Google co-founder Brin and search products VP Marissa Mayer helped christen co-worker Orkut's tenth-floor penthouse on San Francisco's Mint Plaza this past weekend, as we reported yesterday. It turns out co-founder Larry Page may have been there too; his model/Ph.D wife Lucy Southworth certainly was. At the time, we couldn't obtain more than one picture of the event, in part because, according to two tipsters with knowledge of the party, social network founder Orkut told guests not to circulate pictures online. That no doubt had something to do with the "several billionaires" reportedly in attendance.

Inevitably, though, some shots have emerged from the dark corners of Facebook, the Google rival that seems to have something of a lock on the world's most interesting information, at least to gossips like us. (Thank you, tipster who emailed us most of these pics.)

It would appear Orkut wasted no time breaking in his "custom-built party loft," complete (we hear) with elevated dance floor, poles, disco balls, dance lights and an indoor waterfall. There were the male and female strippers, who we're told were professionals. There was a male nude that appears to be an ice sculpture (or maybe glass?). There was a shimmery metal see-through curtain thing, like you might see used as a room divider in a lounge. And there was a logo devoted to Orkut and husband Derek Holbrook.

It was an effort befitting Orkut, whose past fabulousness has included opening Prada, going to BFF Mayer's Sex And The City party, staging disco parties, and appearing in more forbidden pictures, sometimes with strippers. Why he wants to keep all this fun a secret is beyond us. Didn't he hear privacy is dead?

Saturday's party:

We're told these adult dancers are professional. And they're in a professional venue: The poles, stage, lights and disco ball are an integral part of Orkut's new penthouse party pad.

Orkut's husband Derek, on the pole. Oh my.

So it looks like either there was a second lady stripper, or a guest decided to join in the fun.

The guest on the left is Mayer's husband Zach Bogue, only recently taken off the market. In other words: He can look, but he can't touch. On the right, Orkut's brother.

The nude (ice?) sculpture, shot one, from Facebook.

The nude (ice?) sculpture, shot two, which we found yesterday on Twitter but weren't sure it was from this party.

Derek & Orkut. Awwwww. Now back to the strippers!

Ya, it's blurry. But you try taking a surreptitious stripper shot at a party you don't want to get thrown out of.

"Dancer for money, do what you want me to do..."

Metal curtain for the full "club" effect.

Hubby Derek with Larry Page's model/Ph.D wife Lucy Southworth, far right.

This guy is Rhett Butler. Like, literally.

The host, center, with two guests: record producer Jimmy Markee (left) and Yelp account executive Eli Zepeda (right) (Names?)

Orkut, in case you've forgotten, is by far the most interesting person to work for the Mountain View, California internet company, where technical skills are valued over all else, resulting in a (mostly) boring army of engineer droids. Orkut's the fun exception.

Sure, the Turkish programmer built Google's also-ran social network, Orkut, a.k.a. "The Facebook of Brazil." But more importantly, the San Francisco partyboy also hired strippers for his previous too-hot-for-the-Web birthday party; been gay-married by his Vogue-errific best friend Marissa Mayer; attended the opening of the local Prada; wore a fabulous sheening suit to the ballet; and is good at making everyone get dressed up and disco.

The Silicon Valley tech scene needs more of this sort of acting out, and the Valley scenesters would seem to agree: We hear Orkut's Saturday party was packed with what techies (inaccurately) call "A Listers," including billionaire Google founder Sergey Brin and very very rich person Mayer (who threw a party of her own the following day, of the Superbowl sort). Here's how one attendee put it:

According to public records of Orkut's holdings, that ten-story-high apartment building would be a posh renovated warehouse at 410 Jessie Street, on San Francisco's newly-remade Mint Plaza. That's directly across the street from the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper whose misfortunes some have blamed on none other than... Google.

But Orkut's guests didn't come to dance on graves. The disco-lover installed a raised dance floor, complete with poles and special lights, in his two-level penthouse, according to a source with knowledge of the place. There's also some sort of indoor waterfall, we hear. (Orkut declined to discuss his apartment or party on the phone and never sent a promised email reply.)

Pictures from the latest shindig are, alas, few and far between. Despite his direct financial interest in social networking and the free flow of information online, Orkut banned any network distribution of images from his party. we're told. Irony, that. Anyway, in the photo gallery we've mixed in pictures from an apparent pre-party in January as well as of a similar party at a different location last year. Do send us more pics if you have them. We're happy to disseminate the information Googlers refuse to spread themselves.

Apparently from Saturday's event, via friend Jen Liu's Facebook album "house warming & birthday party," uploaded 16 hours ago.

One of the dance poles going up, from a January picture of "orkut's party," again via Liu.

The dance floor again? Again from Liu's "orkut's party" album, January.

Liu and Orkut, ibid.

Orkut at a party in Jan. 2009. Via Facebook.

Orkut, center, with boyfriend Derek Holbrook, right, at a Jan. 2009 party.

Orkut at a Jan. 2009 party.

Quick trip to Brazil via private jet, anyone?

At Burning Man 2009.

What isn't there to enjoy about this?

Seeing as how Apple's commercial game is already far evolved over anything Google's got—this is a spoof of Google's "search stories" campaign—at the very least, they couldn't do too terribly by culling some inspiration, here. It perfectly captures any number of universal Google experiences: shadily searching out How-To information for things pre-established How-To information shouldn't necessarily exist for, the trial-and-error process of using Google and the various misspellings the rest of the world makes with you, the whimsical nature of search results Google will "guess" for you, and finally, the widespread use of Google to search patently innocuous information, which, essentially, is what the internet (and Google) is more or less for. It's witty, it's funny, it's topical, and most important: spot-on. Might as well embrace that shit.

Tesla registered with the SEC on Friday. Buried in the copious paperwork is the name of a very interesting "Series C" and "Series E" stockholder: Amphitheatre LLC. We first flagged this entity as a possible Google front when it invested in a zeppelin company started by Google advisor Esther Dyson. The same zeppelin company was later hired by 23AndMe, the Google-funded and -housed genetic testing firm co-founded by the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Ampitheatre LLC may well have been acquired by Google along with the company INV Tax Group when Google bought its eight-building headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway and 1200-1500 Crittenden Lane in Mountain View. Ampitheatre LLC and INV Tax Group, then believed affiliated with Goldman Sachs, had been the shell companies that held the buildings.

It's hard to imagine why a real estate holding vehicle is now investing in zeppelins and electric cars if it's not controlled by Google. California records are little help; they show the LLC still registered to "INV Tax Group, 180 Maiden Lane, 40th floor," an address once linked to Goldman Sachs in a building now used by a wide array of companies.

Google's a logical investor, anyway, since its founders are already Tesla customers (see picture of Brin in his Tesla, left, by Zach Graves) and investors. Co-founder Larry Page even reportedly "jet pools" with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and Google has an "electric car" section reserved in its parking lot (see picture at top by Tristan Nitot). It wouldn't be the first time Google co-invested with its founders; it followed Brin into his wife's 23AndMe.

Whether the Google honchos had their financial judgment clouded by the fact that they personally made it to the front of Tesla's fiercely competitive waiting list is something for Google shareholders to decide.

In so doing, they might consider another nugget buried in Tesla's S-1: The company has not yet stabilized its notoriously volatile executive ranks. Among the recent departures is general counsel Jonathan Sobel, formerly of Yahoo. Sobel started in September; he was gone by December. One tipster claims friction with Musk was to blame. The bigger question is whether Musk can forge more stable relationships with his co-workers going forward. Only time will tell. We'll be watching, and we bet Google will be, too.

(Top pic: A Tesla parked at Google headquarters, by Tristan Nitot. Second pic: Sergey Brin driving in his Tesla, by Zach Graves.)

Capping months of mounting tension between former allies Google and Apple over competing phones, Jobs called Google's "Don't Be Evil" mantra either "bullshit" or "crap" over the weekend. Now the Googler Diaspora is letting him have it in this FriendFeed thread. "I don't know where people get the idea that competition is evil," writes Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler who invented "Don't Be Evil," along with Gmail and FriendFeed. One current Googler says he plans to tack up Jobs' "very motivational" quote beside his monitor; another says Jobs myopically "sees all competition as zero-sum." And former Googler Kevin Fox says Apple is worse, "holding Google's iPhone apps in limbo because Apple is afraid they might succeed." Your turn, Apple guys.

(Pic Jobs, center, with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, left, and co-founder Sergey Brin, right, at Macworld, Jan. 2008. Getty Images.)

What I want to know is: Which Apple employee hasn't drank enough Kool-Aid/has the balls to stand up in a room with Jobs, and grill him about Google and Flash? Either way, they got the answers. But how do they stand up on the REALTALK-o-Meter? Graded on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being Sign Language, 10 being REAL TALK.

On Google: We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won't let them, he says. Someone else asks something on a different topic, but there's no getting Jobs off this rant. I want to go back to that other question first and say one more thing, he says. This don't be evil mantra: "It's bullshit." Audience roars.

Emphasis mine, though Wired later clears up that Jobs may have said "crap," instead of "bullshit."

