We got a tip that the San Jose location of Spoons, a favored happy-hour spot across the street from eBay's headquarters, was getting purchased by Hooters. An eBayer attending CES acknowledged this last night, but wouldn't confirm the other half of the tip: that eBay CEO Meg Whitman had gone to the city council, asking them to stop the sale. She must not like hot wings. Fortunately for eBay's owl-eyed employees, the changeover seems to be going on despite any of Whitman's efforts. (Photo by PunkJr)

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark discusses 12-year-old Craigslist's past and future in an interview. He never specifically addresses how he got millions of dollars from eBay in a side deal when it acquired a stake in his company. He does have this to say on how he runs Craigslist: "There's nothing noble or altruistic or pious about this; it just feels right." [Computerworld]

In a $3 million lawsuit against eBay, Tiffany has called the online auction house a "rat's nest" of counterfeit goods. Maybe the blue-boxed retailer is grumpy because Tiffany had to send eBay 135,000 takedown notices in 2006. As Eric Goldman points out on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog, that's 370 notices per day, 15 an hour, or 1 every 4 minutes. The suit itself, by the way, basically comes down to who should pay for investigating counterfeiting claims; eBay says Tiffany could fix the problem by hiring one more paralegal.

Facebook is looking for platform developers to test a payments system, an administrator announced on the Facebook Developers forum. Details are scant, but it's more likely than not built on the micropayments software Facebook developed for its virtual gifts. (Which, by the way, is a brilliant Trojan horse strategy: Charge people a token amount for something that costs you nothing, and get their credit-card numbers while you're at it.) The good news for the rest of us is that the new payment system might mean we'll see some Facebook apps that are meant to do something besides show us ads while we goof off.

Like thousands of people around the world right now, Mark Jackson is peeved at eBay about some purchase gone sour. A Nintendo DS Lite, to be precise. Jackson was so peeved that he sent an email to several U.K. press outlets, copying eBay and demanding a response. This is only notable because Jackson is a high-ranking executive at Hill and Knowlton. And eBay does business with Hill and Knowlton all around the world — but substantially cut its budget in the last month. Here's Jackson's screed — and more about its curious timing.

Skype will fire 30 employees in London and Estonia, Om Malik reports. Skype, a subsidiary of eBay, has not yet confirmed the news. The 30 headed for the door will join Skype cofounder Niklas Zennstrom, who in October resigned as Skype CEO as eBay took a $1.4 billion asset-impairment charge on the company it purchased for $2.5 billion in 2005.

IAC's Ticketmaster division is trying to close a multiyear deal to be the official ticket scalper of the National Football League. TicketMaster competitor and eBay subsidiary StubHub is the other potential bidder for resale rights. Earlier this year, Stubhub made a deal to resell Major League Baseball tickets, a significant blow to Ticketmaster. Unfortunately for Ticketmaster, while the MLB deal gave StubHub resale rights for all 30 teams at once, because of the way the NFL is structured, the league has negotiating rights for only about half the league.

Some time ago, this very website told you to read Achewood, the funniest thing on the internet. And many of you did! Little did we know it would end in tragedy, played out, as it so often is, on an electronic auction website.

Valleywag's favorite dancer, Mark Cuban, is sashaying to enter the crowded market of Facebook applications with Radical Buy. Radical Buy is not radically different from other venues for selling goods, like eBay or Facebook's own Marketplace. Cuban's approach is distinguished in one significant way: The application introduces commissions to those who display other people's listings and help close sales. By providing even nonsellers with a chance to make money, Radical Buy hopes to get uptake beyond a small audience of Cuban followers.

Earlier this year PayPal introduced a security fob that generates a six-digit code every 30 seconds, meant as an additional layer of protection against online identity thieves. However, one user discovered a bug that makes the key useless in certain situations. By entering his valid PayPal login and password, answering a security question and entering ANY six-digit number, he can make a purchase. eBay and PayPal have been unable to reproduce the flaw, but Romero stands by his statement, claiming the key doesn't work as advertised. "For someone who's paid money for a Security Key and is thinking their wife or brother can't get into their account because they don't have the key fob ... they're not getting the security that they assume they have."

Since we first covered an eBay auction for a Facebook application on September 27 when Michael Zhang auctioned off LogBook for $2,550, the going price for useless applications has boomed nearly 280 percent, to judge by a similar sale yesterday. Then again, the I Am Hungry application sold for an even bubblier $20,100 in October. No wonder Facebook apologists more juiced?

