As part of these new profiles, there’s also a profile option for kids, so parents can restrict their access to inappropriate content. Here’s everything you need to know about Hulu’s Profiles feature, including how to set them up.
- Hulu now offers 4K, starting with original shows and 20 Bond films
What is Hulu?
Hulu is a video-streaming service in the US that offers premium content such as hit television shows and feature-length movies. For $7.99 a month, you get access to Hulu’s content library, but for an extra $4.00 a month, you can enjoy a commercial-free experience. However, Hulu only allows one stream per account. While you can use your subscription on many different devices, you can only stream to one device at a time.
What are Hulu profiles?
Individual profiles enable you to keep track of all of your shows and movies regardless of what other viewers in your household – who use the same Hulu account – watch. Each profile created within the same Hulu account will have its own personalised Watchlist, recommendations, and viewing history. You can also create profiles for your kids, so they can watch kid-friendly content.
How do ‘Kids profiles’ work?
Profiles for kids aren’t meant to be parental controls, Hulu said. It simply creates a place for children to browse Hulu without accidentally running into recommendations for mature content. Kids also won’t be able to access Watchlist, search, recommendations, and auto-resume functions.
How do you create Hulu profiles?
Profiles are currently only available on Hulu.com, but Hulu plans to add support for more devices in the next couple of months. So, if you create different profiles on Hulu.com and then sign in to your account on your TV or mobile device, you will only be able to view and manage your primary profile. You will not be able to see or access other profiles and their respective preferences and history.
You can create a new profile from the Profiles menu on your Account page (or by hovering over the profile name and selecting Add Profile from the drop-down menu). The first profile is generated automatically using the name and other information on your account, but you will see options to create up to six additional profiles. To edit a profile, simply visit your Account page, then select the Profiles tab, and choose the profile.
How do you switch between Hulu profiles?
From Hulu.com, click or hover over the account name to display the different profiles, and then select the profile you want.
This nostalgic toy magnifies your phone vids onto a mini retro TV
Remember that cardboard smartphone projector that was all the rage a few Christmases ago? We’ve found something similar, only it’s super nostalgic.
On Firebox right now you can buy a toy that blows up your smartphone videos on a TV-like display. That TV has a faux-wood exterior and a warped 8-inch screen and no remote control. It’s supposed to recreate the look of old school box televisions. Even the side hatch, which is where you slip your phone into the magnifier, is designed to resemble old VHS tapes.
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The idea is that you can bring up your favourite Netflix episode on your phone, then slot it into the magnifier via the side hatch, and sit back and watch as your TV show is “transformed into blown-up vintage masterpieces” – warped display quality and all. But aside from reminiscing, you will be watching videos at nearly twice the size because of the 8-inch screen.
It’s the lo-fi, handsfree way to watch magnify films on your smartphone. We can imagine this coming in handy in the tub, when you want to watch a video on your phone, but need to keep it away from the water. Just put it in the Smartphone Magnifier, and you’re good to go.
Facebook now lets you create your own frame for photos and videos
For better or worse, Facebook is trying really hard to copy Snapchat. In the past few months the giant social network has added different features that, if you ask us, are seemingly inspired by the app with the ghost mascot. And its latest feature follows a similar trend. With its Camera Effects Platform, Facebook will let users make their own frame for profile pictures and videos. Now, you can’t just display whatever you want on your page, as Facebook does need to approve your creations.
The new tool isn’t targeted at individual users as much as it is businesses or people who are planning an event, such as a wedding or party. Essentially, you want others to use your frames, like what Snapchat offers with custom Geofilters. You can start making your own here, all you have to do is log in to your Facebook account and follow the steps on that page.
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Facebook
AT&T will finally refund $88 million in unauthorized charges
Thanks to some shady business dealings between AT&T and a pair of companies known for bloating customers’ cell phone bills, roughly 2.7 million current and former AT&T mobile subscribers are getting more than $88 million dollars in refunds from the Federal Trade Commission. The refunds are part of a 2014 settlement in which AT&T was accused of “mobile cramming” — the practice of tacking unnecessary third-party fees onto your bill without consent — along with two known cramming companies Tatto and Acquinity.
According to the FTC’s statement, AT&T was tacking on unauthorized $9.99 monthly charges for things like horoscopes, ringtones, “love tips,” and other “fun facts” from third-party companies and then keeping 35 percent of the charges. After the FTC crackdown, AT&T changed its billing practices and had to pay into the FTC fund that is now issuing refunds amounting to, “the most money ever returned to consumers in a mobile cramming case.”
As the FTC’s new consumer blog notes, customers should be getting back about $31 each on average. Around 2.5 million customers will see their refunds show up on their AT&T mobile bill in the next 75 days and another 300,000 former customers will get their refund via a check in the mail.
Source: Federal Trade Commision, FTC Consumer Blog
German Intel chief: Russia is trying to ‘destabilize’ the country
America’s recent elections weren’t the only event that Russia has been accused of meddling in. On Thursday, President Dr Hans-Georg Maaßen of the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), Germany’s internal intelligence service, issued a brutally frank press release laying out the BfV’s accusations against Russia.
