Facebook is secretly building LOL, a cringey teen meme hub

How do you do, fellow kids? After Facebook Watch, Lasso, and IGTV failed to become hits with teens, the company has been quietly developing another youthful video product. Multiple sources confirm that Facebook has spent months building LOL, a special feed of funny videos and GIF-like clips. It’s divided into categories like “For You”, “Animals”, “Fails”, “Pranks” and more with content pulled from News Feed posts by top meme Pages on Facebook. LOL is currently in private beta with around 100 high school students who signed non-disclosure agreements with parental consent.

In response to TechCrunch’s questioning, Facebook confirmed it is privately testing LOL as a home for funny meme content with a very small number of US users. While those testers experience LOL as a replacement for their Watch tab, Facebook says there’s no plans to roll out LOL in Watch and the team is still finalizing whether it will become a separate feature in one of Facebook’s main app or a standalone app. Facebook declined to give a formal statement but told us the details we had were accurate.

With teens increasingly turning to ephemeral Stories for sharing and content consumption, Facebook is desperate to lure them back to its easily-monetizable feeds. Collecting the funniest News Feed posts and concentrating them in a dedicated place could appeal to kids seeking rapid-fire lightweight entertainment. LOL could also soak up some of the “low-quality” videos Facebook scrubbed out of the News Feed a year ago in hopes of decreasing zombie-like passive viewing that can hurt people’s well-being.

But our sources familiar with LOL’s design said it still feels “cringey”, like Facebook is futilely pretending to be young and hip. The content found in LOL is sometimes weeks old, so meme-obsessed teens may have seen it before. After years of parents overrunning Facebook, teens have grown skeptical of the app and many have fled for Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. Parachuting into the memespehere may come off as inauthentic posing and Facebook could find it difficult to build a young fanbase for LOL.

In one of the recent designs for LOL, users are greeted with a carousel of themed collections called “Dailies” like “Look Mom No Hands” in a design reminiscent of Snapchat’s Discover section. Below that there’s a feed of algorithmically curated “For You” clips. Users can filter the LOL feed to show categories like “Wait For It”, “Savage”, “Classics”, “Gaming”, “Celebs”, “School”, and “Stand-Up”, or tap buttons atop the screen to see dedicated sub-feeds for these topics.

Once users open a Dailies collection or start scrolling the feed, it turns into a black-bordered theater mode that auto-advances after you finish a video clip for lean-back consumption. Facebook cuts each video clip up into sections several seconds long that users can fast-forward through with a tap like they’re watching a long Instagram Story. Below each piece of content is a set of special LOL reaction buttons for “Funny”, “Alright”, and “Not Funny”. There’s also a share button on each piece of content, plus users can upload videos or paste in a URL to submit videos to LOL.

Facebook has repeatedly failed to capture the hearts of teens with Snapchat clones like Poke and Slingshot, standalone apps like Lifestage, and acquisitions like TBH. Fears that it’s losing the demographic or that the shift driven by the youth from feeds to Stories that Facebook has less experience monetizing have caused massive drops in the company’s share price over the years. If Facebook can’t fill in this age gap, the next generation of younger users might sidestep the social network too, which could lead to huge downstream problems for growth and revenue.

That’s why Facebook won’t give up on teens, even despite embarrassing stumbles. Its new Tik Tok clone Lasso saw only 10,000 downloads in the first 12 days. Despite seeming like a ghost town, Facebook still updated it with a retweet-like Relasso and camera uploads today. Unlike the Tik Tok-dominated musical video space, though, the meme sharing universe is much more fragmented and there’s a better chance for Facebook to barge in.

Teens discover memes on Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, and exchange them in DMs. Beyond Imgur that encompasses lots of visual storytelling styles, there’s no super-popular dedicated meme discovery app. Facebook might seem out of touch, but the fact that it’s even trying to build a meme browser shows it recognizes the opportunity here. Sometimes our brains need a break and we want quick hits of entertainment that don’t require too much thought, commitment, or attention span. As Facebook tries to become more meaningful, LOL could save room for meaningless fun.

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Google starts pulling unvetted Android apps that access call logs and SMS messages

Google is removing apps from Google Play that request permission to access call logs and SMS text message data but haven’t been manually vetted by Google staff.

The search and mobile giant said it is part of a move to cut down on apps that have access to sensitive calling and texting data.

Google said in October that Android apps will no longer be allowed to use the legacy permissions as part of a wider push for developers to use newer, more secure and privacy minded APIs. Many apps request access to call logs and texting data to verify two-factor authentication codes, for social sharing, or to replace the phone dialer. But Google acknowledged that this level of access can and has been abused by developers who misuse the permissions to gather sensitive data — or mishandle it altogether.

“Our new policy is designed to ensure that apps asking for these permissions need full and ongoing access to the sensitive data in order to accomplish the app’s primary use case, and that users will understand why this data would be required for the app to function,” wrote Paul Bankhead, Google’s director of product management for Google Play.

Any developer wanting to retain the ability to ask a user’s permission for calling and texting data has to fill out a permissions declaration.

Google will review the app and why it needs to retain access, and will weigh in several considerations, including why the developer is requesting access, the user benefit of the feature that’s requesting access, and the risks associated with having access to call and texting data.

Bankhead conceded that under the new policy, some use cases will “no longer be allowed,” rendering some apps obsolete.

So far, tens of thousands of developers have already submitted new versions of their apps either removing the need to access call and texting permissions, Google said, or have submitted a permissions declaration.

Developers with a submitted declaration have until March 9 to receive approval or remove the permissions. In the meantime, Google has a full list of permitted use cases for the call log and text message permissions, as well as alternatives.

The last two years alone has seen several high profile cases of Android apps or other services leaking or exposing call and text data. In late 2017, popular Android keyboard ai.type exposed a massive database of 31 million users, including 374 million phone numbers.

Another huge database exposed millions of call logs and SMS text messages

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Google starts pulling unvetted Android apps that access call logs and SMS messages

Google is removing apps from Google Play that request permission to access call logs and SMS text message data but haven’t been manually vetted by Google staff.

The search and mobile giant said it is part of a move to cut down on apps that have access to sensitive calling and texting data.

Google said in October that Android apps will no longer be allowed to use the legacy permissions as part of a wider push for developers to use newer, more secure and privacy minded APIs. Many apps request access to call logs and texting data to verify two-factor authentication codes, for social sharing, or to replace the phone dialer. But Google acknowledged that this level of access can and has been abused by developers who misuse the permissions to gather sensitive data — or mishandle it altogether.

“Our new policy is designed to ensure that apps asking for these permissions need full and ongoing access to the sensitive data in order to accomplish the app’s primary use case, and that users will understand why this data would be required for the app to function,” wrote Paul Bankhead, Google’s director of product management for Google Play.

Any developer wanting to retain the ability to ask a user’s permission for calling and texting data has to fill out a permissions declaration.

Google will review the app and why it needs to retain access, and will weigh in several considerations, including why the developer is requesting access, the user benefit of the feature that’s requesting access, and the risks associated with having access to call and texting data.

Bankhead conceded that under the new policy, some use cases will “no longer be allowed,” rendering some apps obsolete.

So far, tens of thousands of developers have already submitted new versions of their apps either removing the need to access call and texting permissions, Google said, or have submitted a permissions declaration.

Developers with a submitted declaration have until March 9 to receive approval or remove the permissions. In the meantime, Google has a full list of permitted use cases for the call log and text message permissions, as well as alternatives.

The last two years alone has seen several high profile cases of Android apps or other services leaking or exposing call and text data. In late 2017, popular Android keyboard ai.type exposed a massive database of 31 million users, including 374 million phone numbers.

Another huge database exposed millions of call logs and SMS text messages

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Soft Actor-Critic: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics

Posted by Tuomas Haarnoja, Student Researcher and Sergey Levine, Faculty Advisor, Robotics at Google

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) provides the promise of fully automated learning of robotic behaviors directly from experience and interaction in the real world, due to its ability to process complex sensory input using general-purpose neural network representations. However, many existing RL algorithms require days or weeks (or more) worth of real-world data in order to converge to the desired behavior. Furthermore, such systems can be tough to deploy on complex robotic systems (such as legged robots) which can easily get damaged during the exploration phase, hyperparameter settings can be challenging to tune, and various safety considerations can introduce further limitations.

In collaboration with UC Berkeley, we recently released Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), a stable and efficient deep RL algorithm suitable for real-world robotic skill learning that is well-aligned with the requirements of real-world robotic experimentation. Importantly, SAC is efficient enough to solve real-world robot tasks in only a handful of hours, and works on a variety of environments with a single set of hyperparameters. Below, we discuss some of the research behind SAC, and also describe some of our recent experiments.

Requirements for Real-World Robotic Learning
Real-world robotic experimentation brings significant challenges, such as constant interruptions in the data stream due to hardware failures and manual resets, and smooth exploration to avoid mechanical wear and tear on the robot, which set additional restrictions to both the algorithm and its implementation, including (but not limited to):

• Good sample efficiency to lower the learning time
  
• Minimal number of hyperparameters that require tuning
  
• Reusing already collected data on different scenarios (known as off-policy learning)
  
• Ensuring that learning and exploration does not damage the hardware

Soft Actor-Critic
Soft actor-critic is based on maximum entropy reinforcement learning, a framework that aims to both maximize the expected reward (which is the standard RL objective) and to maximize the policy's entropy. Policies with higher entropy are more random, which intuitively means that maximum entropy reinforcement learning prefers the most random policy that still achieves a high reward.

Why might this be desirable for robotic learning? The most obvious reason is that policies optimized for maximum entropy will be more robust: if the policy can tolerate highly random behavior during training, it is more likely to respond successfully to unexpected perturbations at test time. However, a more subtle reason is that training for maximum entropy can improve both the algorithm's robustness to hyperparameters and its sample efficiency (to learn more, see this BAIR blog post, and this tutorial).

Soft actor-critic maximizes the entropy augmented reward by learning a stochastic policy that maps states to actions and a Q-function that estimates the objective value of the current policy, optimizing them using approximate dynamic programming. In doing so, SAC views the objective as a grounded way to derive better reinforcement learning algorithms that perform consistently and are sample efficient enough to be applicable to real-world robotic applications. For technical details please see our technical report.

Performance of SAC
We evaluated SAC with two tasks: 1) quadrupedal walking with the Minitaur robot from Ghost Robotics, and 2) rotating a valve with a three finger Dynamixel Claw. Learning to walk presents a substantial challenge, as the robot is underactuated, and must therefore delicately balance contact forces on the legs to make forward progress. An untrained policy can lose balance and fall, and too many falls will eventually damage the robot, making sample-efficient learning essential.

Although we trained our policy only on flat terrain, we subsequently tested it on varied terrains and obstacles. In principle, policies learned with soft actor-critic should be robust to test-time perturbations, because they are trained to maximize entropy (i.e., inject maximal noise) at training-time. Indeed, we observe that the policies learned with our method are robust to these perturbations without any additional learning.

Illustration of learned walking, using SAC implemented on the Minitaur robot. A full video of the learning process can be found at our project website.

The manipulation task requires the hand to rotate a valve-like object so that the colored peg faces to the right, as shown below. This task is exceptionally challenging due to both the perception challenges and the need to control a hand with 9 degrees of freedom. In order to perceive the valve, the robot must use raw RGB images shown in the inset at the bottom right. The initial position of the valve is reset uniformly at random for each episode, forcing the policy to learn to use the raw RGB images to perceive the current valve orientation.

Soft actor-critic solves both of these tasks quickly: the Minitaur locomotion takes 2 hours, and the valve-turning task from image observations takes 20 hours. We also learned a policy for the valve-turning task without images by providing the actual valve position as an observation to the policy. Soft actor-critic can learn this easier version of the valve task in 3 hours. For comparison, prior work has used natural policy gradients to learn the same task without images in 7.4 hours.

Conclusion
Our work demonstrates that deep reinforcement learning based on maximum entropy framework can be applied to learn robot skills in challenging real-world settings. Since the policies are learned directly in the real world, they exhibit robustness to variations in the environment, which can be difficult to obtain otherwise. We also showed that we can learn directly from high-dimensional image observations, which represents a significant challenge in classical robotics. We hope that the release of SAC helps other research teams in their effort to adopt deep RL for more complex real-world tasks in the future.

For more technical details, please visit the BAIR blog post, or read an early preprint of the locomotion experiment and a more complete description of the algorithm. You can find the implementation on GitHub.

Acknowledgements
This research was done in collaboration between Google and UC Berkeley. We would like to thank all the people who were involved, including Sehoon Ha, Kristian Hartikainen, Jie Tan, George Tucker, Vincent Vanhoucke and Aurick Zhou.

12 Sweet Valentine’s Day Games for Every Age

9 Tips for Making the Most Money When Selling Old Toys

Maybe you’ve got a bedroom like The 40 Year Old Virgin’s bedroom, or perhaps you’re a box hoarder, keeping trinkets from your childhood in a box, affording it occasional glances. Sometimes, you might even take the lid off.

But just lately, you’ve realized that perhaps the time has come to stop hoarding toys. You need to make some money, perhaps to help pay for a large expense, such as a car, mortgage down payment, or even a wedding.

