New York Times: A.I. Brings the Robot Wingman to Aerial Combat. “An Air Force program shows how the Pentagon is starting to embrace the potential of a rapidly emerging technology, with far-reaching implications for war-fighting tactics, military culture and the defense industry.”
New Voice of Ukraine: Crimeans using social media to help Ukrainian military spot Russian air defenses. “Crimeans are actively helping the Ukrainian military detect Russian air defense systems by publishing photos and videos of the systems in operation, Taras Berezovets, a political scientist and officer of the I. Bohun special brigade, told Radio NV in an interview on Aug. 25.”
The Conversation: How Ukraine’s savvy official social media rallied the world and raised the bar for national propaganda. “We decided to study all of the posts that the Ukrainian government and the city of Kyiv posted to their official Twitter accounts during the first days of the Russian invasion. We found that the governments strategically used the platform as a form of crisis communication and public diplomacy. While Ukraine was battling the Russian army on its land, it was also fighting for the hearts and minds of people following the conflict on social media from afar.”
New York Times: In a War of Tanks, Ukrainian Soldiers Play World of Tanks Online. “Somewhere along the several hundred miles of front line in Ukraine, a Ukrainian soldier is probably playing World of Tanks — the video game. A war hero recently admitted to gaming although he had to open a new account when he lost his login information. During training in June, border guards outside Bakhmut, where one of the war’s bloodiest battles was fought, were found playing. And a tank crew seen grabbing a quick lunch last year had slapped a World of Tanks logo on the hull of its T-80 main battle tank.”
Bellingcat: A New Tool Shows What War Has Done to Ukraine’s Forests. “We’ve launched the ‘OSINT Forest Area Tracker’, hosted on Google Earth Engine. Our tool compares data collected by Sentinel-2, a satellite which detects changes in infrared wavelengths and can be used to study the health of forests. The tool reveals the scale and intensity of anomalous changes on land. This narrows down search areas for researchers working on environmental damage in Ukraine.”
Associated Press: Russia fines Google $32,000 for videos about the conflict in Ukraine. “A Russian court on Thursday imposed a 3-million-ruble ($32,000) fine on Google for failing to delete allegedly false information about the conflict in Ukraine. The move by a magistrate’s court follows similar actions in early August against Apple and the Wikimedia Foundation that hosts Wikipedia.”
The Moscow Times: Google Blocks Workspace Apps for Sanctioned Russian Firms – Kommersant. “Google has started blocking its popular workplace apps for Russian companies under U.S. sanctions, the Kommersant business daily reported Friday, citing anonymous sources at two major IT companies. Around 30% of Russian companies’ corporate information is stored on Google Workspace services, which include Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Drive and other cloud-based tools, according to one of the sources’ estimates.”
New York Times: Sweden Is Not Staying Neutral in Russia’s Information War. “Facing a tsunami of disinformation about the treatment of Muslims that has in recent months fueled protests from Stockholm to Baghdad, Sweden decided it needed to fight back. It turned to the Psychological Defense Agency, a part of the Ministry of Defense that its government created last year. The agency has become the first line of defense for a country facing a sustained information attack from abroad.”
Daily Beast: A ‘Handsome Daddy Putin’ Bug Is Plaguing China’s Internet. “Last year, a man claiming to be a Russian soldier fighting in Moscow’s war in Ukraine started posting triumphant videos from what he claimed was the battlefield on a Chinese social media app, applauding Russian fighting and calling for a Kremlin victory. But things started to get fishy when the supposedly Russian soldier peddling anti-American and pro-Kremlin narratives around the war had impeccable Chinese pronunciation in his videos, according to the South China Morning Post.”
Meduza: Yandex co-founder Arkady Volozh updates his entrepreneurial bio. Russia shrinks to marginal mention.. “Arkady Volozh, a co-founder and former CEO of the now-divided IT giant Yandex, has updated his entrepreneurial biography — and Russia is vanishing from his story.”
New York Times: Russia Takes Its Ukraine Information War Into Video Games. “These games and adjacent discussion sites like Discord and Steam are becoming online platforms for Russian agitprop, circulating to new, mostly younger audiences a torrent of propaganda that the Kremlin has used to try to justify the war in Ukraine. In this virtual world, players have adopted the letter Z, a symbol of the Russian troops who invaded last year; embraced legally specious Russian territorial claims in Crimea and other places; and echoed President Vladimir V. Putin’s efforts to denigrate Ukrainians as Nazis and blame the West for the conflict.”
Washington Post: The war in Ukraine is spurring a revolution in drone warfare using AI. “The design and software innovations, as well as mass dissemination of piloting know-how, are also likely to influence the way drones are used far beyond the war in Ukraine, with serious implications for governments confronting separatist militias, drug cartels and extremist groups seeking to gain a technological edge.”
Deutsche Welle: Watchdog wants Russia out of UNESCO Heritage Committee. “It was time for humanity to take a stand against this barbarism, Stephan Dömpke, chairman of World Heritage Watch, told DW. Russia had forfeited any right to play a role in international bodies that advise or decide on the protection of cultural property, he said.”
Radio Poland: EU sanctions Russian entities, individuals for propaganda in support of war on Ukraine . “The European Union has imposed sanctions on seven Russian individuals and five entities for disseminating propaganda in support of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, officials have said.”
New York Times: Russia’s Online Censorship Has Soared 30-Fold During Ukraine War. “To compile its findings, Citizen Lab analyzed more than 300 court orders from the Russian government against Vkontakte, one of the country’s largest social media sites, demanding that it remove accounts, posts, videos and other content. Before the war, Russia’s government issued internet takedown orders to Vkontakte, known as VK, once every 50 days on average. After the conflict began, that number jumped to nearly once a day, according to Citizen Lab.”
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