Palm has hired Mike Bell, a 16-year Apple veteran, as its SVP of product development. But you'll never hear that from Palm. The hiring of an industry veteran for a top executive spot is something normally trumpeted as loudly as possible. But Palm is desperately trying to keep quiet the fact that it won over Bell shortly before Christmas. Why the silencing effort? Jon Rubinstein, Palm's chairman, was part of Steve Jobs's turnaround team before he left Apple in 2006. Since he joined Palm last year, the smartphone maker has been hiring a number of Apple engineers. There have been "screaming matches and threats of lawsuits," says a plugged-in source.

Why do some stories abruptly disappear from Digg? Duncan Riley of TechCrunch suspects "super users." But there's a much simpler explanation: Digg's shadowy moderators. Digg cofounder Kevin Rose has admitted that the social-news site, a supposedly democratic venue where users pick the headlines, employs moderators: "We have site moderators that ban spammers, remove illegal content, and keep an eye on things. Always have, always will." But what, exactly, does keeping an eye on things entail?

My boss, Nick Denton, may be banned from Facebook, for posting photos of Emily Brill, daughter of entrepreneur Steve Brill. Insiders at the social network tell me that they have considered similar sanctions against me, especially after I posted the story of Facebook PR chief Brandee Barker befriending her Microsoft counterpart, Adam Sohn, shortly before Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook. In solidarity, I'll now take a similar risk by posting this charming photo of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, taken while the two were goofing off during a BusinessWeek photo shoot.

Yesterday's ten minutes of Tom Cruise madness? Tip of the proverbial iceberg, SPs. The entire hour-long video, as the boss pointed out, has been passing between journos and Scientology critics for a while now. And someone sent us the whole director's cut. Attached, a couple clips from the ceremony honoring Tom Cruise's official Freedom Medal Of Valor (for Achievement in the Field of Excellence). Tom Cruise, as you'll see, destroyed the field of psychiatry itself, fought government oppression, and spread incomprehensible jargon across the entire world. Go ahead and cancel the Oscars, we'll happily watch this.

You have to watch this video. It shows Tom Cruise, with all the wide-eyed fervor that he brings to the promotion of a movie, making the argument for Scientology, the bizarre 20th-century religion. Making the argument is an understatement. The Hollywood actor, star of movies such as Mission Impossible, is a complete fanatic. "When you're a Scientologist, and you drive by an accident, you know you have to do something about it, because you know you're the only one who can really help... We are the way to happiness. We can bring peace and unite cultures." There's much much more. Let me put it this way: if Tom Cruise jumping on Oprah's couch was an 8 on the scale of scary, this is a 10.

Valleywag has learned that Amazon.com has invested $4 million in sale-a-day e-commerce site Woot. The deal gives Amazon right of first refusal to buy the company should Woot hit certain unnamed sales targets, want to go public, or sell to another company. For the most part, the companies operate independently. But there's more to Woot, and its ties to Amazon, than meets the eye.

The Wall Street Journal, in its guided tour of the newspaper's layout, gives special mention to the A-Hed. This is the front-page feature, once found in the fourth column, now at the base of the third; a home for stories about cooking tips for roadkill or the disappearing holes in Swiss cheese; and the most prized slot in the business newspaper, giving "free rein to our reporters' imagination." The Journal's writers had better save it for the weekend.

Are New York's established media companies entirely incapable of developing web properties? Barry Diller's IAC just fired the head of Ask.com after the search engine's obscure "algorithm" campaign failed to eat into Google's lead among web users. Now, word that Conde Nast is laying off staff on Flip.com, a social network for teen girls which was the magazine group's biggest greenfield web initiative. Flip.com attracts less than 20% of the audience it had last April. The new plan, we hear: let Flip scrapbooks be embedded in other more successful West Coast social networks such as Facebook and Myspace. This is what New York media is reduced to: a widget. (Anyone have the Flip.com layoff email? Forward it me!)

Want to know what the Googlephone fuss is about? WhatsOpen.com, the first app to be built for Googlephones, has just launched in beta. The site looks much like the screenshots leaked to Valleywag last month: It's a local search engine which mashes up Google Maps with a directory of store's operating hours. Want a late-night coffee, or beer at 3 a.m.? WhatsOpen tells you which stores to go to. Here's a screenshot of the search results.