REAL TALK-o-Meter: 6 if he said "crap," 7 if he said "bullshit," somewhere in Whitney "Hell to the No" Houston territory. Because any companies in the business of technology telling people they're out to make the World a Better Place are basically full of it, which obviously includes Apple. In fact, aren't most passive-defensive declarative statements bullshit? When someone says "I can't stand stupid people," it's like, why would you say that? Are you insecure about being stupid? How is everyone else stupid? Etc.

About Adobe: They are lazy, Jobs says. They have all this potential to do interesting things but they just refuse to do it. They don't do anything with the approaches that Apple is taking, like Carbon. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy, he says. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash, he says. The world is moving to HTML5.

REAL TALK-o-Meter: A low 3. Yes, he was talking about the Decision Makers of Adobe, but writing an entire company off as "lazy" to your own employees is pretty disingenuous. Is Adobe really not up to speed because their guys are sitting around on beanbag chairs all day, smoking weed and playing Dolphin Olympics on their laptops? No. And is the reason the iPad and iPhone don't support Flash because it's buggy? Might have been taken into consideration, but to speak to it as the primary reason Apple's are crashing at least sounds misleading. So many of the websites you visit every day utilize flash. Why can't Apple's products—among other things—crash less, even if Flash is buggy? Then again, it's Jobs' decision to use Flash or not, REAL TALK. As for HTML5, if by "the world" Jobs means "Apple and whoever follows," he's correct. Which he probably does mean, because he's a computer nerd who's trying to run the universe.

Other notable notes that Wired picked up in the MacRumors forum:

- Apple will deliver aggressive updates to iPhone that Android/Google won't be able to keep up with
- iPad is up there with the iPhone and Mac as the most important products Jobs has been a part of
- Regarding the Lala acquisition, Apple was interested in bringing those people into the iTunes team
- Next iPhone coming is an A+ update
- New Macs for 2010 are going to take Apple to the next level
- Blu-Ray software is a mess, and Apple will wait until sales really start to take off before implementing it.

So, in this grading of the REAL TALK-O-Meter, Steve Jobs gets a 4.25 average, for which he gets nothing. At 8, we'll send him a Golden Shirt Microphone. Any employees who dare question Jobs and still have their testicles fully intact get figureative salutes from people all over who are too afraid to stand up to their power-crazy nerd bosses, and any tipsters who have anything else to say about how REAL the REAL TALK of Steve Jobs is (or the employees who questioned him, for that matter) gets an email address to say it to.

Oh, and as a reminder: this is what REAL TALK looks like.

Google said the stock sale was merely part of Larry Page and Sergey Brin's "long-term strategies for individual asset diversification and liquidity." The duo will still have a hard-to-beat 48 percent of the company between them. But the stock sale is highly symbolic, and we can't help but wonder if all of Google's political issues — privacy, China, Google Books, Google Voice, etc. etc. — have the former computer science grad students feeling restless. After all, as author Ken Auletta tells Beet.tv in the clip excerpted above, even Brin himself concedes that human-to-human interactions aren't his forte.

They say that China "bans using the Internet to subvert state power and wreck national unity, to incite ethnic hatred and division, to promote cults and to distribute content that is pornographic, salacious, violent or terrorist."

And add that "China has an ample legal basis for punishing such harmful content, and there is no room for doubting this. This is completely different from so-called restriction of Internet freedom."

Well that's that solved then.

A foreign ministry spokesperson said critics should stop making "groundless accusations." He added that "the US has criticised China's policies to administer the internet, and insinuated that China restricts internet freedom," according to the BBC. "This runs contrary to the facts and is harmful to China-US relations."

State run media responded even less diplomatically. The Global Times said "the US campaign for uncensored and free flow of information on an unrestricted internet is a disguised attempt to impose its values on other cultures in the name of democracy."

It's lucky no-one brought up Tibet.

Yes, Google's reversal on China is belated and self serving, precipitated by a deepening hacker war with the country. But it's also a rare and potentially influential move, a praiseworthy break with its corporate past.

It also appears to have momentum; The Hill reports that Google is now actively helping Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, craft a bill that goes after corporations he dubbed "chief violators" of human rights in China, including Google, banning them from storing personally identifiable information about users within oppressive regimes. Google opposed the bill in 2006 and now supports it.

We'll assign ultimate credit to Brin, who shares power with co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt. Brin, after all, was the one who pushed to stop censoring Google's Chinese search engine, according to the Wall Street Journal, arguing that Chinese hack attacks against human rights activists meant it was time to stand up to the regime:

[CEO Eric] Schmidt made the argument he long has, according to these people, namely that it is moral to do business in China in an effort to try to open up the regime.



Mr. Brin strenuously argued the other side, namely that the company had done enough trying and that it could no longer justify censoring its search results.

Brin's thinking on repressive governments is shaped by direct experience: His family emigrated from the Soviet Union after battling anti-semitism there, according to John Batelle's The Search.

He's also served as a sort of guardian of the company's "Don't be Evil" motto, according to both the Journal and Batelle.

Page has reportedly supported that ethos, too, but of the two co-founders Brin is the more affable. The sociable Stanford PhD candidate met co-founder Page, in fact, while leading a tour of San Francisco hotspots for younger, incoming students. Meanwhile Page stars in more than his fair share of anecdotes that paint him as humorless or vain, whether it's an insider complaining about a lengthy tantrum or a visiting executive put off by his passive-aggressive arrogance. (Disclosure: Among the stories we've heard about Page was one in which he supposedly said he'd like to buy and shutter Valleywag after our coverage of his wedding to model Lucy Southworth. So we're hardly unbiased observers.)

That's an unfair judgement against Page, perhaps, but it doesn't change the fact that there's plenty to admire about Brin — now more than ever.

Microsoft director of security Mike Reavey said the following in a blog post, according to the BBC:

Based upon our investigations, we have determined that Internet Explorer was one of the vectors used in targeted and sophisticated attacks against Google and possibly other corporate networks.

In short: if you're going to fight oppression in China, use a Mac.

You could hear echoes of those insider whispers in a great post on the Daily Beast this morning, "The Great Google Coverup?" In it, tech author Douglas Rushkoff posits that Google's grandstanding on human rights is intended to distract users from thinking through the implications of Google's China-related security breach.

We've heard a similar thesis from Valley sources, one even claiming inside knowledge of the company's thinking, starting last night. The gossip can be hard to sort through: Is it true hackers got their initial foothold into Google through the Google Apps suite specifically? How much data was compromised? Would Google really sacrifice its also-ran China search engine just to protect the reportedly meager revenue from the Apps division?

But it's worth noting that Google has already said enough publicly to ring alarm bells for current and prospective cloud computing customers alike. It's telling that the president of the Google Enterprise division, whose business-targeted products include the Google Apps suite, felt the need to weigh in on the China situation in a blog post titled, "Keeping your data safe" (emphasis added):

While some intellectual property on our corporate network was compromised, we believe our customer cloud-based data remains secure....This attack may understandably raise some questions... Google is introducing additional security measures to help ensure the safety of your data... This was not an assault on cloud computing.

Ah yes, "this was not an assault on cloud computing." Pay no attention to the Chinese hackers behind the curtain. These are not the droids you're looking for... etc. The last thing Google wants is for corporate executives and IT decisionmakers to start wondering if it can competently secure its systems. Because if Google can't, that will make it awfully hard to get customers to trust the company with not only their email but with the sensitive spreadsheets and documents Google is trying to get them to host on Google Apps.

Heck, Google is at the moment trying to sell its cloud services to the mother of all corporate customers, the federal government. The feds launched a cloud computing initiative just this past fall, and already have significant ties to Google through NASA Ames. How do you think they'll feel about this security breach?

All of this begs the sort of questions everyone should have been asking since Google's initial China post: How much data was compromised? And how? How close did they come to stealing more?

The hackers probably were as "highly sophisticated" as Google claims; they reportedly compromised systems at Yahoo and perhaps Adobe, which helps explain why Yahoo has thrown its support behind Google's hard stance on China.

As for what they got, Google has been sketchy on the details. Here are the scant facts contained in VP David Drummond's original post on China:

• "A highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google..."
  
• "Two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves..."
  
• "The accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users... appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers."

That's not a lot for big corporate customers to go on. Google's director of enterprise security may be a TV magician, but the China incident raises the sort of questions even his impressive powers of deception can't make disappear.

(Image: Cloud City simulation by futursimple on Flickr)

We've heard through the Silicon Valley grapevine that 23AndMe issued all employees a free Nexus One. It's not clear whether Google outright gifted the phones to the genetic testing startup, or sold them in bulk to 23AndMe for use as an employee fringe benefit.

But Google is so tightly intertwined with 23AndMe that it doesn't really matter. 23AndMe was co-founded by Anne Wojcicki, wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin; it has taken repeated investments from Google; it leases office space from Google; and it uses zeppelins from a company Google appears to be heavily tied to.

So count this as the latest example of how Google money and favors circulate to a large diaspora of company friends and back again to Google, through wives, in-laws, ex-employees, consultants, ex-consultants, blimp companies, NASA — the whole thing can get positively byzantine.

Of course, this isn't nearly as bad as that time Brin apparently funneled a tax-free investment to his wife's 23AndMe via Michael J. Fox's charity, but it's another piece of evidence in the pile to show how Google and its buddies could be handling these relationships more carefully, if only to avoid the appearance of so many conflicts of interest.

At the very least, 23AndMe should publish a blog post reassuring the world it has not been enlisted to help upgrade the next Nexus model with superior, genetically-derived Replicant technology. After all, the Nexus 1 was followed by at least six more models. And we know 23AndMe could use the cash.

Google says it hasn't actually done anything yet. A spokesperson told the Daily Telegraph's Shanghai correspondent the company has not changed its filtering since announcing its forthcoming changes. That, presumably, is why you can still see a disclaimer about censored search results in black at the bottom left of both screenshots above.

And that's presumably why a search for "tiananmen" still looks like this on Google.cn...

...and like this on Google.com (with the language set to Chinese):

It's always nice to imagine a censorship free Google.cn, of course. It might even happen, some day. But don't hold your breath.

For decades now, the corporate and political consensus in the U.S. has been that if America did more business with China, freedom would somehow follow. Despite early evidence to the contrary, this formulation gained further traction with the spread of the internet, one of the most powerful forces against the authoritarian state; big tech companies eagerly embraced the idea that, by working with a repressive regime, they could ultimately help bring freedom to hundreds of millions of people.

After years of following this same reasoning, censoring search results to secure a foothold in China, Google has finally come along and acknowledged how little China has changed, exposing in a corporate blog post the extensive threat posed by nationalistic Chinese hackers and saying it will leave the country if it can't publish uncensored search results.

Bravo. Google just had its best-ever quarter in China and relies on China-based engineers for global programming tasks, so this would be no small sacrifice.

But it needn't to cast aside 1990s-brand techno-optimism entirely. Google could embrace its position as the leading corporate voice that's critical of China:

• Sponsor a 20% time employee project to allow Chinese internet users to route around the Great Firewall with greater reliability than ever before.
  
• Create a Google-sponsored force of gray-hat hackers to oppose the efforts of Chinese hackers, primarily through defensive means. They would work to defend not only Google users but others, as well.
  
• Publicly detail all threats to non-Chinese computer users from China's hackers, after the operators of the targeted systems have had ample warning time. After all, Google discovered while investigating Chinese attacks on its own users that "at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses—including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors—have been similarly targeted."
  
• Work with similarly-minded tech companies (if any) to craft a concrete national policy proposal to address the issues the recent attacks have uncovered. Google and DC-bred CEO Eric Schmidt have already become a growing force in Washington.

That's just off the top of our heads. The specifics of Google's actions are less important than that the company takes some additional steps. There's no better way for Google to prove that is change of heart on China is rooted in sincere moral convictions rather than cynical business and security calculations.

(Pic: Schmidt, from his Twitter account and likely taken during his November trip to Iraq.)

Google vice president David Drummond said the internet giant may need to pull out of China entirely, depending on whether the government agrees to allow the company to operate Google.cn without censoring the results.

But censorship doesn't appear to have prompted Google's aggressive posture; instead the company was rattled by "highly sophisticated hackers" going after GMail accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists around the world. Breaking into accounts through malware on activists computers and direct attacks on the Google, they met with some success. Clearly implied in Google's post is that these hackers are working in some capacity for the Chinese government:

We have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses—including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors—have been similarly targeted. We are currently in the process of notifying those companies, and we are also working with the relevant U.S. authorities...



We have taken the unusual step of sharing information about these attacks with a broad audience not just because of the security and human rights implications of what we have unearthed, but also because this information goes to the heart of a much bigger global debate about freedom of speech...



These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered—combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web—have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.

The timing of Google's aversion to censorship is telling. As admitted in Drummond's post, Google has bowed to the censorious demands of the Chinese regime for years, reasoning (conveniently) that the Chinese people were better off with Google than without it; Google even allowed its own censors to be profiled in the New York Times.

Only now, amid executive turnover at Google China and a continued failure to best their state-sponsored competitor there, and after Chinese hackers have endangered the company's interests globally, does Google get firm on the issue of human rights. It's a clever way to dress up a security breach — and an embarrassing attempt to partner with China's authoritarian leaders — as an act of nobility and courage.

Google does at least get credit for dealing with reality once it was slapping the company in the face. That's hardly common in corporate America, and even in Silicon Valley.

(Pic: Google CEO Eric Schmidt unveils a branding campaign at Google China, 2006. Getty Images.)