TechPulse USA

By TechPulse USA | 24 October 2026 On Saturday morning, Ukraine finally got the number it had been waiting for. Not a promise, not an assurance relayed through a third party, and not another claim that the problem was already fixed. A number, read off a monitoring system, by the country's defence minister, to reporters: over 400 kilometres per hour, and stable. That is the whole story and, in a way, it is not the story at all. Because the speed is back, and nobody in a position to explain the past eleven days will say who took it away in the first place. Ukraine's defence minister, Evhenii Khmara, told reporters on Saturday 24 October that Starlink and Starshield — the civilian satellite system and its military version, both operated by Elon Musk's SpaceX — were operating again at speeds over 400 kph after more than a week of restrictions. "The Ministry of Defence's monitoring systems are recording a return to normal speed for Starlink/Starshield. We are record...

Donald Trump declared the problem solved. Kyiv, checking the front line on Friday morning, says it isn't. A day after the US president told reporters that Elon Musk had restored Ukraine's Starshield access — "the bottom line, he put it back" — Ukrainian officials spent the morning documenting the opposite: connectivity still dropping at 161 kilometres per hour, no confirmation of any change, and interceptor drones still going dark at the worst possible moments. Someone, somewhere, is wrong about what happened between Thursday's announcement and Friday's battlefield. And the gap between those two stories is now wider than any speed limit SpaceX ever imposed. Photo: A SpaceX Starlink user terminal (illustrative). Ukraine's military says speed restrictions on Starlink/Starshield connections remain in place as of Friday morning. Credit: Steve Jurvetson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Update, Oct. 23 (evening): the 200 km/h false dawn — and Trump's Fr...

For ten days, nobody would admit who throttled the internet connection Ukraine's drones fly on. Elon Musk said the military and the president decide. The president said he didn't know. The Pentagon said it changed nothing. Then, on Wednesday, Donald Trump picked up the phone, called Musk — and, mostly, it came back. That's the short version of the strangest episode of the war's tech war. The longer version involves a speed limit lower than a camper van on a Texas highway, a feud over Russian diesel, and a week of denials so botched that nine United States senators are now demanding the Pentagon's watchdog name the person who ordered it. Photo: a stack of 60 Starlink satellites atop a Falcon 9 before entering orbit. Starshield, the military-grade network built on Starlink technology, is what Ukraine's forces lost reliable access to this month. Photo: Official SpaceX Photos, via Wikimedia Commons (CC0). Update, Oct. 23: Trump says it's "back...

Palantir Says NATO War AI Has No Kill Switch — Not Even for Washington By Daniel Rao | October 22, 2026 One AI company is begging California to force kill switches into its own products. Another just told Europe that its battlefield AI has no kill switch at all — and that not even the United States government could flip one if it wanted to. The split screen could hardly be sharper: Silicon Valley's most famous lab wants regulators to build in the off-ramp, while the company wiring AI into NATO's war rooms insists there is no off-ramp to build. The second claim landed Wednesday in Brussels. Louis Mosley, Palantir's executive vice president for the UK and Europe, sat down with Reuters in the alliance's capital and delivered what he called "categorical reassurance": the Maven Smart System, the AI platform now running inside NATO's military headquarters, cannot be remotely switched off. Not by Palantir. Not by Washington. Not by anyone. "What we have...

A train of Starlink satellites passing over Tübingen, Germany, in April 2020. Ukraine’s military now depends on the same constellation for its battlefield communications. Photo: Dktue / Wikimedia Commons (CC0). It was the confession nobody in Brussels wanted to make, and Kaja Kallas made it anyway. Standing outside the European Council building on Friday morning, with Volodymyr Zelensky about to walk through the door, Europe’s foreign policy chief said the thing that cuts straight through four years of strategic-autonomy speeches: Europe cannot free Ukraine from Elon Musk’s Starlink. Not now. Not soon. And certainly not on the war’s timetable. The sentence landed harder because of where it was said. The European Council — 27 heads of state and government — had gathered in Brussels for two days of talks with Ukraine and Europe’s own security and defence at the top of the agenda. Zelensky joined the leaders on Friday morning to brief them on the battlefield. And the first thing t...

By the TechPulse USA News Desk Photo: Radosław Sikorski, Poland's foreign minister. Official portrait, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Poland, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0 PL). Somewhere over Ukraine on Tuesday night, a combat drone moving at 120 kilometres an hour lost its satellite link for twenty seconds. Then it happened again. By Wednesday morning, several missions had been cancelled — and Poland's foreign minister was publicly asking Elon Musk, on Musk's own platform, whether he was "playing politics" with a war. A single product tweak, made overnight and without warning, had grounded hardware on an active battlefield. Let that sink in before you read another word. SpaceX hasn't explained itself. Ukraine says it got no warning. And Warsaw — which foots the bill for Ukraine's Starlink service — is done pretending this is a customer-support issue. What happened on October 14 isn't really about a speed limit. It's about what it means ...

By TechPulse USA News Desk The fastest hacking crew on the planet has exactly one member. And he wasn't even typing. That's the story security researchers at SOCRadar laid out last week, and it should worry anyone who has handed an AI agent the keys to anything: a Russian-speaking operator the researchers call CyberXero wired up 51 specialized Claude Code agents — Anthropic's own coding assistant — and turned it into an industrial burglary machine. One automated run scanned 4,708 targets , broke into 429 WordPress admin panels , and planted 32 webshells in 61 seconds . A Telegram bot pinged his phone with each fresh compromise, like delivery notifications for break-ins. The haul was real people. The researchers confirmed 628,000+ records tied to Ukrainian individuals sitting in the actor's possession, pulled from four Ukrainian organizations — including a district heating provider in Kharkiv, a city on an active war front. That's not a data breach anymore....