Ukraine says it carried out the world's first evacuation of a wounded soldier by aerial drone, using a heavy-lift hexacopter after enemy drones and landmines made conventional ground evacuation too dangerous. NBC News reports: Shared by the 92nd Separate Assault Brigade on Monday, the video shows the soldier strapping himself into a large drone and being flown at what appears to be relatively low altitude over blurred-out territory. The drone carefully lowers him, and the drone operator greets him with "Welcome back to the ground!" The video also shows blurred faces of drone operators who carried out the mission. The post said the unidentified infantryman was wounded at his position. "Due to intense enemy drone activity and the presence of landmines, evacuation using conventional unmanned ground vehicles was impossible," the brigade said. "At that point, the specialists in our unit took it upon themselves to attempt something that had never been done before: evacuating a serviceman using an aerial drone," it added. The craft was a heavy-lift hexacopter, it said, originally designed as a bomber by a Ukrainian manufacturer. It looks about twice the size of the soldier in the video. The specialists working on the mission had to ensure the drone could carry a human being without flipping over or swaying excessively, according to the unit.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia's digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech giant Yandex within several days. Pro-Kremlin bloggers are warning that Russia's centralized digital economy could collapse because the country is not prepared for the "data center war" it started, according to posts translated by the pseudonymous independent researcher ChrisO_wiki. The Russian commentators also suggested that Ukraine's decentralized digital services could prove more resilient than Russia's system if the countries continue trading such blows. Russia initially launched a drone strike campaign targeting Ukrainian data centers and mobile phone networks in late September. The attacks temporarily disrupted Internet and cell phone service for up to 100,000 households in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv and came as part of a broader long-range strike campaign that has involved Russian missiles and jet-powered drones hitting Ukraine's power grid infrastructure, transportation hubs, and even residential apartment building blocks. But Ukraine soon began striking back at data centers owned by the Russian company Yandex, also known as "Russia's Google," in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has described as a "symmetrical response." [...] More importantly for Russian society, the damage to Yandex's data centers has reportedly caused interruptions or outages to popular Russian payment apps and digital banking services, email, e-commerce platforms, video streaming services, ride-hailing and food delivery apps, and navigation and map services. Yandex's search engine also accounts for about 70 percent of the market share in Russia. The disruptions are even more widespread, because the data center damage also impacts Yandex's cloud computing service, which counts some of Russia's largest companies as customers, according to The Moscow Times, an independent newspaper. These include large grocery and fast-food chains as well as a household appliance retailer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A U.S. Army battalion at Fort Stewart is offering soldiers a four-day pass timed to the release of Grand Theft Auto VI if they reenlist for at least two years. The program is limited to one unit for now, but it fits the Army's broader effort to appeal to gamers as a recruiting and retention pool. CBS News reports: Twenty soldiers at Fort Stewart in Georgia in the Army's 9th Brigade Engineering Battalion, part of the 3rd Infantry Division, have already chosen this incentive as part of their reenlistment, an Army spokesperson told CBS News on Wednesday. "The idea was to have a unique incentives program that connects to what Soldiers are interested in," Lt. Col. Angel Tomko, a spokesperson for the 3rd Infantry Division, said in a statement. "The command team, in conjunction with the career counselor, wanted to get soldiers excited to reenlist." [...] The Army memo, which has circulated online, says any soldier who signs a reenlistment contract between Aug. 1, 2026 and Nov. 14 will be authorized for a special four-day pass designated to coincide with "the highly anticipated release of the video game Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6)." About 130 soldiers are currently eligible for the incentive, Tomko said. Eligible soldiers must reenlist for a minimum of two years and up to six years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.