Senior Vice President of Apple's iPod division, Tony Fadell has stepped down from his leadership position, and is being replaced by former IBM exec Mark Papermaster.

Fadell is regarded as the progenitor of the iPod ecosystem, bringing to Apple in 2001 the idea of a portable media player with its own dedicated online marketplace. Though The Wall Street Journal says he will be keeping a consultancy position, Fadell's Apple Bio has been removed.

It's difficult to make the case for conspiracy against the competition when XM and Sirius had no competition prior to their merger. Still, a shareholder plows ahead with his campaign against the merged entity, despite a global crisis.

In recent days, analysts have speculated on various ways that US satellite radio provider Sirius XM can complete the funding of its merger and stay afloat, including issuing more stock and even possibly taking the company private. While all of that remains in the realm of speculation, a Sirius XM shareholder whose name is all too familiar to executives who hail from Sirius, has amended his lawsuit in US District Court in California, in an effort to stop what he describes as a conspiracy to monopolize the satellite radio industry by eliminating existing competition and erecting barriers to new competition.

Finnish mobile-phone giant Nokia will drop up to 600 employees as it reorganizes operations, closes a plant, and contemplates global poverty.

In its ongoing effort to address the global digital divide, Nokia is launching both new low-cost handsets in the New Delhi market and a service for rural areas of India, other parts of Asia, and Africa.

During a visit from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Korea-based LG gave more than a hint that it plans to expand its projects with Microsoft, despite belonging to Google's Open Handset Alliance and the Nokia-backed Symbian Foundation.

LG Electronics has made an official vow to keep working with Microsoft on mobile technology, in the face of growing competition to the Windows Mobile operating system from Google's Android, Apple's iPhone, Symbian, and RIM's BlackBerry platform.

In teaming up with MySpace this week, is MTV owner Viacom deviating all that much from YouTube around user uploads of TV show clips? Like YouTube partners CBS, EA, and Universal Music, Viacom now stands to make money from online ads.

After starting a highly controversial lawsuit against YouTube last year, and then getting smacked by a boycott from angry YouTube users last summer, MTV owner Viacom is now adopting a new approach to video content through a deal unveiled with the MySpace social network and tech start-up Auditude.

Finally, after several international false starts and domestic delays, the 3G BlackBerry Bold has premiered at AT&T stores and online in the US, with an offer of free Wi-Fi at some AT&T hotspots.

AT&T has announced that Research In Motion's BlackBerry Bold is now available for purchase, and like other AT&T exclusive smartphones, it receives free Wi-Fi at AT&T hotspots nationwide when accompanied with an unlimited data plan.

With unprecedented turnout expected for Tuesday's elections, a number of efforts are underway to use the net and allied technologies to monitor voting glitches or irregularities.

Individuals connected with many vote monitoring efforts have already gotten their marching orders. Calls went out this summer for geeks of all sorts to step up as election site workers and e-voting machine technicians; Premier, Hart InterCivic, ES&S, and Sequoia all posted multiple calls for tech folks to serve as on-site tech support on November 4. As for observers, groups such as Mobilize.org were signing up younger and perhaps more tech-aware poll workers. And outspoken BlackBoxVoting.org has published a 78-page guide (PDF available here) to monitoring every step of the current elections.

The industry isn't sure how much to charge (yet) for SaaS applications. We know that. But the uncertainty's even helping to wreck pricing for traditional software, according to a new report.

Accenture has released a report examining the current state of growth in the software market. If the picture it paints was actually a piece of representational art, it would show a forest overwhelmed with undergrowth, tangled with clinging vines and thickets of trees long overdue for a culling. (And there would be a lot of squirrels...with quarterly quotas.)

A USB memory stick containing the source code and passwords to a UK government database of 18 million citizens was found in a bar parking lot, thought to be accidentally left behind by an IT employee.

The source code and internal passwords are believed to be part of the Government Gateway system, which handles a huge range of government services, from jobs and pensions to driver's licensing, to taxes, to agricultural affairs. With the data on the USB stick, the personal data of over 18 million Britons could have been compromised.

In an impromptu test this afternoon conducted jointly in Reston, Va. by BetaNews' Nate Mook and InformationWeek's Nick Hoover, a successful Xohm connection was made -- indicating that service is also extending to the suburbs.

Initial tests show the Reston connection to yield 4.8 Mbps downstream and 1.3 Mbps upstream. That's even faster downstream than our Baltimore test three weeks ago, where we achieved 2.6 Mbps downstream and 2.4 Mbps upstream. A wireless upstream connection of over 1.0 Mbps is still a considerable achievement.

There's fewer reports of malware in the wild for the entire industry, Microsoft said this morning -- an indication, it says, that the security field is getting smarter. But once again, do undisclosed vulnerabilities simply not count?

In a more circumspect report than those the company published previously, Microsoft is saying today that the general trend toward malware distribution worldwide is continuing on a decline, and that Microsoft may be contributing to that decline through a reduction in Windows-targeted malware by more than one-third.

Sprint today restored its network connection to Cogent Communications for the time being, after service disruptions rocked customers during the month of October.

Communications between the the networks of Sprint and Cogent are now temporarily up and running, following Sprint's restoration of ten interconnections severed between October 7 and October 30.

First appearing over the weekend on BestBuy.com, Western Digital has officially debuted its WD TV HD Media Player -- a way to expand the reach of its portable hard drives into the DTV realm with the aid of USB.

Introduced as a companion to WD's My Passport portable media drives, the WD TV player acts as a TV docking station for USB storage devices. Photos, movies, and music can be navigated on the user's TV through HD menus with the included remote control. Up to two USB storage devices can be simultaneously hooked up.

Today, Circuit City confirmed earlier reports that it will be closing 155 stores as a cost-cutting measure, and eliminating 17% of its workforce, or roughly 7,800 jobs.

Following a quarter that showed the company worked at a $162.7 million loss, reports arose that Circuit City was contemplating store closures as a cost-cutting measure.

Silverlight-powered movie streams are now available to Netflix subscribers, with the promise of better performance and greater HD. Right now, though, the trial is limited to Intel-based systems.

Last week, Netflix announced its instantly viewable movie streams, which had heretofore been inaccessible to Mac users, would be available through Microsoft's Silverlight platform to those without Windows Media Player.