What's going on over at FriendFinder Networks, née Penthouse Media Group? Apparently the effort to migrate into an online publishing and social networking powerhouse is being hampered by developers dissatisfied with working conditions and an inability to hire new staff — even though supervisor Anthony Previte threatened he could replace the disgruntled employees at a whim, according to a tipster. An internal email obtained by Valleywag features Previte scolding the mutineers for disappearing from work early and being insubordinate. This news might put off the investors necessary to bankroll the company taking itself public — assuming the rumor that the big money has already demurred, delaying the planned $250 million IPO, isn't true.

It's not clear whether Brad Garlinghouse, the Yahoo executive who famously called for Yahoo to focus on doing fewer things well in his "Peanut Butter Memo," is out the door. AllThingsD says no, or not quite yet; TechCrunch says yes. Premature or not, Michael Arrington's epitaph to Garlinghouse's career at Yahoo is remarkable in its tone:

Google no longer advertises subsidized daycare as a benefit to its employees. So why is the company building luxuriously unaffordable child-care centers at the behest of Susan Wojcicki, the sister-in-law of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, and closing down Kinderplex, a more affordable center operated by an experienced Silicon Valley daycare provider, CCLC? If you can answer that one, you're probably clever enough at solving puzzles to qualify for a job at the Googleplex. According to internal memos obtained by Valleywag, Google executives promised in May that its new centers would not see a price hike of 75 percent. Instead, Google management hiked rates 68.34 percent — at the cost of reducing hours and increasing the ratio of children to teachers. Google is phasing in the hikes for currently enrolled children, and offering a scholarship program for the least well-off, writes Laszlo Bock, Google's top HR executive. What Bock never addresses: Why is Google spending shareholder money on a perk that it is now so ashamed of that it doesn't market it to its potential recruits as a reason to work at Google? The memos:

Despite all the reports to the contrary, Microsoft actually ended its bid to acquire Yahoo way back in April. At least, that's what Microsoft topper Kevin Johnson would have his underlings believe. "In a March 10th meeting in Palo Alto, we explained to Yahoo management the importance of reaching an agreement by the end of April," Johnson wrote in a memo.

CARLSBAD, CA — What's this on my table at the Four Seasons Aviara's Lobby Lounge? Why, it's a copy of the program for D6! How careless for someone to have left it out in a public space, where anyone might read it. And there's even an attendee list! I won't bore you with the name of everyone who's going, but here are some names that caught my eye:

File this under "Confirmation of scary news that you already suspected was true": a new survey says that corporations have become so paranoid about leaks (justifiably) that many are now engaged in "systematic snooping" in employees' electronic communications. More than 40% of large companies read employee emails, but that's not all; they're also looking at your instant messages and Facebook pages. Delete! Delete!

There are two ways to get sex for free from an escort. You could try your hand at dating her as a civilian, or you could start a lucrative escort review site and bribe her with good reviews in exchange for freebies. Some escorts call that last tactic rape. Dave of Phoenix, the online pseudonym of an escort client and advocate, maintains a personal mailing list of preferred ladies. In an email sent to that list and leaked to Valleywag, Dave shares the text of an anonymous Craigslist ad which sought witnesses to speak out against Dave Elms, the notorious owner of escort-ratings site TheEroticReview.com.

Martin Varsavsky, the founder of Wi-Fi startup Fon, has concocted another excuse for Web 2.0's jet set to rack up frequent-flier miles and buy carbon offsets: It's called Menorca TechTalk, held on Varsavsky's ranch on the Mediterranean island this weekend. The website is password-protected, but Valleywag got a list of who's going. It's a curious mix of professional conference attendees, like Rapleaf's Auren Hoffman, Loïc Le Meur of Seesmic, TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, and David Sifry of Technorati, mixed in with a few people who have day jobs. There are even Googlers on the list — and when have you known those lot to leave the protective bubble of Mountain View? Oddly, Jimmy Wales did not seem to make the cut, though his New York patroness, Louise Blouin MacBain, is listed. In the comments, sort the TechTalkers into your preferred categories.

Social news aggregator — that is to say, Digg clone — Reddit is working on a redesign. Online media consultant Brent Csutoras landed leaked screenshots. We've annotated them for your convenience.