This is big: unprecedented, stark warning by Germany’s BfV against aggressive Russian influence ops, false flags, APT28, goals—full text: pic.twitter.com/2H8RCKYZbW
— Thomas Rid (@RidT) December 8, 2016
In recent months, Germany has seen an “aggressive and increased cyber spying and cyber operations that could potentially endanger German government officials, members of parliament and employees of democratic parties,” Maaßen said in his statement. This has been accompanied by an “enormous use of financial resources” to spread “disinformation” and sow discord both within the country and the wider EU
The BfV also reports that it has observed a significant jump in the activities of ATP 28, a Russian hacker group better known as Strontrium (“Fancy Bear”), which has been linked to the intrusion into the American Democratic National Convention earlier this year. What’s more, the intelligence agency notes that so-called “false flag” operations conducted by this group have consistently pinned the blame on domestic activist organizations.
Taken together, the BfV has all but yelled “J’accuse!” (but, you know, in German) at Russia’s intelligence apparatus. The BfV claims that the cyber-campaign aims to rile up extremist groups and weaken voter trust in the German government, just like it did in America. All, reportedly, performed in an effort to reduce the degree of economic sanctions currently being levied against Russia and “to influence the federal election next year,” Maaßen wrote.
Source: Al Jazeera, Reuters
Secret’s anonymous sharing app is now a publishing platform
Remember Secret? The standard bearer for the anonymous social app movement shuttered in 2015 before co-creator David Byttow teased a possible Version 2 in the wake of Donald Trump’s election. While the old app-based Secret won’t be coming back, Byttow unveiled its successor today in the form of anonymous publishing platform IO.
As TechCrunch notes, IO shares more with blogging platforms like Medium than it does with social apps like Twitter or Instagram. And, in Byttow’s words, IO is meant to address, “the downsides of current social media products.” Specifically, Byttow and his other startup Bold hope to achieve “authentic publishing” by allowing people to post either anonymously, with a pseudonym or with their real names.
IO itself is sort of a stripped-down blogging platform or a minimalist writing app. There’s nothing on the page but a white text box with optional space for a byline and a title. There are also options to pipe in some ambient background noise or to turn on a Hemingway App-style editing assistant to help clean up your prose. Behind the scenes, IO also supports markdown, images and exporting, but Byttow wrote on Product Hunt that the editor is still very much a work in progress with more improvements on the way. For now, once you hit that Publish button, you’ll get a short, sharable URL to show off your work — anonymously or otherwise.
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Bold.io
AT&T Customers to Receive More Than $88M in Refunds Following Mobile Cramming Settlement
The United States Federal Trade Commission today announced that it is giving more than $88 million in refunds to 2.7 million AT&T customers who had unauthorized third-party charges added to their service bills, something better known as “mobile cramming.”
The refunds come from a $105 million settlement AT&T paid the FTC back in October of 2014, after the carrier was accused of allowing third-party companies to bill customers for things like ringtone subscriptions without their consent. Money was also collected from Tatto and Acquinity, two companies involved in the cramming scheme.
Nearly 2.5 million AT&T customers can expect to receive a credit on their bill within the next 75 days, and over 300,000 former customers will be given refund checks. The FTC says the average refund amount customers will receive is $31, and checks are going out starting today.
“AT&T received a high volume of complaints related to mobile cramming prior to the FTC and other federal and state agencies stepping in on consumers’ behalf,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez. “I am pleased that consumers are now being refunded their money and that AT&T has changed its mobile billing practices.”
According to the FTC, the AT&T refunds being provided to customers represent the most money that’s ever been returned to consumers in a mobile cramming case.
Up until late 2014, AT&T and several third-party companies were charging customers up to $9.99 per month for subscriptions that provided sham services like ringtones, horoscopes, love tips, and more, with AT&T keeping 35 percent of the money that was taken from its subscribers.
Other mobile carriers, such as T-Mobile, had similar cramming practices. Back in December of 2014, T-Mobile agreed to pay out $90 million in fines.
Recently, AT&T also agreed to pay out an additional $7.75 million for a separate issue that allowed scammers to charge AT&T customers $9 per month for a fake directory service.
Tags: FTC, AT&T
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With Windows 10 on ARM, Microsoft is coming for the Chromebook — and might win
Microsoft is taking on Chromebooks with a new ARM-based version of Windows 10, and everyone wins.
Microsoft is coming for your Chromebooks. No, they’re not going to confiscate them like the TSA steals your water bottles, but more so in the competitive sense.
This week, Microsoft announced that it is launching an ARM-friendly version of Windows 10 in collaboration with Qualcomm’s upcoming Snapdragon 835 SoC, which comes out next year. While most Android fans will know Qualcomm’s work from such phones as nearly every product on the market, Snapdragon is increasingly capable, especially at the high-end, of powering tablets, 2-in-1s and traditional laptops.