It’s time to let someone else play with your old toys. Here’s how to sell your used toys for cash, and actually make good money doing so.

Old Toys I’ve Sold on eBay for Cash

Over the years, I’ve personally sold a lot of toys on eBay, to the extent that at one point I was buying and selling at the same time, turning it into a quite profitable side job.

While I was focusing on G1 Transformers toys (the originals are the best; the new franchise is an example of how CGI is ruining modern movies) and 1970s-80s Lego sets, the tips and tricks I picked up apply to any toy in reasonably good condition (and some that aren’t).

But your figures might be something else entirely. Perhaps you have vintage Scalextric or Hornby trains; you might own some rare A-Team figures, or 1950s friction spark guns. You might be the proud owner of a complete Star Wars toy collection, or have boxed, pristine comic book figures.

Whatever toys you own, they can be sold for cold, hard cash.

Selling Vintage Toys and Games Is Hard

Before we proceed, a quick reality check.

You’re reading this because you have some toys, games, or figurines, perhaps even MIB (“mint in box,” meaning the item is in mint condition, and in the original box) or BNIB (“brand new in box,” as before, but never opened), and you’re considering selling them to make money.

Perhaps you enjoy looking at them. Or else you like playing with them (hey, we won’t tell), or you don’t, but you’re happy to know they’re in your basement/attic/storage garage.

The fact is, you won’t feel happy about selling these items unless you feel that it is time to move on, and that you have outgrown them. Until that happens, unless you’re desperate for the cash, keep them. You’ll regret it if you don’t.

1. Research Your Toy’s Value

To get started, you need to know that what you’re planning to sell is worth. At this stage, you don’t need to take anything off any shelves or get anything out of the attic.

If you know what you have, and what condition it is in, you can research its value.

Admittedly, eBay may not be the best place to find this information. While you’ll certainly get a general idea of what the value is of recent sales of the same or similar items (using the Advanced search option and checking Sold listings before clicking Search on your search term), it’s worth heading to specialist collector sites that deal with the collectible figurines, toys, and games you’re considering selling.

You’ll find such sites with a quick Google search, and here are some advanced searches to bookmark while you’re at it.

2. Clean Them, Carefully

Once you’ve decided it’s time to say goodbye to your prized possessions, box them up.

But first: clean them! If your much-loved toys have been sealed in a box, then they’ll be fine, although the box itself may need a dusting.

For toys that have lived a bit, it’s time to get the toothbrush, a clean paintbrush, Q-tips, and paper towels out, along with a small amount of water that should be used conservatively. With older toys, missing stickers will leave residue, so you’ll need a suitable removal solution that doesn’t damage the surface.

When you’re done, leave them overnight before checking again for any dirt and dust that needs removing.

3. Find Missing Spares Online

Missing stickers, guns, spoilers, heads, wheels; toys of all shapes and sizes find themselves slowly shrinking as bits get knocked off or just lost.

Toys with small parts are the usual suspects, but the most susceptible must be LEGO bricks and minifigs. These hard pieces of plastic find themselves trodden into carpets, stuck in air vents, and hiding under your car seat.

It doesn’t have to be small toys, either; accessories can be a problem. I once lost a He-Man sword in my parents’ back garden for 11 years. Finding it again, completely by chance, was an amazing feeling.

So, if you don’t want to sell your old toys them incomplete, eBay is your friend. There’s a very good chance that someone has the missing item you’re looking for, whether it’s stickers/decals, instructions, or accessories.

I’ve even bought an empty 1970s Lego box from eBay to complete an existing set and increase its value.

4. Take Clear Photos

Forget your smartphone camera (unless you’re rocking a new iPhone or top-of-the-line Android). Good, clear photos come from DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. If you have access to one of these, you should certainly be putting it to good use.

For toys with damage, make sure you take a good photo of the affected area; give the potential buyer all the information they need, and no excuse to back out of any sale. Always photograph the item in its best state, and boxed if possible, with uniform lighting and a white background.

Our guide to making sure your photos sell your goods online should help.

5. Where to Sell Vintage and Collectible Toys

You have several options for selling your vintage toys. Collectible or otherwise, they’ll sell both online and offline.

Sell Collectible Toys Offline

Looking for a way to sell your collectible figures offline? Try:

Second hand stores: these often buy and sell old toys, although they won’t pay what the item is worth. After all, they’re trying to make a profit.

Auction houses: if you’re looking for the best price, and the widest audience, then selling your toys through an auction house is wise. You’ll have to pay a commission, however.

Sell Your Vintage Toys Online

If you’re choosing to sell online, you should start off with the online version of an auction house: eBay. While you’ll probably find some online locations for specialist toy sales, eBay is too big to overlook.

Similarly, you should take the time to evaluate the possibilities of Facebook. It is now simple to sell your old stuff on Facebook, with groups dedicated to buying and selling almost everything.

You can sell on various online marketplaces, but you’re probably going to be using eBay the most, certainly at first.

6. Take Time to Craft Your Listing and Description

As with any online listing, you should add all the necessary information. If you’re using eBay, its automation tools may be useful, but overall take the time to write your own description. Use item specifications if necessary.

You might also include a personal memory of the item, such as when you first bought it. Anything that can give a potential buyer an idea of your relationship with the item you’re selling is useful. It makes your listing memorable, and helps it to stand out, which is important with so much competition.

Meanwhile, if the item is a limited edition or comes with certification, highlight this, and photograph it too. It can add significant value, and again serve to make your listing more valuable.

7. Understand the Importance of Keywords

Wherever you’re selling the item, make sure you clearly describe it in the listing title, using its most recognized name, followed by the condition it is in. This is useful both for the listings page of the site you’re using, and any search engines that might be indexing the listing site or its sub-categories.

For instance, “Original Transformers G1 Soundwave BNMIB w/Buzzsaw Cassette” tells the reader that the item is a Generation 1 Transformer figure, is “Brand New, Mint in Box”, and comes with the Buzzsaw cassette transformer. This works far better than “1980s Transformer Cassette Player”—searches on eBay and Google will be for “Soundwave,” “Transformers Soundwave,” or “G1 Soundwave”.

Second guess what potential buyers might type into Google to find your item, and work with it.

8. Factor in Packaging and Shipping

Are you able to ship the item safely?

You need to think about this before listing it to sell, so do your research to find a courier or postal service that will ship the item safely and securely. If you’re expecting to make some good money from older toys, you don’t want them to get lost or damaged in transit.

Also, make sure that there is an option for the buyer to take out insurance.

9. Promote Your Auction and Sell Your Vintage Toys

You know all about listing on eBay, right? Perhaps you’ve done it before, or perhaps you’ve read our guide to making money on eBay. Or you might be avoiding it completely, preferring to list your classic toys for sale on dedicated websites and forums.

