The discount chain is promoting a deal on gas with a funny new video called Big Gas Savings. If you don’t realize the joke already, just say “big gas” out lout a couple times — and you’ll get it. In the video, several customers ogle over the “really big gas discounts.” One man tells his wife it solves her “big gas problem.” She agrees, but gives him some cause for concern when she stares longingly at the “big gas man” standing in front of the “big gas truck.”

Kmart struck viral gold last month with a similar ad that played on the phrase “ship your pants.” The spot has been shared more than 2.5 million times since it was released, according to Unruly.

Both Kmart ads were created by the ad agency DraftFCB.

Forbes also urged investors to “Buy Early And Buy As Much As You Can.” A poll of 800 people determined that Facebook would close at $55 on its first day as a public company, putting it in that ethereal $140 billion range.

A year later, we all know how things actually turned out. Facebook’s stock price jumped a mere $0.23 on that first day. Over the next few months, the stock bottomed out at $17.55 — less than half its opening price. The backlash was so fierce that there was even a movement to dump CEO Mark Zuckerberg in favor of a more seasoned chief executive. Viewed in cold economic terms, the Facebook IPO was a bust.

Sometimes a kick in the teeth can be therapeutic. Sometimes it can even be a lifesaver.

Sometimes a kick in the teeth can be therapeutic. Sometimes it can even be a lifesaver. Consider, for instance, why investors were so down on the stock: Facebook was caught flat-footed by the mobile revolution. Indeed, in early 2012, the company appeared to have no mobile strategy at all. Though its users were rapidly abandoning desktop for phones and tablets, Facebook wasn’t making a nickel from either. Bearing in mind that even though mobile advertising typically sells for a fraction of the rates of ads on desktop, there were lots of reasons to believe Facebook’s future looked bleak. No wonder Wall Street was bailing.

We’ll never know what would have happened if Facebook hadn’t gone public when it did. Perhaps the company would have realized that its was about to get hit by a Mack truck. Perhaps not, though. Either way, Wall Street analysts performed a valuable function by downgrading the stock and putting so much emphasis on mobile.

A quick study, Zuckerberg was soon predicting that Facebook would make more money from mobile than desktop. In July 2012, Facebook announced it was earning about $500,000a day (roughly $45 million a quarter) from mobile ads. By the first quarter of 2013, 30% of Facebook’s ad revenues (about $375 million) came from mobile.

Looking back, Facebook’s mobile monetization strategy looks inevitable, but that’s not necessarily the case. By December 2011, Facebook already had 425 million monthly active users who used the company’s mobile products. Yet throughout 2011, there was little activity on the mobile front. The company went about a year — from November 2010 to October 2011 — without a major mobile release. The company’s lead iPad app developer, Jeff Verkoeyen, left to join Google after he became frustrated with Facebook’s slow progress on its iPad app.

Facebook had some reasons for its ambivalence about mobile. On iOS, since Apple controlled the ecosystem, Facebook couldn’t make any money from apps. The only other choice was Android, which was controlled by another archrival, Google. While Facebook debated its mobile strategy, it appears that little thought was given to advertising on a platform that, as Zuckerberg later noted, would one day become the default.

The IPO seems to have provided the nudge that Facebook needed. Faced with failure for the first time in its gloriously short life, Facebook was publicly shamed into focusing its energies on mobile.

Though Facebook has yet to match its $38 opening price, it appears to be a much healthier company than a year ago. The ass-kicking, courtesy of Wall Street, was just what the upstart social network needed.

It may not be so lucky next time.

There have been rumors in recent weeks that Apple is planning a complete redesign for iOS 7 that moves away from the “skeuomorphic” look it has relied on to date, which designs digital objects like real-world objects. Now, one digital agency has come out with a video imagining what this kind of redesign might actually look like.

In the concept video above, Simply Zesty shows off a flatter user interface. Each of the app icons have less-rounded edges and cleaner designs. The calendar app ditches the look and feel of a printed calendar in favor of a design more like the Sunrise app. The weather app has a more minimalistic design that is similar to Forecast, a web-based weather app from the makers of Dark Sky.

The film starring Robert Downey Jr. as the title character now sits behind just “The Avengers” — another Walt Disney comic book superhero flick — which earned $207.4 million when it opened a year ago.

In second place for this weekend’s box office was action comedy “Pain & Gain,” starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, with $7.6 million in ticket sales, according to industry tracker Exhibitor Relations.

Not far behind was “42,” a biopic about trailblazing black baseball star Jackie Robinson, which made $6.2 million.

