• McAfee's president and chairman-CEO resign after the company finds a $100 to $150 million discrepancy in the accounting of its stock options grants. McAfee notes that CEO George Samenuk is retiring, while the board fired president Kevin Weiss. [NY Times]

Tech tabloid The Inquirer picks up a dirty firing technique by Hewlett-Packard that leaves ex-employees with an "anti-bonus." Thought we'd point to it since HP hasn't gotten enough bad press lately.

Written by a reader. Fact-checked by your mom.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd, now under suspicion for cooperating with chairwoman Patricia Dunn's investigations of board members and reporters, is now the chairman of HP, he announced today. Dunn has resigned from the board — a move that was inevitable eventually, but few thought would happen while the scandal was still fresh in the media.

AOL Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis announced today that on January 1, he'll "retire from active management" while keeping his job title.

While Flock founder and ex-CEO Bart Decrem says he quit to start a new company, tipsters say he was fired from the social-browser maker. One writes:

Pop quiz: What does a once-popular startup, top-heavy with philosophy and lacking direction, do when the one guy who started the whole thing quits?

Now that Hewlett-Packard's Patricia Dunn said she'll step down as chairwoman but stay on the board, don't get caught saying "What's Dunn is done." Remember these facts when you chat about HP at the water cooler or conference lobby.

The reason for venture capitalist Tom Perkins's resignation from the HP board of directors became clear today when Newsweek reported that chairwoman Patricia Dunn sniffed out directors' home phone records using possibly illegal methods of "pretexting" (obtaining personal info under false pretenses).

The founding editor of Search Engine Watch, the heavyweight in search blogging and the Wall Street Journal for the growing search-marketing set, says he's heading out this winter. Danny Sullivan announced his impending exit — from SEW and his Search Engine Strategies conferences — on his personal site, saying, "My contracts with their owners Incisive Media are expiring, and we've not been able to agree on new ones."

Tribal Fusion's VP of Network Development quits today. Scott Swanson announced the move on his blog two weeks ago, but no one seems to have noticed — one reader reported it as a rumor.

Thanks to the internal AOL e-mails leaked on Mercury News's blog, Good Morning Silicon Valley, we now know that CTO Maureen Govern did not quit but "decided to resign," according to CEO/Chairman Jon Miller.

The Journal:

AOL fired Chief Technology Officer Maureen Govern, according the Wall Street Journal. The paper's source says the bumbling company was responding to the outcry against its records-releasing fiasco, in which millions of user search records were released to the public.

• Web 2.0 start-up Kiko gets auctioned off for $50K. Kinda like that chick from "Family Matters" whose boyfriend pimped her out to porn. And both heed the disclaimer: Past traffic is no guarantee of future traffic. [Ebay]

Has convergence claimed another life? A reader asks about the head of Intel's digital home division:

PC Forum, the long-running tech conference, is shutting down, according to inside sources.

Today, a product team manager left Microsoft's Windows Live division to start his own company. That manager was Niall Kennedy, who had only joined Microsoft in April after leaving Technorati. I chatted with him about his move.

So far, the latest top-level engineer to leave Technorati has only announced his move in his Flickr photos. Ben Jenkins handled Flickr photo integration handled all CSS and HTML for the blog search company; now he's heading to Yahoo's Flickr team.