Here's an interesting development about to take place in India. From a report: Walmart Inc. has decided to go all in on its deal to acquire Flipkart in a deal sealed on Thursday to buy 73% of the Indian ecommerce company in one of the biggest mergers and acquisitions in the country -- spending at least $14.6 billion in the cash-and-stock buyout. One source said Flipkart was valued at $20 billion, while two others said Walmart, the world's largest retailer, had put the target company's value at as much as $22 billion, a price at which it will spend more than $16 billion. Alphabet Inc., the parent company of search giant Google, is said to be participating in the deal with a $3 billion investment. Kalyan Krishnamurthy will stay on as chief executive of Flipkart.

"Hawaii's Kilauea volcano erupted Thursday, releasing lava into a residential neighborhood and prompting mandatory evacuation orders for nearby homes," reports Chicago Tribune. The eruption comes after officials had been warning residents all week that an eruption was possible and that they should be prepared to evacuate. From the report: Hawaii County said steam and lava poured out of a crack in Leilani Estates, which is near the town of Pahoa on the Big Island. Leilani Estates has a population of about 1,500, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. But the evacuation order only covers a portion of the neighborhood. Nearby community centers have opened for shelter. The Puu Oo crater floor began to collapse Monday, triggering a series of earthquakes and pushing the lava into new underground chambers. The collapse caused magma to push more than 10 miles downslope toward the populated southeast coastline of the island.

An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has a video celebrating the 40th birthday of spam email. Here's a transcript of the video: "It is 40 years since the first spam email was sent. Marketer Gary Thuerk composed an email selling his company's newest computers and sent it to 400 users on ARPANET, which was the network that become the basis for the internet. Why is it called spam? It has been suggested that it was called spam after a song in a Monty Python sketch. Where patrons of a cafe were repeatedly offered something they didn't want. The concept of spam is nothing new. Unsolicited telegrams were sent over 100 years ago and we've come to accept junk mail as part of everyday life. Now [nearly 60%] of all email is spam. Like most rubbish, it can be found everywhere on earth."

Paige.Bennett writes: In a recent study, University of Exeter's Center for Graphene Science used nanoengineering technology to add graphene to concrete production. The resulting graphene concrete is two times stronger than traditional concrete and four times as water resistant, but with a much smaller carbon footprint compared to the conventional process of making concrete. According to the research, the addition of graphene cuts back on the amount of materials needed in concrete production by nearly 50 percent and reduces carbon emissions by 446 kg per ton.

When Google released Chrome 66 just over two weeks ago, it received lots of attention and praise for introducing the ability to mute autoplaying videos with sound until you press play. Today, Chrome product manager John Pallett revealed that "the new policy blocks about half of unwanted autoplays." VentureBeat reports: Pallett also shared that "a significant number" of autoplays are paused, muted, or have their tab closed within six seconds by Chrome users. He didn't say how many exactly, as the number varies significantly from site to site. But that shouldn't surprise anyone, given how much work Google put into this latest feature. Chrome decides which autoplaying content to stop in its tracks by learning your preferences and ranking each website according to your past behavior. If you don't have browsing history with a site, Chrome allows autoplay for over 1,000 sites where Google says the highest percentage of visitors play media with sound (sites where media is the main point of visiting the site). As you browse the web, Chrome updates that list by enabling autoplay on sites where you play media with sound during most of your visits, and disables it on sites where you don't.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon is offering to pass along the discounts it gets on credit-card fees to other retailers if they use its online payments service, according to people with knowledge of the matter, in a new threat to PayPal and card-issuing banks. The move shows Amazon is willing to sacrifice the profitability of its payments system to spread its use. Swipe fees are a $90 billion-a-year business for lenders such as JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, networks including Visa and Mastercard, and payment processors like First Data and Stripe, which pocket a fraction of every sale when shoppers swipe cards or click "buy now."

The financial industry's fees amount to about 2 percent of a typical credit-card transaction, or 24 cents for debit. But big stores such as Amazon and Walmart have long been able to negotiate lower rates for themselves based on their massive sales volume. Now, Amazon is offering to pass its discount along to at least some smaller merchants if they agree to embrace its Amazon Pay service. Previously, online merchants using Amazon's service have paid about 2.9 percent of each credit-card transaction plus 30 cents, which is divvied up among Amazon, card issuers and payment networks.

lod123 shares a report from Threatpost: Android phone-maker BLU Products agreed to a proposed settlement on Tuesday with the Federal Trade Commission, over allegations it allowed the third-party firm Adups Technology to collect detailed consumer data from users without their consent. In an administrative complaint filed earlier this week against BLU and the company's co-owner and president Samuel Ohev-Zion, the FTC accused the firm of sharing with China-based Adups the full contents of their users' text messages, real-time cell tower location data, call and text-message logs, contact lists, and applications used and installed on devices.

Ultimately, the FTC is alleging Ohev-Zion and BLU violated the FTC Act's section pertaining to "deceptive representation regarding disclosure of personal information." The proposed settlement will be made final after a 30-day public comment period. In its proposed complaint, the FTC said Florida-based BLU contracted with Adups to issue security and operating system updates to millions of phones sold by the firm through Amazon, Best Buy and Walmart. In addition to allegedly failing to protect consumer privacy, the FTC asserts that BLU failed "to adequately assess the privacy and security risks of third-party software installed on BLU devices" resulting in "common security vulnerabilities that could enable attackers to gain full access to the devices." Security researchers at Kryptowire first reported in 2016 that several models of BLU phones actively transmitted user and device information to Adups.

