eBay, Microsoft and other ‘ethical’ companies; hot valuations for Facebook, Zynga, Groupon; Sony racks up points against GeoHot

It’s Thursday, must be time for tech tapas.
• You stick around tech news long enough and you get gems like this: Microsoft has, for the first time, made a list of the World’s Most Ethical Companies, “an honor that would have been unthinkable a decade ago,” writes Todd Bishop at GeekWire. The 5-year-old list didn’t exist a decade ago, but Bishop is, of course, referring to the failed U.S. government effort to break up Microsoft. I remember editing story after story for the Mercury News about the antitrust trial, which coincided with the dot-com boom and bust. Nowadays, the perception of Microsoft as monopolist is mostly gone, while companies such as Google and Apple are facing antitrust questions. This is presumably among the reasons they are not on the list.
To choose its corporate do-gooders, Ethisphere sent out questionnaires, reviewed ethics codes, checked out business practices and more. Its methodology is detailed here.

EBay also made the list for the first time. Among other tech companies on the list are Adobe Systems, Cisco Systems, Juniper Networks, Salesforce.com and Symantec.
• Valuation news: Valuations for Facebook, Zynga and Groupon continue to scale new heights. The world’s largest social network could be worth $60 billion to $75 billion, according to a Wall Street Journal report that says new investment talks are under way. The same report also mentions a new $500 million round of financing that is said to bring the value of San Francisco-based Zynga, the social-gaming company, to about $10 billion.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that Groupon, the 2-year-old company that brought sexy back to coupons, is getting ready for an IPO that would put its value at $25 billion. In December, the Chicago purveyor of online deals declined to be bought by Google for a reported $6 billion.
• Sony keeps advancing to the next level as it pursues a legal case against George Hotz, a.k.a. GeoHot, the hacker famous for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3 game console, and previously, the iPhone. Last month, a judge let Sony inspect Hotz’s hard drive. Earlier this month, Sony won the right to access the IP address of anyone who visited Hotz’s website for the past couple of years, plus access to GeoHot-linked data from YouTube and Twitter. And Tuesday, the same federal magistrate out of San Francisco, Joseph Spero, said Sony can access Hotz’ PayPal records since 2009, according to Ars Technica.