While Microsoft launched an ARM-based version of Windows in 2012, called Windows RT, it failed because there was no interoperability with traditional x86 apps, and the software, which was based on Windows 8.1, was deprecated with the Surface 2’s end of production in early 2015. Now, with Windows 10 on ARM facilitated by a very powerful-yet-thermally-efficient system-on-a-chip (SoC), the Snapdragon 835, a new opportunity for backwards compatibility has emerged: emulation.
From our friend Daniel Rubino at Windows Central:
Windows 10 on ARM will also run traditional x86 Win32 apps and games through emulation.
Users will be able to install any x86 Win32 app – unmodified – from any source, no repackaging as UWP or delivery via the Windows Store required. The apps are not sandboxed and they will have full access to the OS. Apple made a similar emulation feature when the Mac line switched from PowerPC to Intel processors, but Microsoft’s move to support ARM is a magnitude more impressive.
How is it more impressive? Because despite the overhead involved with emulating applications and their inputs from the keyboard, mouse, camera, and other peripherals, Microsoft is confident that users won’t even notice a difference. The company demoed a version of Photoshop running in emulation on a test version of the Windows 10 on ARM platform and it was fast. It even plays games.
But there is a business angle here: Microsoft wants Windows 10 to run on everything, from high-end Intel desktops to virtual reality headsets to HoloLens to phones — all of which are already available — to inexpensive 2-in-1s and laptops that run cool and last long, a market that ARM-based Chromebooks currently have on lock.
Zac Bowden, again at Windows Central, sums it up nicely:
More and more schools and businesses are opting for Chromebooks over Windows 10 laptops, mainly because of price, but also because Chromebooks do what they need them to do, durably, and at a low cost.
There are many reasons Microsoft would want to compete with Chromebooks, but the strategy at its core is about offering reliable, low-cost, low-power alternatives to Intel-based computers, especially as the Portland-based company has struggled not only to compete in the mobile space but to offer a cost-effective replacement to its now-cancelled Atom line of processors.
Windows 10 itself is a stable, attractive and feature-filled operating system and that bodes well for the future of mobile computing.
There’s also the promise of cellular connectivity: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835, being tailor-made for phones, comes with inherent cellular capabilities, and while Microsoft has shied away from releasing new smartphones — and may hold out indefinitely as it cedes the market to Apple and Google — there are plenty of reasons it has maintained its Windows 10 Mobile development, and much of it has to do with the promise of ubiquitous connectivity as the developed world moves headfirst towards 5G.
Laptops and tablets running a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor won’t be as costly to make and sell compared to devices rocking Intel Atom or Intel Core M chips. It’s a huge deal for Microsoft to be able to bring Windows 10 to Snapdragon devices, as it means manufacturers can begin building devices that cost nothing to make and sell.
A low-end device running a Snapdragon processor with a cheap 1366×768 screen, basic keyboard, and passable trackpad, running full Windows 10 with support for all of the Windows app library, all for the same price as a Chromebook — the choice between the two is all but a given for schools and businesses. Do you want a glorified web browser, or do you want a real and fully-capable computer?
Zac takes some liberties with Chromebooks’ capabilities — the platform expanded to be well more than a “glorified web browser” years ago, and with Android app support has catapulted to a full Windows 10 competitor in many ways, but the idea is sound. Microsoft has decided, with its Surface line, to compete in the high-end, and it wants its manufacturing partners like Asus, Acer, Dell, Lenovo, HP and others to be able to make as many lower-cost products as possible, in varied forms and with multitudinous specifications.
ChromeOS is a glorified web browser as Windows is a glorified DOS shell
This is what enabled Windows to proliferate in the 90s and 2000s, and will continue to give Microsoft cache in the mobile space even as it moves away from smartphones themselves.
Microsoft has done a great job overcoming the biggest limitation, namely apps, of Windows 10 on ARM, and considering we’re at a point where Windows 10 itself is a stable, attractive and feature-filled operating system it bodes well for the future of mobile computing. At the same time, Android apps on Chromebooks will launch for most existing customers before Microsoft’s mobile gambit, so the impact, at least at first, may be tempered.
The path to a Surface phone is clearer than ever with Windows 10 on ARM
Chromebooks
- The best Chromebooks
- Should you buy a Chromebook?
- Google Play is coming to Chromebooks
- Acer Chromebook 14 review
- Join our Chromebook forums
Cortana for Android takes on Google Assistant with redesign, UK expansion
Spruce up your Android device with Cortana’s digital assistant features.
Cortana for Android is coming and it features all the same helpful functionality as the Windows 10 desktop app. This includes cross-platform reminders, missed call alerts, and daily summaries. You can even ask Cortana for help on various matters the same way you would with Google Now. Cortana also lets you manage notifications on your Windows PC and across various Android phones.
If you’re in the United Kingdom, Cortana will be available to you over the coming week. And if you’re wondering what the heck Cortana is, this is a good place to start.
Download: Cortana (free)
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