Salesforce, Other Suitors Reportedly Considering Twitter Buyout

Today’s topics include the rumors that Salesforce.com may be preparing to acquire Twitter, the release of the public iOS 10.1 Beta test version, BlackBerry’s heavy discounts on the Priv and Passport smartphones and the latest distributed denial-of-service attacks are rapidly trending toward volumes of 1 terabit per second.

Salesforce.com and Twitter—two companies that have banked hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital over the years but have yet to show profits—are “exploring” a multibillion-dollar merger in which Salesforce will become the new owner of the Twitter’s social network, The Wall Street Journal reported Sept. 23.

Neither company commented officially on the story. Later in the day Sept. 23, reports surfaced that the Disney Company and Google were also interested in talking to Twitter, but nothing substantive came of their overtures.

Twitter famously has been losing tens of millions of dollars per year for nearly the past decade. Salesforce also has lost millions interspersed with some profitable quarters, but since both internet companies generate billions in revenue and are considered in “growth mode,” investors continue to support them.

Apple has released the public beta version 10.1 of its iOS 10 mobile operating system, just nine days after the company delivered the production version of the latest iOS 10 mobile operating system to users on Sept. 13.

The public beta of iOS 10.1 allows registered users to download and test out the code, although Apple recommends that beta versions only be loaded onto spare devices and not installed on mobile devices in regular use.

The beta program allows users to test-drive new releases as they are built and to provide feedback and other insights. The iOS 10.1 public beta was posted by Apple on Sept. 22.

BlackBerry has announced a $250 discount on the regular prices of its Passport smartphones and $224 off its Priv handsets through Oct. 19 in a special sale being held on its BlackBerry.com website.

The sale brings the price of a black Passport phone to $249, down from the regular $499 price, while the Passport Silver Edition handset is $299, compared with its regular $549 price.

The Priv smartphone is on sale for $425 in black, down from its regular $649 price. BlackBerry announced the special prices in emails to customers and on the company’s website. The special pricing is available while supplies last, according to the company.

This past week, the largest-ever internet distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were reported, targeting popular security blogger Brian Krebs and internet service provider OVH in Europe.

On Sept. 20, Krebs tweeted that his site was hit with a DDoS attack of 665G bps. A day later, on Sept. 21, Octave Klaba, founder of OVH tweeted that his network was affected on Sept. 20 by simultaneous DDoS attacks approaching 1T bps.

The peak attacks came in at 191G bps and 799G bps. Krebs’ blog was being protected by content delivery network and DDoS defense provider Akamai, which had previously reported that the top DDoS it had seen in the second quarter of 2016 was 363G bps.