The Daily Crunch 09/23/16

Twitter on sale, Yahoo's huge yikes moment and Facebook's troubled Thursday. Everything's a mess in The Daily Crunch for September 23, 2016. At least there's good news below for aspiring cyborgs.

1. Who ISN'T looking to buy Twitter?

Twitter's said to be close to fielding bids for acquisition of the company, and the list of potential acquirers sounds like a laundry list of tech companies, with the weirdest in the mix probably being Salesforce, and the ever-acquisitive Verizon making an appearance. Google and Microsoft are also apparently in the running, which leaves only really Facebook and Apple as odd ducks not interested in buying the social networking company.

Twitter's stock is surging on the rumors, which means who knows where they came from. Here's hoping someone buys them soon so the speculation ends. Meanwhile, a number of fairly high-level people are leaving the flock.

2. Yahoo's 500 million user breach is bonkers

Yahoo now owns the dubious title of the largest account info leak in history, thanks to a breach resulting in the loss of 500,000,000 user accounts, including names, emails, birthdays phone numbers and passwords (most hashed) and security question answers. It actually happened in 2014, but we're not the only ones just finding out about this – potential acquirer (and TC parent co.) Verizon also just learned about this a couple of days ago. It's insanely bad news, and needless to say, if you have a Yahoo account, better get to changing your credentials (security questions included) pretty much everywhere.

3. VR's modern-day savior is a troll sponsor

A lot of VR journalists I know are taking this one hard – turns out Palmer Luckey, the 24-year old founder of Oculus (which sold to Facebook) has been quietly funding a pro-Trump political organization specifically designed to create memes that make rival Hillary Clinton look bad. Sure, it's a free country and you can do what you want mostly (which is probably why Luckey actually personally owned up to this to begin with) but this is pretty vile by almost any standards – it's not like he just donated to the campaign, it's basically funding the worst kind of trollery. Rough.

4. Facebook just screwed with publishers and advertisers for two years

And then on the VERY SAME DAY, we found out that Facebook has been inflating a metric regarding how much time people spend watching videos on the site on average by not counting any videos viewed for less than 3 seconds towards said average. This could skew average viewing times by as much as 60 to 80 percent – and not in the good direction. That's a bombshell for media buyers, advertisers and publishers alike and one that could very well change business models (or even have impacted the decision to create some businesses in the first place). You goofed, FB.

5. Samsung says whoooaa-ohhh, they're halfway there!

Samsung must enjoy that the heat is generally located elsewhere in terms of tech screw-ups as it soldiers on through its Galaxy Note 7 recall. The company also has something to celebrate, at least for now – it's about half done in terms of getting affected Note 7s back in the US, and has also exchanged the majority of those for new Note 7s without the exploding battery defect.

6. Cyborg future progress update

How close are we to becoming full cyborg? A tad closer, thanks to new research simulations by MIT and Beijing's Tsinghua university that show how water could help pave the way for graphene implants that might help with targeted drug delivery for things like cancer treatments. Or hopefully also making us unstoppable.

7. Airbnb confirms $555M raise

Airbnb is raising a huge sum of cash, and a new $555 million SEC filing is only part of that. It's still looking to close a total of $850 million and can amend this filing if it gets the rest. Helping people rent their houses is thirsty work.