Is Nick Denton going soft? Even his cutbacks are sentimental these days. In the old days, Denton, the publisher of Valleywag and 14 other Gawker Media blogs, would simply shutter blogs. These days, he worries first about finding them nice homes. Such is the velvet-glove treatment he's giving Gridskipper, Wonkette, and Idolator, his blogs about, respectively, travel, politics, and music. The three blogs amount to less than 3 percent of Gawker Media's traffic, he says. Fine, so why keep them around in any form? Silicon Alley Insider has the details on their new owners. More evidence of Denton's increasing namby-pambosity: Instead of threatening to fire leakers, he's encouraging us to post the internal memo announcing the move. Darling bossman, that's no fun. But also no reason to keep the memo from you, dear readers:

AdWeek's Brian Morrissey thinks Google executives bring up the free food way too often. What they never mention: How managers make the cooks — contract workers — feel like second-class citizens. Below, an email from Google HR to the Bon Appetit employees who make all that food. The memo, in the words of our tipster, was intended to "let them know that no matter what they think, they will never be as good as or privileged as their Googly overlords."

Internet mogul Barry Diller is locked in a battle with former cable baron John Malone for control over IAC, and he told his staff last night to expect the case to go to court this week. Writes a tipster:

Gnarls Barkley, the somewhat experimental hip hop duo whose ability to walk the line between "catchy" and "crazy" has made them beloved among millions more fans than Cee-Lo ever could have dreamed of when he was in the far superior group Goodie Mob, has a new album due out on April 8. But now the damn thing has leaked to the internet. That's what they get for having so many more fans who just play on the computer all day! If you're so inclined, a link to the download of "The Odd Couple," and the first video, after the jump.

Dalia Perez is a state legislator in Mexico, now. But she used to do a little bit of actin', and her striptease scene from the 2006 film Xalapeno Chiles recently got YouTubed. She "plays a table dancer named Ana having an affair with a powerful politician," reports the International Herald-Tribune. She's getting beat on in the Mexican press, but whatever. Go on with your bad self, girl! (Pole-dancing video follows.)

TED, an annual, star-studded group thumbsuck held in Monterey, Calif., bills itself as "Ideas Worth Spreading." Organizers don't think its attendee list is worth spreading. We were curious why, and got our hands on the complete list. Judge for yourself why they don't want you to see it:

(continued from "The complete list of TED attendees")

Is Yahoo general counsel Michael Callahan trying to tell us he's bored? Having tired of turning dissidents over to the Chinese government, the lawyer has reportedly turned his attention to other prey — the sources of leaks about Yahoo's newly launched Buzz news site, a poorly made Digg clone. He recently "sent out a note saying that the person who leaked 'Buzz' had been found and dealt with," commenter Snarkotron writes. Perhaps his energies would be better spent prosecuting Buzz's engineers. John Paczkowski of AllThingsD tells me that Buzz is failing in its most basic purpose: Accepting a link for discussion and voting. "I posted a story 90 minutes ago, and readers are telling me they can't buzz it up," he writes. Paczkowski's story is unflattering to Yahoo. I'd speculate that Yahoo is filtering out unwelcome news on Buzz, but that would imply far too much organization and competence.

When that alleged clip from Spike Jonze's Where The Wild Things Are hit the internets earlier this week, the reactions to the footage varied widely. Even though we loved it, a barrage of negative feedback almost immediately began taking root in the comment sections of many blogs who covered the leak ("a piece of crap," said a Movieweb reader; "looks like a car crash," said a Gawker commenter). The furor caused Jonze to make a statement defending his highly-anticipated project:

We think most of us are in agreement that Where the Wild Things Are—as far as sacred texts go, basically the Koran of childhood—was in safe hands with Spike Jonze, a filmmaker we fear may have at some point been beaten with a genius stick as hard as Kanye gets it with a shovel in his latest Jonze-helmed music video. (It bears noting that he co-wrote the screenplay with McSweeney's founder/ co-genius Dave Eggers, offering further promise that Things won't follow the same road as any number of Seussian big screen disasters.)

Late last night, we received an anonymous email explaining the details behind an ugly incident that recently went down between two Vice Presidents at Showtime, an incident that ended up with one of the two Veeps getting fired. This email was initially distributed to a number of Showtime staffers but quickly made its way to the outside world (Nikki Finke is proclaiming it as being "the talk of Hollywood"). The full tale involves an intimate birthday dinner, an expense account gone wrong, an employee in a position of power known as "Mr. Untouchable" and a whole Valley full of tears. While names have been redacted to protect the (potentially) innocent, that doesn't make the juice any less tasty. Read the sordid tale of the people we'll call Thing 1, Thing 2 and Thing 3 after the jump!