A judge has ordered a New York nonprofit to reinstate five employees who were fired after they were found to be complaining about their jobs on Facebook, a decision that is thought to be the first of its kind. Inc.com reportsthat a National Labour Relations Board judge said that because the employees were discussing working conditions at Hispanics United of Buffalo out-of-hours, they were protected by the National Labor Relations act, which states that a company cannot be seen to be “interfering with, restraining, and coercing employees in the exercise of rights” which are guaranteed by the Act....

TNW Quick Hit youRoomis a web application that provides a simple way of sharing information within different groups. While there are already sites such asFriendfeedandSazneothat functions similarly, is youRoom still worth checking out? Read on our review to find out. Hits: Misses: The 💜 of EU tech The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox....

Monetate, a “test and target company”, is running its first ever Open Source Developer competition to promote open source development in conjunction withPhilly Tech Week. Judges include Jay Adelson, the former CEO ofSimpleGeoand Digg; Alex Payne, co-founder and CTO of BankSimple; and Gabe Weinberg, founder and principal engineer ofDuckDuckGo. (Read our recent story onDuckDuckGo and Wolfram|Alpha’s partnership.) “The goal of the Monetate Open Source Prize is to support development of an existing open source project or to provide a kickstart to a new open source idea,” said David Brussin, Monetate founder and CEO, adding, “We have built our company on top of open source work such as Python, Linux, Nginx, Memcache, HAProxy, MySQL, Django and Google Closure Library, so it is only fitting that we at Monetate do our part to drive open source forward while at the same time supporting the Philly Tech community....

A few weeks ago I finished reading “Sex on the Moon” by Ben Mezrich. I enjoyed the book a lot sotweeted somethingabout it. Within a few minutes the author replied with a simple ‘thank you‘. Later, when I finished reading “in the plex” by Steven Levy I emailed him a short note: Just read the last page of (the ibooks version of) “in the plex” and wanted to thank you for a great time....

Several attempts have been made to give sound to quiet EVs, as in most countries it’s a legal requirement for electric vehicles to emit a pedestrian warning sound at low speed. To name a few examples, there’sthe soundscape by designer and musician Yuri Suzuki, andthe BMW i4’s soundtrack, developed by Hans Zimmer. But to turn the sounds of an EV into an independent musical composition is a first, claimed by Polestar....