But you will need people to know about the auctions. What better way to do this than to share the auction on Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and/or Instagram?

Social media contacts might like to know about the sale or have friends that might like to know more.

Additionally, specialist websites might have a forum or Facebook page where you can alert fellow members to your sale. Be careful to abide by the site rules, however, and avoid spamming and repeated posts. Suffice to say these are frowned upon.

Selling Stuff Online: Don’t Change Your Mind!

Ultimately, this is a choice that you must make, and then stick to the decision. Either you need the money or the space, or even both, or you don’t. But if you feel as though you’re going to regret selling these items, don’t list them in the first place.

Prioritize; avoid messing people around. Be honest in your dealings, and if the money for a single item looks like it could be ridiculously large, consider using escrow (eBay has an escrow option for just such an occasion).

Thinking you could make a business out of selling old toys on eBay? Check our list of critical tips for selling more on eBay.

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What Are the Different Versions of Firefox (And Which One Is Best for You)?

Do you think there’s only one version of Firefox? In fact, there are many alternative versions of the browser, providing experimental features or development tools. The good news is that they are all available for you to use and experiment with.

We’re going to go through what all the versions offer, like Beta and Nightly, and tell you how they differ from each other and how they connect. We’ll also show you how to downgrade from them if necessary.

The Five Different Versions of Firefox

There are five different versions of Firefox. Here’s what they all offer.

1. Firefox

This is the standard version of Firefox that most people use. You may see it referred to as Firefox Quantum. It’s the name Mozilla gave the browser after it had a large update at the end of 2017, offering improved speeds and less memory usage.

Mozilla Firefox (originally called Phoenix) has been around since 2002. It took its name from the mythical bird that rose from the ashes. In this story, those ashes were the Netscape Navigator browser.

Firefox is free and open-source. Usage peaked in 2009 but declined when Google Chrome entered the scene. However, it’s still the second-most popular web browser for desktop.

2. Firefox Nightly

Firefox Nightly is for active users who volunteer to test and report bugs. It’s the version to use if you want access to all the cutting-edge features in development, long before they hit the mainstream browser.

Each day, Mozilla developers write code that gets merged into a code repository. That code is then compiled for testing and this is the Nightly build you use. It receives updates twice daily.

As such, this is the most unstable version of Firefox. It’s more likely to crash and have bugs. Mozilla collects usage statistics anonymously to help improve the browser.

As the Nightly code matures, it moves into the Beta version of the browser, before eventually being made available for everyone.

3. Firefox Beta

Firefox Beta allows you to test about-to-be-released features. It’s the version to use if you to use functionality unavailable to the masses, but with confidence that it’s been tested beforehand.

While Beta is still intended primarily for testing, it’s geared more towards the general public than Nightly is.

It’s the most stable pre-release build but is still prone to crash and have bugs. Like Nightly, it also collects anonymized information about you to help Mozilla fix any problems.

Once the Beta code has matured, it then moves into the general release branch for everyone to use.

4. Firefox Developer Edition

The clue is in the name for this one: Firefox Developer Edition is aimed at developers. More specifically, those people who are designing, building, and testing things on the web.

This version of the browser has lots of features and tools to make web development easier. There are things like a JavaScript debugger, visualization of CSS Grid, a shape path editor, element font information, and more.

This version allows developers to receive these particular features sooner than they would in a normal release. However, unlike Nightly and Beta, the Developer edition is stable and isn’t designed as a test environment.

It also uses a dark theme by default. Because developers only work in the dark, or something? Don’t worry, though, you can enable dark mode in the standard version of Firefox too.

5. Firefox Extended Support Release

Firefox ESR is for organizations who control their client’s desktops—businesses, schools, governments, and so on—and need to maintain Firefox on a large scale. It doesn’t have the latest features but still gets important security patches.

Unlike the standard version of the browser, which is updated regularly, versions of Firefox ESR are supported for more than a year. At the end of the period, no further updates will be given to that version, and an update to the next version will be offered.

Occasionally, regular users may want to use ESR. For example, Windows XP users were advised to do so when the vanilla version of Firefox stopped supporting the operating system.

How to Downgrade to a Lower Version of Firefox

Firefox Nightly and Developer Edition will install as separate programs. You can uninstall these via Windows key + I > Apps. Beta and ESR will overwrite the standard version of Firefox. If you want to revert back from either, simply reinstall Firefox.

Ideally, don’t use anything but the latest version of Firefox. Old versions are vulnerable to threats.

Consider using Firefox Extended Support Release if you want to downgrade. Maybe, you don’t want the latest features but want to stay protected.

Still want to downgrade? First, visit Mozilla’s directory of Firefox releases. Click the browser version you want, then your operating system. For example, win32/ for 32-bit Windows and win64/ for 64-bit Windows.

Next, click the language version you want. For example, if you’re an English speaker in Great Britain choose en-GB. For the United States choose en-US.

Finally, click the “exe” link to download the installer. Open it up and follow the wizard. Your chosen version of Firefox will install.

Note that Firefox will automatically update.

To prevent it doing so, click the menu button > Options, then scroll to the Firefox Updates section. Set Allow Firefox to as Check for updates but let you choose to install them. The steps required for this task might be different in some older versions.

Enhance Firefox Functionality

Who knew there were so many different versions of Firefox? Hopefully, now you understand what they all do and which is the best version for you.

If you’re sticking with the general public version of Firefox, but still want to expand its functionality, don’t fear. You can do that through add-ons.

Check out our article on the best Firefox add-ons, which covers everything from security, tab management, design, and much more.

Read the full article: What Are the Different Versions of Firefox (And Which One Is Best for You)?

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7 Best Weather Apps for iPhone

Netflix thinks ‘Fortnite’ is a bigger threat than HBO

Netflix thinks “Fortnite” is a bigger threat to its business than HBO. The company in its latest quarterly earnings report released on Thursday said that while its streaming service now accounts for around 10 percent of TV screen time in the U.S., it no longer views its competition only as those services also providing TV content and streaming video.

“We compete with (and lose to) ‘Fortnite more than HBO,” the company’s shareholder letter stated. “When YouTube went down globally for a few minutes in October, our viewing and signups spiked for that time…There are thousands of competitors in this highly-fragmented market vying to entertain consumers and low barriers to entry for those with great experiences.”

In other words, Netflix today sees its competition as anyone in the business of entertaining their customers, and eating up their hours of free time in the process. That includes breakout gaming hits like “Fortnite.”

Netflix’s statement comes at a time when the internet, mobile and gaming have been shifting consumer’s focus and attention away from watching TV.

In fact, all the way back in 2012, mobile industry experts were warning that time spent in mobile apps was beginning to challenge television. And a few years ago, apps finally came out on top. For the first time ever, time spent inside apps exceeded that of TV.

Fortnite, in particular, has capitalized on this change in consumer behavior and has now grown to over 200 million players. (Netflix just reached 139 million, for comparison’s sake.)

In 2018, Fortnite – along with other multiplayer games like PUBG – pushed forward a trend toward cross-platform gaming that’s capable of reaching consumers wherever they are, similar to streaming apps like Netflix. According to a recent report from App Annie, this is just the tip of the iceberg, too. Cross-platform gaming, including not only Fortnite and PUBG, but also whatever comes next – is poised to grow even further in 2019.

Notably, Fortnite, too, has become a place where you don’t just go to play – but rather “hang out.” For kids and young adults, the game has replaced the mall or other parts of the city where kids and teens just go to be around friends and socialize, wrote tech writer Owen Williams, recently, on his blog Charged.

“Not only is Fortnite the new hangout spot, replacing the mall, Starbucks or just loitering in the city, it’s become the coveted ‘third place’ for millions of people around the world,” he said.

Roblox, with it over 70 million players, serves a similar purpose.

That means it’s also a real threat to Netflix’s time. If gamers are hanging around a virtual space with friends, they have less time to stream TV. (And perhaps – given that many of the youngest Netflix never got cable to begin with – less desire to watch TV to begin with.)

“I think about it really is as winning time away, entertainment time from other activities,” said Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Thursday, discussing the threat from those competing for users’ time. “So, instead of doing Xbox or Fortnite or youTube or HBO or a long list, we want to win and provide a better experience. No advertising on demand. Incredible content,” he said.

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This $350,000 Swiss watch looks like an Apple Watch, chimes to tell the time

H. Moser & Cie. Swiss Alps is back with another Apple Watch lookalike. The $350,000 Watch Concept Black is a ludicrous take on the classic minute repeater design. And on this version, the wearer can only tell the time by chiming the watch.

These sort of watches have a storied history that predate wristwatches by hundreds of years. Called minute repeaters they allow the wearer to hit a button, and the watch will respond with chimes indicating the time of the day. The movements were developed before artificial illumination made it possible for watchmakers to add glow-in-the-dark markings. But this is far from a working man’s watch. H. Moser worked with Manufactures Hautes Complications SA to develop the custom movement for this watch.

Flip the watch over, and the watch’s cost is explained in the custom movement. This minute repeater has a rectangular-shaped movement. It’s special. To chime two small hammers strike a gong that runs around the outline of the rectangle casing. Despite the odd shape, the watch is capable of producing a chime Hodinkee calls “crisp, clear, and resonant, with none of the dampening you’d expect from a heavy precious metal case.”

To set the time, the wear chimes the watch using the slide on the side of the casing. Then the wearer adjusts the time using markers on the crown. I like it. It’s a simple and clever way to set a watch without hands.

This watchmaker started using the Apple Watch’s design in 2016 and now has a range of timepieces that mimic the rounded square look in its Swiss Alp Watch line.

H. Moser is known for its concept watches. Don’t expect this watch to be in your local Tourneau. It’s a publicity stunt for H. Moser’s custom watch business that lets the ultra-rich develop one-off timepieces. As for this concept, I’m a fan. The watch demonstrates everything special about the watch industry right now. After years of getting beat up from the Apple Watch, it’s finding its grove in producing both beautiful and affordable mechanical watches and wonderful unattainable timepieces. To be justified, watches do not have to have apps; they just have to delight the wearer and this $350,000 watch does just that.

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Momo, Vietnam’s top payment app, lands big Series C investment led by Warburg Pincus

Fintech in Southeast Asia continues to pique the attention of global investors. Alibaba, Tencent and others have jumped into the region and deployed hundreds of millions of dollars, and now Warburg Pincus is joining them. The U.S-headquartered PE firm has led a Series C investment in Vietnam’s Momo, which claims to be the country’s largest mobile wallet company with 10 million downloads.

Momo already has some big-name investors; Standard Chartered led a $28 million round in 2016 while Goldman Sachs invested $5.7 million back in 2013.

The size of this new round isn’t being disclosed, but Pham Thanh Duc, CEO of M-Service — the parent company of Momo — said it is a record deal for an e-commerce or fintech startup in Vietnam. A lot of the biggest deals in Vietnam have been undisclosed, but one of the largest from last year was a $50 million-odd investment in e-commerce company Tiki from China’s JD.com which gives an indication of the size. The deal might even be as high as $100 million, that’s according to a Deal Street Asia report, although Pham declined to comment on the figure.

M-Service was founded over a decade ago, Momo is its take on digital payments in Vietnam, a market of nearly 100 million people, one-quarter of whom are aged under 25.

Momo started out offering digital payment via an e-wallet app. It has since expanded into utility bill payments and mobile top-up, as well as areas like movie tickets, airline flights and payment for goods and services at 100,000 payment points nationwide, including popular chains. The service recently began offering bill payment for loans, and Pham said it is developing a credit scoring system that will allow it to introduce financial services to users in partnership with financial institutions.

The playbook, he said, is very much based upon the success of Alibaba’s Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay services in China, which went from payments to loans and investing and more.

While both of those Chinese internet giants have stepped into Southeast Asia with fintech investments in markets like Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines, neither has entered Vietnam at this point. Pham said Momo has an ongoing dialogue with Alibaba, but there’s been no investment. Since neither Alibaba nor its fintech affiliate Ant Financial has an operating presence in Vietnam, he said the relationship is “just conversations” at this point. That’s certainly a pairing that is worth keeping an eye on as Alibaba aims to enlarge its presence in Southeast Asia, which — with a cumulative population of 600 million people, growing middle classes and rising internet access — is seen as a growth opportunity by Chinese tech companies.

Partner-wise, Momo works with the likes of Facebook and Google to provide payment for their services and it will soon begin working with Apple, Pham revealed.

While other businesses may be looking region-wide, Momo is not entertaining new market expansions at this point.

“For the next two to three years, we are still very focused on the domestic market,” Pham told TechCrunch in an interview. “There’s no short-term plan to expand to other countries [and] our main effort is focused on user base expansion in Vietnam.”

But, Pham said, he does expect that overseas players will enter Vietnam.

Grab Pay and GoPay [from ride-hailing duo Grab and Go-Jek) will come soon and even Alipay, but I think that for the last five years we have been the number one e-wallet provider,” he said. “We care much about competitors because we are leading the market… other players have had to imitate our model.”

Estimating that nearest-competitor ZaloPay, from Vietnam’s top chat app Zalo, may have around “one-tenth” of the user base Momo, Pham explained that he believes his company is around 12-18 months ahead of the competitor.