According to a report from New York City's comptroller, Scott Stringer, Airbnb is causing rent prices to increase significantly in Manhattan and Brooklyn (Warning: source may be paywalled: alternative source), where the majority of the company's rentals are concentrated. The New York Times reports: In Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen and Chelsea neighborhoods and the Midtown Business District, which accounted for about 11 percent of all Airbnb listings in New York City in 2016, average monthly rents increased by $398 between 2009 and 2016, of which $86, or 21.6 percent, was a result of Airbnb's presence, the report said. In Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, the study said, rents went up 18.6 percent in those years because of Airbnb listings. Airbnb makes it easy to rent apartments to tourists, taking units off the market for full-time residents, the report said. The report said that Airbnb's influence cost New Yorkers $616 million in additional rent in 2016 as a result of price pressures.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Today, Google is releasing an open source framework for the development of "confidential computing" cloud applications -- a software development kit that will allow developers to build secure applications that run across multiple cloud architectures even in shared (and not necessarily trusted) environments. The framework, called Asylo, is currently experimental but could eventually make it possible for developers to address some of the most basic concerns about running applications in any multi-tenant environment. Container systems like Docker and Kubernetes are designed largely to allow untrusted applications to run without exposing the underlying operating system to badness. Asylo (Greek for "safe place") aims to solve the opposite problem -- allowing absolutely trusted applications to run "Trusted Execution Environments" (TEEs), which are specialized execution environments that act as enclaves and protect applications from attacks on the underlying platform they run on.

A demand from the California DMV of eight companies testing self-driving cars has highlighted a number of areas where the technology falls short of being safe to operate with no human backup. From a report: All companies testing autonomous vehicles on the state's public roads must provide annual reports to the DMV about "disengagements" that occur when a human backup driver has to take over from the robotic system. The DMV told eight companies with testing permits to provide clarification about their reports. More than 50 companies have permits to test autonomous vehicles with backup drivers on California roads but not all of them have deployed vehicles.

It turns out that a number of the issues reported are shared across technology from different companies. Some of the problems had to do with the way the cars sense the environment around them. Others had to do with how the vehicles maneuver on the road. And some had to do with what you might expect from systems made up of networked gadgets: hardware and software failures. The disengagement reports themselves identify other problems some self-driving vehicles struggle with, for example heavy pedestrian traffic or poorly marked lanes.

Twitter is urging its more than 330 million users to change their passwords after a glitch exposed some in plain text on its internal computer network. Reuters is first to report the news: The social network said an internal investigation had found no indication passwords were stolen or misused by insiders, but that it urged all users to consider changing their passwords "out of an abundance of caution." The blog did not say how many passwords were affected. Here's what Twitter has to say about the bug: "We mask passwords through a process called hashing using a function known as bcrypt, which replaces the actual password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter's system. This allows our systems to validate your account credentials without revealing your password. This is an industry standard. Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process. We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again."

The social networking service is asking users to change their password "on all services where you've used this password." You can do so via the password settings page.

Dave Knott writes: The 2018 World Video Game Hall of Fame inductees have been announced. The Hall Of Fame "recognizes individual electronic games of all types — arcade, console, computer, handheld, and mobile -- that have enjoyed popularity over a sustained period and have exerted influence on the video game industry or on popular culture and society in general." The 2018 inductees are: Final Fantasy 7, John Madden Football, Spacewar!, and the first Tomb Raider.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Researchers have found eight new flaws in computer central processing units that resemble the Meltdown and Spectre bugs revealed in January, a German computing magazine reported on Thursday. The magazine, called c't, said it was aware of Intel's plans to patch the flaws, adding that some chips designed by ARM Holdings, a unit of Japan's Softbank, might be affected, while work was continuing to establish whether Advanced Micro Devices chips were vulnerable. Meltdown and Spectre bugs could reveal the contents of a computer's central processing unit -- designed to be a secure inner sanctum -- either by bypassing hardware barriers or by tricking applications into giving up secret information.

Can lightning have an impact on people with electrodes implanted in their brains? A new study shares a case study. From a report: Lightning had struck the building. But the appliances were not the only things affected. After about an hour, the woman, who had had the electrodes put in five years before to help with debilitating muscle spasms in her neck, noticed her symptoms coming back. When she went to see her doctors the next day, they found that the pacemaker-like stimulator that powered the electrodes had switched itself off in response to the lightning strike.

In a study describing these events published Tuesday in the Journal of Neurosurgery, her doctors suggest that physicians and medical device companies add lightning strikes to the list of things patients with electrodes implanted in their brains should watch out for. It may sound futuristic, but deep brain stimulation, or D.B.S., has a fairly long history. Surgeons operating on epileptic patients in the 1930s and 1940s found that removing small portions of the brain could quiet seizures. Later, researchers found that stimulating certain brain areas, instead of cutting them out, could quell the involuntary movements characteristic of Parkinson's and other disorders.