Joerg Ziercke, president of Germany's Federal Police Office, told reporters that Skype "creates grave difficulties for us" because of its strong encryption. A traditional land-line phone can be tapped very easily, as can a cell phone — but voice-over-IP calls are routed over countless paths across the Internet, making them difficult to intercept. Ziercke said they were not asking eBay to leave "back doors open" to Skype for law-enforcement authorities. Of course, it's likely the National Security Agency has already done that and passes along any significant intercepted calls to U.S. allies. The other theory? That this is merely a headfake to criminals. If the Polizei does have Skype wiretapping abilities, they'll want to encourage evildoers to speak freely. That's it: I'm switching my secret communications back to smoke signals.

Even more worrisome than eBay's losing $900 million on Skype to Wall Street is the lack of money the auction runner has put into its own site. Financial analysts worry about the site's outdated design and feature set. Enter Best of eBay, a new site with weird little monster icons, Digg-like voting features, and a name ripped straight from Craigslist, the classifieds site in which eBay owns a minority stake. Best of eBay is in beta, which these days just means "don't blame us if it's broken."

A former PayPal executive recently pointed out that PayPal, as a division of eBay, has swelled to 7,000 employees — vastly more than it ever had as an independent concern. "What do those people do?" he asked. The growth in headcount had not led to a concomitant increase in inventiveness. Take, for example, the news, breathlessly reported by TechCrunch, that PayPal would roll out a "virtual credit card" for shopping even at stores that don't take PayPal. This would be more impressive had PayPal not rolled out the same product six years ago.

According to London's Web entrepreneurs, Google has been flirting with a bid for Skype, eBay's overpriced VOIP startup. Guardian blogger Jemima Kiss is just the latest to offer eBay CEO Meg Whitman advice in the guise of rumor after a $900 million writedown: Last month Portfolio's Felix Salmon recommended it sell to News Corp. Compared to its other pushes into the telecom business, like the Android cell-phone operating system and a hot pursuit of wireless spectrum, buying Skype may prove downright cheap. Skype has been running ragged ever since August's major outage. Perhaps even Google isn't above some bargain-hunting.

Here's the real takeaway from Fortune's long-expected profile of the PayPal mafia: "Peter Thiel has a butler." The former PayPal CEO is living large in Pacific Heights. But he's hardly idle. With PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, masterminding a wide array of startups founded by some of his star hires at the payments company he sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. He's now on the board of Facebook, with a stake worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and stakes in Yelp, LinkedIn, Slide, and others besides. He may not quite be the capo di tutti capi imagined by Fortune's photo editors — who cleverly staged a Godfather-inspired shoot, above — but he's created a gang that can run free from the rules of the traditional VC game. Sand Hill Road hates him for it. I say, more power to him — and the rest of his mafiosi. (Photo of Thiel and Levchin by Robyn Twomey/Fortune; Godfather still from IMDB)

Turns out today's bomb scare which caused the evacuation of 200 people from an eBay campus was in response to a suspicious, but harmless, device sent to eBay's mailroom. eBay spokeswoman Shannon Stubo sent in this update, after the jump:

eBay's campus in Campbell, near San Jose, has reportedly been evacuated due to a suspicious package. No word if this is related to last year's still unsolved PayPal bombing. Have any more details? Please let us know.

"The auction is for a Dell Latitude D600. 60GB HD, 1 GB memory, Dual Band Wi-Fi, Very light scratches on the top, Screen is scratch free and shows up crystal clear. She took good care of the laptop. It has all the newest updates, and comes with office, Roxio and other programs. Just an all around good laptop to have. I bought this as a gift for my ex. What is included in winning this auction is not only the laptop, but also everything else she left. Right now it is the laptop, the bag some cables, the power supply, some personal items, sunglasses, clothes and a book 'the story of O.' I will be cleaning my place this weekend so the bounty will grow." [eBay]

Proving you people are as sick as we thought, there's news that scammers are already exploiting southern California's wildfires for profit. Security firm Websense spotted an eBay auction titled "Children Lost." Fortunately, the intricacies of English grammar once again foiled the scam artists' attempt at ill-gotten gains. The fake eBay auction asked shoppers to "put the item you want to buy aside and take in consideration of helping."