In case you’ve never heard of theShorty Awards, it’s just like the Oscars but for Twitter and it rewards Twitter users for their entire body of work and brilliant tweets over the last year. This March, the 3rd annual Shorty Awards will be honouring the Twitter accounts with the most votes from the community. Twitter users can nominate their favourite Twitter accounts for their best overall 140-character micro-blog posts, it’s not for a single tweet....

Should a conscious robot get the same rights as a human? Two flavors of intelligence and a test IBM’sDeep Blue chess machinewas successfully trained to beat grandmaster Gary Kasparov. But it could not do anything else. This computer had what’s called domain-specific intelligence. On the other hand, there’s the kind of intelligence that allows for the ability to do a variety of things well. It is called domain-general intelligence. It’s what lets people cook, ski, and raise children – tasks that are related, but also very different....

Francis Ford Coppola was just 30 years old when he reached Hollywood success and fame with Godfather. In arecent interview with the 99%, at La Mamounia, the legendary Moroccan palace-turned-hotel, during the Marrakech International Film Festival, Coppola candidly discusses his past 45 years in the film business and his latest endeavor as a wine maker. My love of film and wine aside, what is most intriguing in this interview for you, dear TNW reader, is the radical stance Coppola takes on issues of art creation, copyright and rampant downloading....

If there is one sector that has been slow to embrace social media it has to be the banking sector and probably with good reason as they hold a lot of very private data. I spottedthis articletoday saying that one of the world’s biggest banks, Citibank have just launched aTwitteraccount@askcitithat will deal with customer complaints. This is a huge step for the banking industry: one of the biggest consumer facing banks in the USA is saying, “We are here to help you online....

In conventional warfare, it’s accepted that if a state finds itself under attack, it’s entitled to respond – either with defensive force, or with a counterattack. But it’s less clear how countries should respond to cyberattacks: state-backed hacks which often have dangerous real-world implications. The 2020 SolarWinds hack, attributed to state-backed Russian hackers, breached security at around 100 private companies. But it also infiltrated nine US federal agencies – including theUS Energy Department, which oversees the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile....