Almost everyone has been in the position at one time where they’d like to stick it to a company that just fired them. But few ever get the chance to depart in the extremely public fashion that a group of HMV employees did.

The UK branch of the struggling HMV let go 190 of its employees in England on Thursday, and one who still had access to the @hmvtweets official company Twitter account didn’t go quietly. The Tweets have since been deleted, but not before some speedy Twitter followers snapped screengrabs of what the disgruntled ex-employee had to say:

“We’re tweeting live from HR where we’re all being fired! Exciting!!” began the Twitter-spree, The Independent reports. What followed was a flurry of tweets, including “Just overheard our Marketing Director (he’s staying, folks) ask ‘How do I shut down Twitter?”

[ Related: Twitter’s Vine: How to get the most out of the new six-second video sharing app ]

Screengrab of @hmvtweets account on January 31, 2013

While the Marketing Director didn’t succeed in shutting down the entire service

Photo of David S. Gallant (via @Ananagurl)It seems that a Brampton, Ontario game developer got his wish after being fired by Canada Revenue Agency for a computer game that mocks his day job.

Game developer David S. Gallant created ‘I Get This Call Every Day,’ a point-and-click PC game with rudimentary graphics and a very basic premise: you’re an office worker, in a cubicle, taking phone calls from customers and are given a limited number of reactions to choose from to progress the game. You can choose to be snippy with the frustrating customer, or string along the tedious conversation for as long as you can. Most of the time, no matter what you do, you end up getting fired.

If this doesn’t sound like much fun to you, don’t worry, it wasn’t for Gallant either. He created the game as a means of expressing the doldrums experienced at his part-time job answering phone inquiries at Revenue Canada.

Now, in a case of life imitating art, Gallant’s been let go from his position. Gallant said in a tweet on Wednesday morning that he was

After months of speculation about its new device and countless problems for RIM, the excitement for today’s announcement was almost palpable. And with the unveiling of the new BlackBerry 10 operating system alongside two brand new devices, things are starting to look up.

At today’s launch events in Toronto, New York and other cities around the world, journalists were eager to get their hands on the new devices and start putting them through their paces. Here’s what you need to know about the much-hyped BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q10:

One week ago, it was the top paid iPhone app in Canada. Now, Canada’s privacy commissioner is slamming it for contravening Canadian and international privacy laws.

WhatsApp, an instant-messaging application that lets users chat across various platforms without having to pay text messaging fees, requires access to users’ entire address books in order to function. Canadian Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart and her Dutch counterpart Jacob Kohnstamm say that since the app doesn’t ask for permission before accessing the address book, it violates privacy laws in both countries.

The investigation also revealed that the app sends unencrypted messages, which could potentially make them susceptible to eavesdropping or interception. The issue has since been resolved as a result of the commission.

[ Related: WhatsApp breaches privacy laws ]

“Our investigation has led to WhatsApp making and committing to make further changes in order to better protect users’ personal information,” said

If you’ve received an email telling you that Facebook may be sending you $10, it’s (potentially) not a scam: as the result of a class-action lawsuit over Sponsored Stories, Facebook is paying out a small portion of the settlement to many of its users.

I say “potentially” because the chances of someone capitalizing on this turn of events to make some money off of unsuspecting folks are high, but for many users, the news is true.

Unfortunately, for many users, that $10 will never make its way to your pockets, and will instead line the pockets of the lawyers and privacy groups that helped get that money in the first place.

[ Related: Three reasons Facebook’s Graph Search might not be the Next Great Thing ]

GigaOM reports that a class action lawsuit was filed against the social network in response to “Sponsored Stories” that ran on its website. If you were to “Like” a Page, your friends may see a targeted post in their feed advertising a product or service related to that Page.

As most of Canada is in the grips of winter weather, it seems like days of bright flowers and warm summer breezes are years away. But before you know it, spring will be here, and it will bring with it a chore that many of us dread: cutting the grass.

Those mavericks of mowing at John Deere have come up with a solution that will hopefully help you get even more time to soak in the sun during the summer without having to spend your time pushing a lawn mower back and forth. They’ve come up with the Tango E5, a “fully autonomous” garden tool.

[ Last week’s Must-Have: The perfect alarm clock for everyone ]

Like the indoor Roomba, which most of us recognize as the automatic vacuum for our homes, the Tango E5 navigates your lawn automatically and cuts the grass to the length you set, anywhere between 19 and 102 mm. You (or a John Deere dealer/installer) set up a boundary wire around the area you want mowed (probably not in the flowerbeds), then set the mower off on its merry way. When its

CBC photo “UNLOCK YOUR IPHONE - $20” proclaim signs in front of shady electronics stores across North America. Soon, those signs will be a thing of the past south of the border, because as of Saturday, unlocking your phone in the United States is a crime.

Those who opt to modify their phone and make it usable on any network probably don’t give it much thought beyond making their life easier and preventing them from being tied to one provider. But as of January 26, 2013, that practice will officially become illegal in the United States because of government regulations that come into effect that day.

[ Related: B.C. woman gets charges for cell phone roaming in her own home ]

A decision back in October gave customers the option to unlock their cell phones without carrier permission for a 90 day period, after which the practice would become illegal, PC World explains. Every three years, the rules on unlocking and jailbreaking phones must be reviewed in accordance with the Digital Millennium

On Thursday, Twitter unveiled its next step towards abbreviated world domination with its new app for uploading and sharing videos embedded in tweets, Vine. The app (currently available only for the iPhone) lets you record and post videos up to six seconds long directly to your Twitter account, and your followers can watch it right in the tweet.

In the blog post announcing the service, the Twitter team included some samples:

Click the image to see the animation.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, it remains to be seen if a six-second video will be worth 140 characters, but chances are good that our Twitter feeds will soon be filled with brief vignettes of cats and goofy stunts.

[ Related: Twitter blocks neo-Nazi posts in Germany, setting precedent for targeted censorship ]

And if you’d like to get in on the action, you can start by downloading the Vine app from the App Store, then following these easy steps outlined by Mashable:

1. Sign in using either your Twitter or Email account.

2. If signing in using your Twitter