The fourth spot, with $5.8 million, went to “Oblivion,” the post-apocalyptic action flick starring Tom Cruise, followed by “The Croods” — a stone-age cartoon — in fifth, with $4.2 million.

“The Big Wedding” — a star-studded comedy featuring Robert De Niro, Katherine Heigl, Diane Keaton and Robin Williams — came in sixth place, taking in $3.9 million.

“Mud,” a coming-of-age story starring Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon, earned an estimated $2.2 million, for seventh place, the film’s first week in the top ten after going into wide release a week earlier.

And in eighth, Walt Disney’s 3D fantasy adventure flick “Oz the Great and Powerful” earned $1.8 million, for a nine-week total of $228.6 million.

“Scary Movie 5,” the latest installment in the slasher-comedy franchise, took the ninth spot with $1.4 million.

Rounding out the top 10 at $1.3 million was “The Place Beyond the Pines,” starring Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper. (AFP)

Sharemind uses a concept called “shared multi-party computation” that allows several users to combine and analyze secret data while keeping it that way.

“Sharemind is like a computer that does not see or understand the data,” said Dan Bogdanov, a researcher at the Tallinn-based software and IT firm Cybernetica.

For satellites, three separate servers, each one containing a different nation’s encrypted satellite data, would combine the data to predict the likelihood of future orbiting crashes. The idea is to prevent the 2009 fender-bender that knocked out satellites from both Iridium and the Russian military.

The same encrypted analytical program may also be used to help retailers know more about what their customers want to buy without revealing their identities, or powerful applications for personal financial and investment data.

Bogdanov said current computer programs can hide, store and secure data with encryption systems, but in order to analyze it, the information has to be decrypted.

“That makes it vulnerable,” said Bogdanov, who developed the program as a doctoral student at Tartu University. “We are trying to solve this problem by learning to program computations on encrypted data.”

Bogdanov used the example of the satellite trajectories problem as a rope containing three strands, none of which are useful on its own, but combined together they reveal the desired result. This video explains how Sharemind works.

Sharemind doesn’t store the data it generates, he said.

“The cool thing about this is we do not reconstruct the secrets, we do not make them public to anyone,” Bogdanov said. “There will be no memory device were the information will be public.”

Shared third-party computation is a relatively new field that so far has been more of an academic exercise than a real-world application. But with Sharemind and other projects, the power of sharing secrets may become more commonplace.

At the University of Virginia, computer science professor David Evans is working on a shared third-party computation project that would take a person’s genomic information and compare it to studies of how various medicines work on people with different genotypes. The result is a personalized drug treatment that would not require the patient to share his or her information with the pharmaceutical company (or insurer), according to Evans.

“There are lots of interesting medical things you could do with that information, such as correlations between (DNA) sequences or different outcomes, all of these have great medical benefits,” Evans said. “But people view their genome as private data.”

As for Sharemind, Evans notes that using shared third-party computation would require a great deal of trust between users. Any attempt to collude with another party, or cheat by giving false data points could disrupt the whole program.

“If one country decides I’m going to report the wrong results, everybody else would get the wrong answer and not know they were getting the wrong answer,” Evans said. “But maybe for satellites, all participants have a common interest and so they are highly motivated to do what they are supposed to do.”

Bogdanov responded that the program cannot make people be truthful, but there are ways to detect fake entries.

Cybernetica is hoping to unveil Sharemind later this year as a way for various agencies of the Estonian government to share education, unemployment and income data without revealing too much about the nation’s citizens. The goal would be to better target delivery of social services.

Unfortunately for Nokia, not many people really noticed or cared that the shop is closing. The Nokia Flagship Store SH account on Sina Weibo has had only 938 reposts of its “Goodbye Shanghai” post in the past three days. Trending Weibo posts generally get tens of thousands of interactions. However, the account only had 4,251 fans.

The Nokia Shanghai store opened in 2007, one of about 10 worldwide. At that time, Nokia was still China’s top phone-maker with its Symbian platform. Then Android and iOS happened. While Symbian still has a surprisingly large user base in China, all the traction is behind Android. There will be an estimated 300 million active Android users in China by the end of this year.

In contrast, Nokia’s stats for 2012 were disastrous in China, with sales down 79% throughout the year. Now Nokia is pinning its hopes on the Windows Phone OS, but it’s growing slowly.Apple has three major stores in Shanghai and has rapidly expanded to eight Apple Stores in four cities across mainland China.

YouTube announced it will be shutting down after eight years in business and will no longer accept videos. The news comes, of course, just before April Fools’ Day.

The company teamed up with The Onion to create a YouTube-star-studded video explaining how the site was set up as part of a contest to find the best home video on the Internet.

“We are so close to the end,” Tom Liston, communications director at YouTube, said in the video. “Tonight at midnight, YouTube.com will no longer be accepting entries. After eight amazing years, it’s finally time to review everything that has been uploaded to our site and begin the process of selecting a winner.”

With hilarious cameos from YouTube: Antoine Dodson, David After Dentist and Charlie and his brother (from the video “Charlie Bit My Finger” video) — everyone in the clip is in on the joke.

“We are all storytellers — that is what pulled me into this contest,” said Dodson, known for the viral “Bed Intruder” Auto-Tune video. “I encourage everybody to watch as many videos as possible before YouTube deletes everything tonight.”

YouTube said every video on the site will be reviewed by a panel of judges and it will take 10 years to watch them all. The winner will be announced in 2023, when the site finally comes back online.

In an attempt to make the prank more believable, YouTube added a live stream of two faux presenters announcing “Best Video” nominees, which will run on the site for 12 hours. Although the stream will start out with the feel of an Emmys or Oscars presentation, it’s expected to get a little bit kooky and stranger as the day goes on.

It’s no secret that April Fools’ Day is a big part of Google and YouTube’s company culture and tradition. For example, YouTube did a throwback in 2011 to fake viral videos from 100 years ago and last year, the site said you could order all clips on DVD. In 2008, every video led to a a Rick Roll.

What do you think of this year’s prank? Which is the best you’ve seen on web today? Let us know in the comments.

The attack — which some experts are calling the biggest in history — is aimed at Spamhaus, a anti-spam company based in Geneva and London that flags websites it considers bogus. Spamhaus sells its blacklists to Internet Service Providers, which often blocks the hosts flagged therein. According to experts, it’s estimated to be responsible for blocking up to 80% of the global e-mail spam.

Spamhaus found itself at the business end of a colossal and specialized Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) onslaught soon after it recently added Cyberbunker, an online hosting service offering storage space to anything “except child porn and anything related to terrorism,” to its blacklists, labeling it a spammer’s haven — a characterization Cyberbunker rejects. Cyberbunker has not directly claimed responsibility for the attacks, but Sven Olaf Kamphuis, claiming to be a spokesman for Cyberbunker told the BBC that Spamhaus shouldn’t be able to determine “what goes and does not go on the Internet”.

Spamhaus, which has contracted with security firm CloudFlare to mitigate this attack, has been hit by more typical DDoS attacks plenty of times in the past. In such an attack, hackers use servers or botnets that they control to point large amounts of bogus traffic at a target in the hopes of knocking it offline. But this situation is different: Hackers are exploiting a known issue in the Domain Name System (DNS), which is a key element of the Internet’s infrastructure, to hit Spamhaus with traffic from around the world. The scale of the attack is also unprecedented, clocking in at up to 300 gigabits per second — many times the size of average DDoS attacks.

The attack, then, has been clogging essential Internet infrastructure, which is why it’s causing Internet services and users across the world to experience shutdowns or slowdowns. And while sole businesses can choose to temporarily shut down servers that are being used to carry out or being targeted by a DDoS attack, the DNS system cannot go offline without causing major disruptions to the global flow of Internet traffic — disruptions that would have significant consequences for the global economy.

According to The New York Times, the FAA has been looking into the use of electronics on planes, and might ease up on the strict rules to shut them down during certain times. However, don’t get too excited. This wouldn’t apply to cellphones, the report said.

The news comes following demands from the public to scientifically prove why devices such as e-readers can’t be used to read during takeoff and landing.

The F.A.A. has been meeting with key companies from different industries such as Amazon and the Consumer Electronics Association since January, and it plans to reveal its findings on July 31, 2013, according to The New York Times.

“We are working very hard to get ready for it. We are preparing products for the future, and the watch is definitely one of them,” said executive VP of Samsung’s mobile business, Lee Young-hee, during an interview in Seoul.

Lee gave no details about the features of the watch or its price, merely saying that the company has been “preparing the watch product for so long.”

Samsung’s admission comes after months of rumors about an Apple wristwatch, followed by the unearthing of patents for a wearable accessory device.

Still, nothing about Apple’s watch has been officially confirmed at this point, so we now have two “upcoming” watches which may turn out to be nothing but smoke and mirrors.

What do you expect from a Samsung smartwatch? How about Apple’s? Share your thoughts in the comments!