This new investment — which was led by a Warburg Pincus affiliate in Vietnam and closed last year — is aimed at fortifying that lead and grabbing a much larger slice of the Vietnamese population, which is tipped to rocket past 100 million by 2025.

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Models of the Atom

Models of the Atom

YouTube Cracks Down on Dangerous Pranks

YouTube is cracking down on videos which show people engaging in dangerous challenges and pranks. YouTube already had rules in place regarding people filming themselves engaging in dangerous activities, but this explicitly deals with challenges and pranks.

There are some dumb people doing dumb stuff on YouTube. In 2018, some people filmed themselves eating Tide Pods. And 2019 began with people taking part in the Bird Box Challenge. And YouTube has finally decided it needs to lay down the law to YouTubers.

YouTube Strengthens Community Guidelines

In a YouTube Help thread, YouTube details how it’s “strengthening enforcement of our Community Guidelines”. And alongside reinforced rules regarding custom thumbnails and external links, it’s cracking down on “dangerous challenges and pranks”.

YouTube explains:

“Content that encourages violence or dangerous activities that may result in serious physical harm, distress or death violates our harmful and dangerous policy, so we’re clarifying what this means for dangerous challenges and pranks.”

“We’ve updated our external guidelines to make it clear that we prohibit challenges presenting a risk of serious danger or death, and pranks that make victims believe they’re in serious physical danger, or cause children to experience severe emotional distress.”

There’s a long history of prank videos on YouTube, and while many of us think they’re lame, the creators behind them have built big audiences. Involving children is clearly a red line for YouTube, which is why it deleted some Bird Box Challenge videos.

Heads up! Your feedback helped us identify 3 areas of our Community Guidelines where we can clarify policies & strengthen enforcement:

1?Custom thumbs
2?External links
3?Pranks & challenges

Read how enforcement will ramp up over the next few months ? https://t.co/CkaAiHsp4z

— Team YouTube (@TeamYouTube) January 15, 2019

In a statement to Engadget, YouTube clarified that this tougher stance “wasn’t in response to a specific challenge, and has been in the works for months”. However, for pranks to continue making an impact, creators have been pushing the boundaries of late.

YouTube Pranksters Begone!

Pranks and challenges can be lots of fun. But there is definitely a line beyond which no one should cross. Eating Tide Pods or leading blindfolded children across a highway both cross this line. As does making people believe they’re in real physical danger.

YouTube has made lots of changes over the years, many of which have not been well received by YouTubers and their audiences. However, cracking down on the worst kinds of pranks and challenges is surely a no-brainer very few people could argue against.

Image Credit: Coastal Elite/Flickr

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Google remains the top open-source contributor to CNCF projects

According to the latest data from Stackalytics, a project founded by Mirantis and hosted by the OpenStack Foundation that visualizes a company’s contribution to open-source projects, Google remains the dominant force in the CNCF open-source ecosystem. Indeed, according to this data, Google is responsible for almost 53 percent of all code commits to CNCF projects. Red Hat, the second biggest contributor, is far behind, with 7.4 percent.

The CNCF is the home of Kubernetes, the extremely popular container orchestration service that Google open sourced, so the fact that Google is the top contributor may not seem like a major surprise. But according to this data, Google would still be the top code contributor to all CNCF projects without even taking Kubernetes into account. In part, that’s due to the fact that Google is also the major contributor to GRPC, a queuing project the company donated to the CNCF, and Vitess, the database clustering system it developed for YouTube.

There are still quite a few projects where Google isn’t the main contributor; 64 percent of contributions to Jaeger come from Uber, for example, and 84 percent of LinkerD code commits are from Buoyant engineers. What’s interesting here is that the report found there is only one project where there isn’t a vendor who contributes more than 40 percent, and that’s the Prometheus monitoring solution that was contributed to the CNCF by SoundCloud but which is now mostly maintained by independent developers Red Hat.

You may read those stats and argue that Google may be a bit too dominant a player in the CNCF ecosystem. Google, of course, doesn’t think so.

“Google has a long history of contribution to and respect for, contribution to open-source software. We love to give back,” said Aparna Sinha, Group Product Manager for GKE and Kubernetes, Google Cloud. “One top of mind example is Kubernetes, one of the fastest growing projects in the history of open source, and today has a thriving community and widespread industry support. Google has been at the heart of it all, as a constant driving force in the community and the broader CNCF. A key part of that momentum has been driven by Google’s deep commitment to the project’s success, whether it’s through providing extensive engineering expertise, code contribution and compute resources, or through project management, testing and documentation. We’re just as dedicated to the project as ever, and we’re excited to see the broader Kubernetes community begin to shape the project’s future and ensure its long-term success.”

It’s worth noting that the CNCF also publishes its own data through its DevStats tool, which tells a similar story, even though it doesn’t quite highlight Google’s dominance as a contributor. When I asked Mirantis co-founder and CMO Boris Renski about these discrepancies, he noted that Stackalytics focuses on commits, whereas the CNCF’s tool looks at contributions, which includes reviews, comments and created issues, among other things. Stackalytics also doesn’t take the CNCF’s sandbox projects into account, where Red Hat contributes quite a bit. The two tools also handle attributions differently, with DevStats attributing all former contributions from CoreOS to Red Hat after it was acquired by the company.

On Twitter, Renski suggested that the different organizations should merge their different data sources to do away with these discrepancies, but I’m not sure how well the CNCF and the OpenStack Foundation really play together these days.

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Monster Data Leak Exposes Millions of Passwords

A monster data leak called Collection #1 has been discovered. Collection #1 contains hundreds of millions of email addresses and tens of millions of passwords. Luckily, the data has been loaded into Have I Been Pwned, so it’s easy to see if you have been affected.

Data leaks seem to be getting more common. In 2015, there was the Ashley Madison leak, and in 2016, there was the AdultFriendFinder leak. However, the biggest so far is the Yahoo data leak, which saw all 3 billion Yahoo users affected. And now this…

Collection #1 Leaks Data Online

As detailed by Troy Hunt of Have I Been Pwned, a monster data leak has recently been doing the rounds. Collection #1 first appeared on MEGA, before being shared on a hacking forum. This means your login credentials may have been exposed to hackers.

New breach: The "Collection #1" credential stuffing list began broadly circulating last week and contains 772,904,991 unique email addresses with plain text passwords (now in Pwned Passwords). 82% of addresses were already in @haveibeenpwned. Read more: https://t.co/BAa3rbgZo4

— Have I Been Pwned (@haveibeenpwned) January 16, 2019

Collection #1 is mostly a compilation of previous data breaches. This means that even if your email address has been targeted, it may be from an old security incident. This hopefully means you’ve already changed your password, as you should do so regularly.

Have You Been Pwned by This Leak?

