BitTorrent consumes 12% of total Internet traffic in North America and 36% of total traffic in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a 2012 study. It’s so popular that the new “Copyright Alert System” targets BitTorrent traffic alone. BitTorrent may be popularly known as a method of piracy, but it isn’t just for pirates. It’s a useful, decentralized peer-to-peer protocol with significant advantages over other protocols in many situations. This article will help you understand how the BitTorrent protocol works and why it’s not just a tool for piracy....

With iOS 10’s new “Recognized Faces” feature, you never have to spend time looking for photos of friends and loved ones–all your photos are automatically cataloged and right at your fingertips. Recognized Faces: Local Face Recognition On Your iPhone iOS 10 has a slew of new features, many of which are pretty well hidden away if you’re not actively scouting for them. Among those stealthy-but-fantastic new features is an update to the Photos app that brings facial recognition technology, dubbed “Recognized Faces”, right to your iOS device....

And if you’re looking for a TV specifically for gaming, different features are more important. We’re breaking down everything you need to know to make the wisest purchase! Choosing a Display: OLED, QLED, and More Currently, there are two dominant display technologies on the market: LED-LCD (including QLED) and OLED. Understanding the differences will help you make the right decision. A simple rule of thumb is to match the display type to your viewing habits....

If you have a label or heading on a spreadsheet in Excel that you want to center across a certain number of cells, there are couple of ways you can do this, with or without merging cells. We’ll show you both ways. First, we’ll center text across cells by merging cells. To do this, select the cells you want to merge. In the “Alignment” section of the “Home” tab, click the “Merge & Center” button....

When you insert a picture into a document, Word always defaults to the Pictures Library folder for selecting your picture file. However, you can specify a different folder as the default picture location that displays when you insert pictures in Word. RELATED: How to Change the Default Save Location and Local Files Folder in Word 2013 If you have a common folder where you store all your images you insert into your Word documents, you can specify that folder as the default picture location in Word....

Traveling to a new place or just want to use a different time zone? You can change your time zone in Microsoft Outlook on your desktop and the web. Here’s how to make the change. How to Change the Time Zone in Outlook’s Desktop Version To switch time zones inside the Outlook desktop app, launch Outlook. In the app’s top-left corner, click “File.” In the left sidebar, select “Options.”...

Consumer router security is pretty bad. Attackers are taking advantage of lackadaisical manufacturers and attacking large amounts of routers. Here’s how to check if your router’s been compromised. The home router market is a lot like the Android smartphone market. Manufacturers are producing large numbers of different devices and not bothering updating them, leaving them open to attack. How Your Router Can Join the Dark Side RELATED: What Is DNS, and Should I Use Another DNS Server?...

The whole point of a home theater PC is being able to kick back and watch anything from your couch–but Netflix has never worked truly well on home theater PCs. This app changes that. There have been countless attempts to get Netflix working on home theater PCs, but most fail. Some integrated with Kodi, but got shut down or didn’t work well. You could use the website or Windows Store app, but neither respects remotes or basic keyboard shortcuts, meaning your only option is to browse TV shows using the mouse like some sort of 19th century peasant....

You know how time-consuming repetitive tasks can be. If you find yourself recreating the same table repeatedly in your Word documents, why not automate that job? Using a macro, you can make the table once and reuse it easily. Maybe you want to use the same table in different spots throughout a single document. Instead of copying and pasting the table multiple times, just run the macro. Or maybe you create regular business reports that sometimes include a table....

If you find that your guests are asking fairly often to use your computer temporarily to check their email or look something up on the web, you don’t have to let them use your personal account or create a special account for each guest. RELATED: Why Every User On Your Computer Should Have Their Own User Account Windows used to have a dedicated Guest account you could enable that would allow someone to temporarily use your computer, while ensuring they wouldn’t see your private data....

Windows is designed to be almost universal in its support of PC accessories, particularly USB-based add-ons like external hard drives, flash drives, game controllers, webcams, microphones, and other peripherals. Most things work out-of-the-box thanks to pre-loaded drivers, but occasionally a gadget will still give you the dreaded “USB device not recognized” error. There are a lot of different ways that this problem can manifest, and unfortunately Windows still isn’t very good at actually telling users how to solve it....

RELATED: What Is “Shared with You” on iPhone and iPad? Shared With You or Annoyed With You? Starting in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, Apple is taking steps to integrate iMessage with other apps like Photos, Music, TV, and Safari. All these apps have a new Shared with You section that features links and content that was shared over iMessage. For instance, if someone shares a link to an article, you’ll see it when you open the Safari start page....

Google Chrome now has a built-in ad blocker, designed to get rid of the ads that are intrusive or otherwise annoying, but allow ads from sites that follow specific guidelines. If you’re not into the idea of letting your browser control the ads you see, however, you can disable it pretty easily. RELATED: Why Ad Companies Love Google’s Ad Blocker, But Hate Apple’s Privacy Features There are two ways to allow ads: you can allow all ads, or you can whitelist specific sites if Chrome’s ad blocker is causing a problem....

Windows 10 includes a whole bunch of new privacy settings, all are important in their own right, but perhaps none so much as the location settings. If you’re privacy-conscious, you will definitely want to investigate them further. As a whole Windows 10’s privacy settings, at least in the most current build, are a lot more extensive and comprehensive than its Windows 8.1 counterpart. One of the most important aspects of any set of privacy options will be the location items, because those are going to tie you and your device to a place, revealing where you are and where you have been....

Superfetch (known as SysMain in Windows 10 and Windows 11) is a built-in Windows service that preloads your frequently used apps in the RAM. If you experience sluggish performance on your PC, you may want to turn this feature off. Here’s how to do that. What Is Superfetch and How Does It Work? Superfetch was introduced with Windows Vista and it’s now known as SysMain on the latest versions of Windows 10 and 11....

Windows normally animates windows whenever you minimize or maximize them. These animations can be disabled, if you like, making windows hide or appear immediately. This option is available on all modern versions of Windows, including Windows 7, 8, and 10. You’ll find this toggle in the System Properties window. To open it, head to Control Panel > System and Security > System > Advanced system settings. You can also click Start, type “sysdm....

NVIDIA’s SHIELD Android TV is by far the most powerful Android TV box on the market, and the only one that supports 4K playback (the others are limited to 1080p). The good news is that once you’ve got it all hooked up to an HDCP 2.2-compatible port, getting UHD content to play is little more than a few clicks of the remote away. HDCP 2.2 Compatibility Is a Must In order to make sure that 4K content is always accessible on your particular TV, we need to cover why it might not be accessible in the first place....

Why Do I Want To Do This? With more and more families cutting the cord, switching to streaming-only media sources, and otherwise looking to bring digital content into their living rooms it becomes increasingly important for parents to be able to easily restrict their children from racking up charges via instant purchases and accessing age-inappropriate content. That said, the protection features are well implemented on both devices and Fire TV Stick users can follow along with the PIN and parental control section....

Photoshop is a fantastically complicated raster image editor, and it’s possible to lose yourself in hours of work when you’re editing photos. But if you do a lot of little tasks and then later realize you’d rather go back, you can only hit Crtl+Alt+Z so many times before you hit the limit in Photoshop’s history panel. Fortunately, it’s really easy to add extra states for history, so you can go back and forth through your artistic progress to your heart’s content....

You can do this in two ways. You can unpublish your Facebook Page so that it doesn’t show up in search or on anyone’s news feed (but Page managers can still access it). If you’re sure you don’t want anything to do with a Page anymore, you can permanently remove your Facebook Page as well. How to Hide or Delete a Facebook Page on Website Even though most of the Facebook website has been updated to the new interface with dark mode, the Facebook Page settings are still in the Classic Facebook interface....