Dictators use bombast and bullying as a kind of malevolent calling card. Meet the people who have found surprising and creative ways around that.

Three stories about technologies that started out doing one thing, and ended up doing quite another — from online tractors, to tasers in schools, to cellphone hackers who take their online battles into the real world.

There’s a specific kind of cyber attack targeting big industrial systems that is coming back into fashion: it’s called a ‘living off the land’ attack. What makes it particularly scary is that unlike traditional attacks in which bad actors break into a system and plant malicious code, in living off the land attacks, there’s nothing to find — bad actors leverage what’s already in the network.

If you want to know how Ukrainians are coping with the war, look at the Ukraine apps in the app store. From an air raid alert built in the first week of the invasion to a map that helps work-from-homers find electricity, technology is helping Ukraine find some sense of normalcy in wartime.

We talk to two ordinary people who decided to tackle two extraordinary problems: identifying the thousands who went missing in Israel in the days after the October 7th attacks, and one man’s leap of faith to get internet and cellphone service into Gaza.

Bucha, a bedroom community just outside of Kyiv, is best known for enduring Russia’s atrocities during a month-long occupation in the Spring of 2022. Now the citizens of Bucha don’t want revenge, they want justice.

When a Russian bomb damaged a beloved library in the Ukrainian town of Chernihiv, locals feared that it would be lost forever. Then a cutting-edge technology came to the rescue.

We traveled to Ukraine last month to learn more about a hunt forward operation Cybercom and cyber operators from Ukraine secretly launched before the war. This is the first time the Ukrainian side of the story has been revealed publicly.

We travel to Ukraine to look at its grassroots defense industry and take you into its secret drone factories where entrepreneurs are able to put innovative weapons into the hands of soldiers at the front in a matter of weeks, not months.

An episode from “Humans vs. Machines” from Aventine Research Institute and Pineapple Street Studios.

Misinformation has influenced elections, ruined reputations and fundamentally changed society’s relationship with the truth. Now, large language models like ChatGPT have the potential to create and spread misinformation at a scale we’ve never seen before. As technology improves, the question won’t be, ‘What we can believe in?’ but whether we’ll be able to believe in anything at all.