By now, you've likely heard how Peter Thiel parlayed a $500,000 investment in Facebook to a stake now worth $750 million. There's been a crush of coverage on his $220 million Founders Fund, which may well change the way entrepreneurs get paid in the Valley. We know about his mansion (he rents it — clever!), his butler, his early-morning jogs. But what no one ever says out loud: Thiel is gay.

The guys behind startup-trashing site Uncov have been working on their own company for the last few months now. It's called Persai, and it's some sort of machine-learning recommendation thingy — I don't know, I tune out whenever they start talking about it, and only pay attention again once they start repeating 4chan catchphrases. Anyway, a beta tester (where's my invite, Kyle?) leaked us a screenshot of the product in action. See it below, and feel free to mock.

MySpace is settling into its new San Francisco office space on Second Street near South Park, from the looks of this photo sent by a helpful inside spy. The building was a former startup incubator owned by LookSmart. No computer setups, yet, but note the size of the coffee machine. This should keep coders awake long enough to fix the social network's screamingly bad user interface. More pictures of the office follow.

We hear that Larry Page's wedding to Lucy Southworth on Necker Island Sunday was a smaller affair than widely reported — only 170 people, not 600. Confirmed in attendance: Richard Branson, who officiated, and Bono, who read a poem he wrote for the couple and performed a song. Oh, and also San Francisco's hunky god-mayor, Gavin Newsom, shown here with Page and Google cofounder Brin. How do we know Newsom was there?

From a helpful tipster, the first-ever photo from the wedding ceremony of Larry Page and Lucy Southworth. The groom wore a white buttondown shirt, untucked; the bride, a cream strapless number, with her hair loose. Pics or it didn't happen, eh? After the jump, visual confirmation that Sir Richard Branson was the Google cofounder's best man.

Venture capital's ancien régime is on the verge of being overturned. We hear Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, may have cashed out — before an IPO, before a sale, and before his investors. In the company's recent financing round, insiders believe, he sold about $40 million worth of stock. A tiny portion of his $5 billion stake, but in cash rather than on paper, and "enough that he never has to think about money for the rest of his life," says a person made privy to details of the sale. On the Sand Hill Road of old, this is simply not how things are done.

We've heard rumors that there will be three presidents attending the Caribbean wedding of Google cofounder Larry Page and his bride-to-be, Lucy Southworth. The Times Online is reporting that Bill and Hillary Clinton are expected to attend, which leaves two presidents unaccounted for. The likeliest candidates: Dubya and his dad. Here's why.

Pictured, above, is the reception tent for this weekend's nuptials of recent Stanford Ph.D. Lucy Southworth and her beau, Larry Page, the Google cofounder worth about $20 billion. A curious charter captain in the British Virgin Islands decided to take the boat for a spin around the wedding site — the Richard Branson-owned Necker Island — and took these shots of the preparations. The tent above has apparently been outfitted with air conditioning and security cameras, more clearly pictured in the image below. The captain also noted that it looked like workers were adding sand to the beach and placing fake plastic palm trees along a sandbar to give it that authentic tropical look, I guess. What happened to Larry and Lucy's eco-friendly bash? More pictures after the jump.

Since I first noticed that Fake Bono had taken over Fake Steve Jobs's blog, I've been wondering who Fake Bono really is. We had a number of guesses: Dan Lyons was taking on a second alter ego; Bono himself was writing; Marc Bodnick, cofounder of Elevation Partners, where Bono is a partner, was taking a turn; and Bono-wannabe Valleywag contributor Paul Boutin. After carefully reviewing the Bono posts, we're ready to reveal the identity of Fake Bono.

Is Revolution Health showing signs of recovery? The health information site, launched by AOL founder Steve Case, seemed on its deathbed after laying off 60 earlier this fall. Now a tipster alerts us to two acquisitions Revolution Health will announce later this week. We're not sure if that's a sign of new life, or an acknowledgement that past startup buys have disappointed.

Our tale begins with a fresh-faced college grad who, taken in by its gloss of Jetsons futurism, say his career in the biometrics payments industry. Scan your thumbprint, pay your groceries! Who wouldn't fall in love? At the time, the biggest player in the industry was Pay By Touch, the company founded by cocaine addict John Rogers. But when our source took a closer look at the company, he reeled, seeing an ever-shifting executive team and a bad business structure. So our disillusioned young biometrician wrote a little post-college dissertation on the company. His white paper got around to investors, and this displeased Rogers. Here's the threatening missive Rogers composed in response: