President Zelenskyy claimed last Monday that Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centers belonging to Yandex had reduced disinformation and hate on social platforms. However, tracking account antibot4navalny reports bot traffic remains unchanged, and analyst Valdemar Osted says interactions on MAGA and AfD-affiliated accounts have actually risen since the strikes. Charts circulating online that purport to show a decline in bot activity appear to be AI-generated.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-13
Google has released Gemini 4 Argon, a new frontier AI model it says matches or beats GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Opus 5.5 on benchmarks spanning coding, cybersecurity, science, finance and law. The model is rolling out to Gemini app Pro and Ultra subscribers, AI mode in Search, and Ultra users of the Antigravity development platform, starting at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens before prices double in late November.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-13
Public records show Covington, Georgia paid Flock Safety $40,000 in 2020 to maintain 20 license-plate cameras, a figure that rose to $113,225 by 2024 and roughly $201,000 through just the first eight months of 2026. The increases stem from new camera installations, added software products, and a multi-year maintenance agreement for its expanding fleet. WIRED gathered similar records from a dozen Flock customers nationwide to examine how costs have grown across different cities.
wired.com
· 2026-10-13
Ukraine has struck three major data centers owned by Russian tech company Yandex in recent days, including a facility in Sasovo that houses supercomputers used to train Yandex's AI model. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy described the strikes as a 'symmetrical response' to Russia's own drone campaign against Ukrainian data centers and telecom networks that began in late September and disrupted service for up to 100,000 households in Kyiv.
arstechnica.com
· 2026-10-12
MIT Technology Review has included US startup Brimstone in its 2026 list of 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch, a subscriber-only feature. Brimstone produces lower-carbon cement alongside critical minerals, using silicate rocks instead of limestone to cut emissions from the cement-making process by about 60%. Separately, the publication's upcoming print issue explores the technical and political hurdles to building a self-sustaining lunar base.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-10-12
Following Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian data centers, a Cloudflare chart showing a drop in Yandex-related bot traffic spread widely on social media, with many assuming it showed Russian disinformation bots going offline. Researcher antibot4navalny says the data actually reflects a decline in Yandex's own web crawler activity, not social media bot farms, and that broader Russian bot traffic was largely unaffected. A separate chart claiming to show a drop in pro-AfD online activity, shared by EU lawmaker Tomáš Zdechovský, has been flagged by computer scientist Raphael Wimmer as possibly AI-generated.
theverge.com
· 2026-10-12
Cloudflare data shows bot traffic from Yandex's network has collapsed to just 0.4% of its two-week peak following a third Ukrainian drone strike on the company's data centers. Earlier strikes hit a Sasovo facility housing two supercomputers and a larger campus in Kaluga, while Yandex Cloud's status page lists at least 84 services currently offline. NetBlocks reports Yandex Cloud traffic down to 30% and Yandex LLC traffic down to 63%.
tomshardware.com
· 2026-10-11
Three months after a major wildfire swept through the Cairngorms National Park, drone pilot Pete Short is conducting weekly dawn flights using thermal-imaging drones to detect smouldering fires still burning beneath the surface. On a recent flight he found eight hidden hotspots, and during a reported flight a heat signature was detected under a tree despite no visible flames above ground.
bbc.co.uk
· 2026-10-10
Russian state media TASS reported on October 9 that a drone attack hit Yandex's data center in Kaluga's Grabtsevo industrial park, completely disabling several of its modules. The facility, Yandex's largest in Russia, spans about 130,000 square meters with a planned 63-megawatt capacity and over 3,800 server racks. This comes just two days after satellite imagery showed damage from a separate drone strike on another Yandex data center in Sasovo, Ryazan region.
united24media.com
· 2026-10-09
FlyTrex has created a role called remote pilot in command (RPIC), where staff like Trevor Wischnewsky monitor fleets of delivery drones and coordinate airspace with competitors such as Zipline, Amazon, and Alphabet's Wing operating over Dallas. The job requires FAA drone pilot certification and a weeks-long FAA-approved training course, and involves overseeing deliveries using GPS, lasers, and sensor data from an operations center.
technologyreview.com
· 2026-10-09
Yandex suspended services at its Sasovo data center in Ryazan following a drone attack that caused a fire, leading to partial service disruptions. The company confirmed no casualties and noted emergency responders are managing the situation. The attack is part of broader Ukrainian efforts targeting Russian infrastructure amid ongoing tensions.
cnbc.com
· 2026-10-08
After years of focus on winning FAA approval for beyond-line-of-sight flights and multi-drone piloting, drone delivery operators are now running into a different obstacle: local control over where drones can actually take off and land. Even as federal rules loosen, municipalities and private landowners retain authority over launch and landing sites, creating a patchwork of local restrictions that can limit service regardless of airspace clearance.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-10-07
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