• Yahoo picks the new boss: Scott Thompson, the president of eBay’s PayPal division, has been picked by Yahoo as its new CEO, replacing CFO Tim Morse who filled that role in an interim capacity. This marks the fourth CEO Yahoo has turned to in under five years; the company, once a giant in the world of search engines, has understandably suffered with the seemingly unstoppable ascendancy of Google over the past decade. Thompson faces a tall task — he’s being looked to, as chairman Roy Bostock said, “reignite innovation and drive growth” — this for a company that’s had a ton of trouble with both. source

• $2,500 violin destroyed, at PayPal’s behest source

• » Bad policy, lazy practice? An eBay seller named Erica recently complained, in a letter to Regretsy, that her attempted sale of an antique violin ended with the violin smashed to pieces, apparently at the direct instruction of PayPal. The buyer had disputed the violin’s label, which Erica claims is common and matters little in the world of violins, and that it was “examined and authenticated” before being sold. That aside, PayPal declared the violin “counterfeit” and instructed the buyer to destroy it to receive his money back, which the buyer did. Meaning Erica came away with nothing: “…my main goal in writing to you is to prevent PayPal from ordering the destruction of violins and other antiquities that they know nothing about. It is beyond me why PayPal simply didn’t have the violin returned to me.”

• It does look like some of these guys (hackers) were just fools. The PayPal attack in particular. It looks like these bozos must have just said ‘Cool, an attack on PayPal. You can use my machine.’ I think it makes it a lot less likely that that people will join the next digital lynch mob.
• Former Homeland Security official Stewart Baker • Discussing the nature of the 14 people arrested yesterday in connection with a wide-scale attack on PayPal and other services late last year — a form of retribution, reportedly coordinated by Anonymous for PayPal taking away Wikileaks’ main source of funding. A couple other folks were arrested, too, in a series of raids that represent the largest law-enforcement response to the spate of large-scale hackings that have cropped up since late last year. But if Baker is right, they may not have gotten anyone of note — but a bunch of dudes who fed into the mob mentality. source

• what Three of the nation’s largest consumer banks — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo — have created a system for simple money transfers via phone or e-mail.
• why The new service, clearXchange, gets around a banking system that takes a really long time, requires a routing number, and has to go though the Federal Reserve’s tubes.
• threat This model threatens PayPal, the  solution du jour for this problem — which will likely someday make more money than its corporate parent, eBay. Unless this new thing takes off. source

• what Bank of America has decided to follow in the footsteps of such companies as Amazon and Paypal and will remove Wikileaks’ access to their banking systems.
• why Beyond all the obvious-if-you-watch-the-news stuff, we think the rumor that Wikileaks has stuff to nail Bank of America to the wall has something to do with it. source

• We have an acceptable use policy and their job is make sure that our customers are protected, making sure that we comply with regulations around the world and making sure that we protect our brand.
• PayPal’s VP of Platform Osama Bedier • Explaining why his company chose to block Wikileaks. Simply put, they read the State Department’s letter to Wikileaks saying what they were doing was illegal, they decided to block the site on those grounds. Bedier also noted that he isn’t fazed by threats of an Anonymous DDoS attack: “One of the signs that you’re a successful payments company is that hackers start to target you,” he saild. “This case isn’t anything different.” This topic was unpopular with the European conference he was talking to, BTW. It’s also important to note that a letter from the State Department is not a legal decision. source

• yeah … Tumblr user quesurasura pointed out to us that The Pirate Bay is recommending you withdraw your money from PayPal in protest of them booting Wikileaks from their donation-based service.
• … but Problem is, as Tumblr user pitusim pointed out to us, Visa and Mastercard are now doing the same thing. BTW, the Guardian notes that Visa and Mastercard still count the KKK as users of their services. source

• Someone was gonna call them out for this at some point, and it might as well be WePay, a competitor which focuses on setting up group payments (rather than PayPal’s person-to-person payments). They put this giant block of ice outside of a PayPal developer conference in San Francisco earlier today. Publicity stunt? Sure. But PayPal has only been freezing accounts without cause for years, and what a way to call them out on it. source

• 40% the amount the stock increased on its IPO day (it was a great day)
• 3.85% the amount the NASDAQ as a whole fell today (it was a bad day)

Elon Musk scored big, too

• $70M the amount that Musk put into Tesla Motors all by himself – he was broke before today
• $650Mthe amount that Musk’s share in the company is worth after today – not bad, duder
• $15M the amount Musk took out to ensure his Tony Stark-like life can continue source