supersquirrel

Ukraine Is Producing 200 Long-Range Strike Drones a Day—And Says Output Can Triple

Recent reporting by Nieman Lab describes how some major news organizations—including The Guardian, The New York Times, and Reddit—are limiting or blocking access to their content in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. As stated in the article, these organizations are blocking access largely out of concern that generative AI companies are using the Wayback Machine as a backdoor for large-scale scraping. These concerns are understandable, but unfounded. The Wayback Machine is not intended to be a backdoor for large-scale commercial scraping and, like others on the web today, we expend significant time and effort working to prevent such abuse. Whatever legitimate concerns people may have about generative AI, libraries are not the problem, and blocking access to web archives is not the solution; doing so risks serious harm to the public record.

We’ve been covering Australia’s monumentally stupid social media ban for kids under 16 since before it went into effect. We noted how dumb the whole premise was, how the rollout was an immediate mess, how a gambling ad agency helped push the whole thing, and how two massive studies involving 125,000 kids found the entire “social media is inherently harmful” narrative doesn’t hold up. But theory and data are one thing. Now we’re getting real-world stories of actual kids being harmed by a law that was supposedly designed to protect them. And wouldn’t you know it, the harm is falling hardest on the kids who were already most vulnerable. Just like many people predicted. If you thought this was a good idea you are part of the harm against these kids, wake the fuck up and use your brain, this is a moral panic, you are hardly different than villagers yelling for a witch to be burned at the stake and you should feel ashamed of your stupidity. Do better fediverse and if you are one of those people who casually waxes lyrical about denying kids access to the tools you use everyday because you honestly believe letting young people on social media is equivalent to giving them physically addictive drugs and that this place should have young people restricted from it because it is fundamentally unhealthy, please leave. You bring this place down and you undermine any sense of optimism about digital communities that motivates the rest of us to be here. “The current research does not support the usefulness of banning kids from social media. Research studies do not suggest there is a correlation between time spent on social media and youth mental health. Further, reducing social media time does not improve mental health. This ban is likely to be a waste of time and resources. Further, it prevents opportunities to teach kids how to use social media responsibly. Like most moral panics, these kinds of efforts do harm in distracting us from real sources of youth mental health problems, mainly families in distress and failing schools. We have to remember we’ve been through this all before many times from video games, to rock and roll, books to the radio. These panics over media and technology never do anything to help kids.” … “Perhaps because of that balance and because many other factors are known to have a much larger impact on childhood, current evidence suggests very small effects at a population level when it comes to associations between social media/smartphone use on wellbeing e.g., McCrae et al., 2017; Vahedi & Zannella, 2021; Yoon et al.,2019). Note that not all the above reviews involve children. Also, that these are all reporting associations, not cause and effect. “When it comes to the general use of social media and smartphones, the effects on mood or wellbeing are so small ‘that they require implausibly large behavioral changes to produce even minor mood shifts.’ (Winbush et al., 2025; p6) sciencemediacentre.org/expert-comments-on-evidenc… news.ucsb.edu/…/brain-science-social-media-and-mo… theguardian.com/…/social-media-time-does-not-incr… …lse.ac.uk/…/social-media-age-bans-toxic-business… ox.ac.uk/…/2026-01-23-expert-comment-under-16-soc… aap.org/…/the-good-and-bad-of-social-media-what-r… businessinsider.com/kids-parenting-social-media-b… cacbrevard.org/should-teens-be-banned-from-social… publications.ieu.asn.au/ie-220/…/help-or-harm?coo… medium.com/…/banning-social-media-for-teens-is-da… theconversation.com/i-research-the-harm-that-can-… …edu.au/…/australia-social-media-ban-under-16s thebureauinvestigates.com/…/a-social-media-ban-fo… jezebel.com/social-media-bans-teens-europe-uk-spa… thedrum.com/…/social-media-regulation-is-being-sh…

The new standard makes it possible to stream data from sensors married to passive tags, by allocating a frequency channel to each device. When radio waves reaches a tag, the device wakes up and broadcasts the basic info it contains and then negotiates a clear channel on which to stream data.

“Things are shrinking, so we’re shrinking around it,” Elias says. “Electronics are becoming embedded, consolidated, optimized, and batteries are the only part of that equation that’s being left behind.”

Pollard also provided new detail on the progress of Atlantic NET, a programme intended to examine how persistent anti submarine warfare sensing might be delivered through service based models rather than through a single platform acquisition. “The first formal element of the tendering process for Atlantic NET commenced in September 2025 and was completed in January 2026,” he said. “This involved the assessment of 26 compliant industry proposed solutions for ‘Persistent ASW Sense (ISR) as a Service’ and followed on from six months of regular two way industry engagement with approximately 327 companies in the supplier base. These are largely UK based, or have UK elements in their proposals.” Irony is dead and the military industrial complex killed it.

Yet a close look at the data suggests that Russia is hardly winning and, even more interestingly, that Russia is increasingly a declining power. To better understand the state of the war and Russia’s battlefield performance, this analysis asks: How successful has the Russian military been in achieving the Kremlin’s main objectives? What are the broader implications for the United States and Europe? To answer these questions, this assessment examines several indicators of Russia’s battlefield performance: fatality and casualty rates, the relative rate of advance of Russian forces, and the size of Russian territorial gains. The assessment also examines the state of Russia’s wartime economy, including long-term economic performance. … President Putin and the Russian government have been adept in conducting an aggressive disinformation campaign that has convinced some policymakers, including in Washington, that Russian victory is inevitable, despite substantial evidence to the contrary. Russia boosted its funding for state-run media in 2026 by roughly 54 percent, indicating a commitment to intensified information warfare.59 The Kremlin’s propaganda machine is designed to sustain domestic support for the regime and its war against Ukraine, as well as to convince key foreign audiences that the war has been successful and needs to continue.

From a critical youth work standpoint, the ban risks eroding youth rights, undermining professional practice, and diverting political attention away from more systemic reforms. A rights-based, participatory approach offers a more sustainable and equitable path to enhancing young people’s safety and wellbeing in digital environments. By enforcing a blanket restriction, the policy infantilises and homogenises young people, setting a precedent for future exclusionary policies, such as raising the legal age to vote or obtain a driver’s licence. It is also likely to generate new challenges, such as the rise of less regulated or legally circumventive social media platforms. These dilemmas are not unique to Australia. In the UK, the Online Safety Act (2023) reflects similar anxieties but pursues a different approach, placing greater responsibility on platforms rather than banning young people outright. Both cases highlight a global struggle to balance protection with participation, safety with rights. These developments raise broader questions: Have we learned nothing from past attempts at prohibition and ‘protective’ policies? Will other countries follow this world-first political measure? Should they? Panic logic would say yes; critical youth work argues otherwise.