You can check whether your email address and/or password was leaked using Have I Been Pwned. Just head to the site and type your email address where indicated. You’ll then be informed whether your credentials have been leaked, or, as Hunt puts it, pwned.

If your email and/or password doesn’t show up then you’re fine. However, if it does show up on Have I Been Pwned you should change the password(s) associated with that account immediately. You should also avoid recycling the same password on multiple sites.

Learn to Protect Your Passwords

It’s always disheartening to learn that your credentials have been leaked. However, it’s a good wakeup call to start using better security practices. Always enable 2FA when it’s offered, and consider using a password manager. Here are the best password managers.

Image Credit: Marco Verch/Flickr

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How to Pay Taxes on eBay and Craigslist Sales

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably in one of two groups: you sell used goods on sites like eBay and Craigslist every once in a while for extra spending cash OR you sell self-made goods every day as a side job to boost your income.

In both cases, a portion of the money you earn needs to be declared for income tax, especially if you’re in the latter group—but even one-off sales may count. Not reporting sales could lead to an IRS audit for tax fraud.

Here’s a crash course on when you need to pay taxes for online sales and how to go about it. This post was written with US tax laws in mind and may not apply elsewhere.

Which Sales Count Toward Taxes?

The general rule of thumb is that if you made ANY profit on a sale, then it must be reported as income. Profit is defined as the difference between what you paid to acquire something, any loss in value due to depreciation, and how much you sold it for.

For example, if you purchased a tablet or smartphone for $200 and sold it a week later for $250, then you’ve made a profit of $50. However, if you bought a tablet or smartphone for $200 a few years ago and sold it just now for $100, then there’s no profit.

The IRS has a few guidelines for taxes on goods sold online. Here are the key points you should know, but we recommend reading the whole page:

• If you’re selling things that you’ve owned for a while, such as a comic book collection, then there’s likely no profit involved and you’re fine. This is akin to holding a garage sale, except online.
• If you’re selling something you’ve produced, such as hand-made crafts and artwork, then it’s reportable income.
• If you’re buying and reselling online, such as gadgets on Craigslist, then it’s reportable income.

What it really comes down to is whether your online sales are defined as a business or a hobby according to the definitions set out by the IRS. The waters can be a bit murky here. As such, the IRS has put forth several questions that may help to clarify where you stand:

• Does the time and effort put into the activity indicate an intention to make a profit?
• Does the taxpayer depend on income from the activity?
• If there are losses, are they due to circumstances beyond the taxpayer’s control or did they occur in the start-up phase of the business?
• Has the taxpayer changed methods of operation to improve profitability?
• Does the taxpayer or his/her advisors have the knowledge needed to carry on the activity as a successful business?
• Has the taxpayer made a profit in similar activities in the past?
• Does the activity make a profit in some years?
• Can the taxpayer expect to make a profit in the future from the appreciation of assets used in the activity?

If you can answer “yes” to any of those questions, then you are most likely conducting a business in the eyes of the IRS. The more questions you can answer “yes” to, the more likely it is that you’re running a business, at least in terms of taxes.

The distinction between business and hobby is important because some tax actions, such as deducting business expenses, are only available to one and not the other.

You may also need to pay sales tax on items you sell online. Unfortunately, sales tax is far more complicated than income tax, and it would be impossible to cover it all in one post. Refer to this guide to internet sales tax in all US states.

And to be clear, even though the title of this article mentions only eBay and Craigslist, these tax guidelines apply REGARDLESS of where you actually make your sales—whether you’re selling stuff on Amazon or even selling to friends on Facebook.

How Much Do You Owe in Taxes?

The first thing you need to do is keep good records. You should always have access to some kind of transaction report (or, at the very least, a transaction history) and be able to sum up how much you made in sales over any given period of time.

You’ll need this information to determine how much you truly owe in taxes—and in the event you’re ever audited by the IRS, these records will save you lots of time, energy, and headache. While 1099 forms are great, you should still keep independent records.

And yes, you still owe taxes even if you never receive 1099 forms from eBay, Craigslist, PayPal, or wherever else. It’s your responsibility to track your sales and pay the taxes you owe on those sales.

Note: If you’re handling lots of sales and feeling overwhelmed, consider using accounting software for small businesses.

Understanding Income Tax vs. Self-Employment Tax

If you’re selling on sites like eBay and Craigslist, then whatever income you generate from those sales will be subjected to two taxes: income tax and self-employment tax.

Income tax is a bit tricky because the brackets depend on your filing status and they can change from year to year. Fortunately, you can just use MoneyChimp’s Income Tax Calculator to see what you owe given a certain amount of taxable income.

Self-employment tax is more straightforward but comprised of two parts: Social Security and Medicare. In 2019, for the self-employed, the Social Security tax rate is 12.4% on the first $127,200 of self-employed income and the Medicare tax rate is 2.9% on all income.

You must pay both income tax and self-employment tax on income earned through self-employed means, including sales made online.

For example, if I sold $10,000 worth of goods on eBay in 2019 and filed taxes as Married Jointly, then I would owe $1,240 to Social Security and $290 to Medicare (actually less if you include deductions and exemptions, but you won’t know until your file your tax return).

Note: Be sure to check out the IRS’s Self-Employment Tax Center page.

A bit overwhelming, isn’t it? That’s why we highly recommend using tax software when it comes time to file your tax return. You’ll probably have to pay a bit more for a version that can handle self-employed income, but the savings in time and energy are worth it.

Don’t Forget About Quarterly Tax Payments!

There’s one more thing to worry about when dealing with self-employed income: you have to make quarterly estimated payments to the IRS.

Normally, as an employee working for an employer, a portion of every paycheck gets taken out as a “tax withholding.” These are payments made to the IRS on your behalf over the course of the year, and these withholdings count toward the total tax you’d owe at the end of the year.

Self-employed income is subject to the same “over the course of the year” payments, except these payments only need to be made once every quarter and they only need to estimate the tax you owe on the self-employed income you earned during that quarter.

Quarterly estimated payment deadlines are:

• Q1, April 15 (for income earned January to March)
• Q2, June 15 (for income earned April to May)
• Q3, September 15 (for income earned June to August)
• Q4, January 15 (for income earned September to December)

If the day falls on a weekend or holiday, then the due date is postponed to the next business day.

How to Pay Quarterly Estimated Tax

The easiest way to pay these quarterly estimated payments is to use the IRS website’s online payment portal, which is just one of many useful online tools provided by the IRS:

1. Visit irs.gov on a secure computer.
2. Click Make a Payment.
3. Click Direct Pay.
4. Click Make a Payment.
5. Under “Reason for Payment,” select Estimated Tax.
6. Under “Apply Payment To,” select 1040ES.
7. Select the tax year and click Continue.
8. Fill out your taxpayer details and click Continue.

