Russia's Digital Sky Technologies might be the toast of Silicon Valley, but the investment firm gives the Russian founder of Chatroulette the creeps. Sometimes it takes a teenager to say the obvious, rude things adults can't bring themselves to utter.

Alisher Usmanov is nicknamed "the hard man of Russia," but he's good at seducing the softies in California's tech community: An investment firm he backs lead a $180 million investment in Zynga, the gaming company that trafficked in scammy ads.

Who says foreign investors are done handing money to risky Americans? Russia's Digital Sky Technologies just started cashing out employee shares in Facebook, a $100 million investment. The move was expected; the implications will take longer to settle in.

It seems Facebook's new investor is keen to downplay its ties with "the hard man of Russia," an oligarch one critic called a "gangster and racketeer." How inconvenient, then, that said oligarch is reportedly buying up more shares.

The Financial Times reports that "among the biggest backers" of Facebook's new funder is Alisher Usmanov. He might be playing sugar daddy to a freewheeling social network, but the Russian oligarch is also known as a "devourer of websites" that dared to mention certain allegations about his past.

• Rumor has it Richard Branson may be interested in buying Playboy. [ChiTrib]
• Two Boston Globe unions have agreed to concessions with the NYT Co. [E&P]
• Why did the Times pick Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to invest in the paper instead of David Geffen? It seems publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was "worried about Geffen's ambition to take over the company." [AllThingsD]
• Mayor Bloomberg plans to introduce legislation in Albany to extend the city's popular—but broke—film/TV tax credit program. [THR]
• Tom McGeveran has been named interim editor of the New York Observer. He'll take over for Peter Kaplan, whose last day will be this Friday. [NYO]