News and Notes Roundup - 10/5/2015

Happy Monday, valued readers! We’re relaunching our website tomorrow, so please enjoy the brand new NDItech.org and the old one while it lasts!

Amazon Web Services is hosting a hackathon tomorrow in Las Vegas and NDI is sponsoring one of the contests! At re:Invent 2015, we’re asking teams to design a framework for building story-driven text-based games that convey lessons in an engaging “choose your own adventure” format. Follow us on Twitter (@NDItech) for some live tweets from our leader Chris for updates on the conference.

Our beloved software engineer Jason Baumgartner finished his Reddit submission repository and another Redditor ran some analytics and put Godwin's Law to the test. Turns out a lot of people like to misappropriate Nazism, but not as many as you'd think. Naysayers of Godwin's Law, you live to fight another day.

Tech News:

• Pew Research Center has published some great findings on teens, tech, and romance

• Find out if LinkedIn owes you money for being a nuisance with their emails

• A former sales exec of Facebook and Google was hired as president and COO of India’s HackerRank

• Twitter weighs expanding the length of tweets to 160 characters

• The Oculus Rift is getting some high first estimates on shelf pricing, hinting at a focus on quality

• Adobe packed the essentials of Photoshop into a free retouching app

• The popular extension AdBlock has been sold by its creator to an unknown buyer

• FBI agents can hack their way through an investigation when faced with encrypted data

• Kaspersky Lab found that nearly a third of users do nothing to secure their online banking

• We’re one step closer to quantum computing

ICT4D:

• Myanmar’s smartphone usage is exploding beyond expectations

• Civic tech is more than just code and developing

• Catherine Bracy, Code for America’s Director of Community Organizing, says tech can help government, not save it

• 4 Syrian refugee children took over the UNICEF Twitter account last week to tell their stories to the world

• Startup accelerator Techstars is launching in Africa on Wednesday

• UAVs are being put to great use in Nepal

• Courts are being called to publish their rulings in the name of open data

Mobile News:

• It looks like we’ll have Yelp for human beings next month, but the company’s site and social media have gone dark

• Bad news bears for the users of one billion Android phones: Stagefright 2.0 is here

• Jack Dorsey was named as Twitter’s permanent CEO

• SMS is changing the lives of much of Cambodia’s youth

• Yelp is settling its lawsuit over fake reviews