That’s it! Whatever payments you make in this way will count as a kind of “self-employed withholding” towards the total tax that you owe at the end of the year.

Do not skip out on paying quarterly estimated tax, because you will have to pay a penalty on whatever you still owe to the IRS when tax day comes around.

When in Doubt, Seek a Tax Professional

This is all admittedly confusing, especially if you’ve never had to deal with self-employed taxes of any kind. However, the point is this: you DO owe taxes on all sales made through sites like eBay and Craigslist with the intention of earning a profit.

If this is too much for you to wrap your head around, don’t worry. You aren’t the only one who feels that way, which is why so many people defer their tax preparation to a Certified Public Accountant (CPA).

In the meanwhile, check out these tips on how to improve eBay sales and these other tips for making more money on eBay.

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How to Change the Background of a Picture in Photoshop

Do you want to change the background of a picture in Photoshop? Perhaps you want to turn a cloudy sky into a beautiful sunny day? Or add a flat background to your corporate headshot? If so, you’ll be pleased to know it’s actually quite easy.

Being able to change the background of a photo is one of Adobe Photoshop’s best features. The application even includes tools to select tricky areas like hair, and match the colors from different images.

Choose the Right Approach

The best approach to changing the background in Photoshop is to create a selection that separates the foreground and the background.

As with everything in Photoshop, there are several different ways to do achieve the same results. In this tutorial we’ll be using the Quick Selection tool, but it would work just as effectively with the Pen tool.

If you want to follow along with the same images you can grab them both from Pexels.com, one of the best royalty-free image sites. Download them here and here.

1. Select the Foreground Object

Grab the Quick Selection Tool from the toolbar, or by hitting W on your keyboard. With a hardish brush click and drag inside the area you want to select. Photoshop will try to guess which parts you want to include based on the contrast levels in the image.

As as result, you’ll find that areas with high contrast and hard edges are selected cleanly, but low contrast and soft edges will require more work.

In some images you might find it easier to select the background instead. You can then invert the selection by pressing Shift + Ctrl + i on Windows, or Shift + Cmd + i on Mac.

2. Fine-Tune Your Selection

To fine-tune your selection zoom into the image and make your brush size smaller by pressing the left square bracket. Now continue clicking and dragging to add parts of the foreground object to your selection.

If you need to remove anything from the selection hold down the Alt key and click and drag in those areas.

Ideally your selection should contain all solid objects, but you don’t need to obsess over selecting individual strands of hair, for example. We’ll sort that out in a moment.

3. Select and Mask

In the options bar at the top of the screen click Select and Mask. The screen that opens enables you to refine the selection and convert it into a mask.

In the Properties panel click the View Mode option to change how you will see your selection. Overlay is a good choice, as you can pick a color that contrasts with your image. But as you work you may want to hit the F key to cycle through the views—different backgrounds will highlight any problems with your selection.

4. Refine the Selection

Now you can begin refining the selection. In the toolbar on the left side of the screen are various tools to help you with this:

• Quick Selection Tool. The same as we used in step 1, this can be used to quickly add (or remove) any larger areas to your selection.
• Refine Edge Brush Tool. Best used over hair and other soft edges.
• Brush Tool. Use this over harder edges.
• Lasso/Polygonal Lasso Tool. Manually draw areas to add or remove from your selection.

Zoom in to your image to check the edges of the selection. You won’t need to touch much of it—you’re mostly looking for areas that either haven’t been selected, have been wrongly selected, or have very rough edges.

In our image we’ll start with the Brush tool to smooth the edges of the wall and body. Just paint in to add to the selection, or hold Alt and paint to remove areas.

Next, switch to the Refine Edge tool to touch up the hair, or any soft edges. Under Edge Detection in the right hand panel check the box marked Smart Radius. This helps Photoshop make a distinction between soft and hard edges.

Also, you can increase the Radius a little. You’ll need to do this by eye to see its effects—press P to toggle between before and after.

Place a softish Refine Edge brush on the outer edge of the hair and begin brushing. You should see strands of hair starting to be added to the selection. Hold down the Alt key and paint to undo your changes if you aren’t happy with them.

5. Adjust the Settings

The Select and Mask options include several listed under Global Refinements. We don’t need to use them for our image, but for reference they are:

• Smooth. Smooths the edge of a selection, removing any jagged lines. Good for selections with a clear edge.
• Feather. Softens the edge of a selection by adding a feather.
• Contrast. Hardens the edge of a selection by increasing contrast on the edge pixels.
• Shift Edge. Moves your entire selection in or out by a specified number of pixels.

6. Remove Color Fringing

Once you’re happy with your selection, go to the Output Settings in the right hand panel. Tick Decontaminate Colors to remove any color fringe left in your selection.

In Output, choose New Layer with Layer Mask, and click OK. You will now return to your main image, with your selection added as a new layer. You’re now ready to add a new background.

7. Paste Your New Background

Next, paste in the image containing your new background. Place it on a layer just below the layer containing your foreground selection.

Use the Hand tool to position the layer wherever you want, resizing it if necessary using the Free Transform tool (Ctrl +T, or Cmd + T). Grab the handles on the the corners or sides of the images and drag inwards to make it smaller. Hold the Shift key to keep the aspect ratio the same.

8. Match the Colors

By now it should be looking pretty good. The final step is to fix colors of the foreground to make sure they blend properly with the background.

Select the foreground layer, making sure to select the image not the mask. Go to Image > Adjustments > Match Color.

In the window that opens go to Source and select the image you’re working on. Under Layer select which layer you want to fix — you can either match the foreground to your new background, or vice versa.

Now check the Neutralize box to remove any color casts from your chosen layer, and adjust the Luminance and Intensity options until your foreground and background match. You can reduce the effect using the Fade slider if you need to. Use the Preview option to toggle between the before and after states.

9. You’re Done!

Click OK and you’re done. Save your file in the PSD format to preserve all the layer information. With the foreground, background, and original image all on separate layers, your file remains fully editable. For more ways to improve your image editing, try these Adobe Photoshop workflow tips.

You can edit the mask to add or remove from what’s visible in your foreground, and you can reposition the background or even experiment with different ones entirely.

To share your image you’ll need to save it in another format. Go to File > Save As and choose Jpeg to do this. Don’t delete your PSD, though—that’s your backup!

What If You Don’t Have Photoshop?

When you’re working in Photoshop background tweaks are easy. But you can achieve similar things in most other serious graphics packages, too. If you’d rather use something less expensive than Adobe’s tools, we’d recommend GIMP. It’s free, and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Once you’ve installed it, check out our guide on how to change a background in GIMP to help you get started.

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