Developments have ranged from the shameful, like YouTube and Facebook/Meta finally blocking Russian state propagandists from carrying revenue-earning ads on their social channels, to the Anonymous collective of loosely associated hackers apparently pulling off some great stunts.
Reports are coming in that Anon took down Russia's RT.com and hijacked the nation's public television network to play the Ukrainian national anthem.
That would be hilarious if true, along with hackers fiddling with the global Automatic Information System (AIS) to change the callsign of Putin's hundred-million-dollar yacht to FCKPTN.
Its destination was changed to "hell", and the hackers made it look like the ship ran into Snake Island, where Ukrainian defenders were apparently shelled and died after swearing at a Russian Navy warcraft threatening to obliterate them unless they surrendered.
According to the free AIS lookup site Vesselfinder, the yacht Graceful is now sailing under British Virgin Islands flag, with most of the information locked.
Another excellent troll that I hope will be verified is hackers intercept Russian military radio stations to play a Caramelldansen pop ditty which has lyrics like "hands in the air, we will show you how".
We should take hack attacks seriously, however, and expect them. Ukraine was hit by a wave of destructive cyberattacks before the invasion. Officials in Ukraine are now calling for an "IT Army" to launch denial of service attacks against Russian targets in return.
On social media channels, people have graduated from being epidemiology experts to grizzled keyboard warriors with deep inside knowledge about modern warfare. There is a huge amount of old and irrelevant information being batted around on social media, along with good and useful news.
Separating the wheat from the chaff is really difficult, and the media is having to work overtime with fact-checking.
The internet could possibly last longer than the Russian invaders would like. Although telco infrastructure will be targeted, technology has moved forward and it's becoming harder to silence user-generated content.
Elon Musk said SpaceX has activated Starlink in Ukraine, which led to a morbidly fascinating thread on Twitter for us doomscrollers.
Could the Russian military home in on Starlink terminals with missiles as some "experts" suggest? The consensus seems to be that it's theoretically possible, but infeasible in practice to target microwave signals.
A sensible message to turn off automatic geolocation data being added to smartphone photos turned into a long Twitter thread about a different thing - leaking location information.
Mobile phones do keep track of your location as it would be impossible to make and receive calls and open data connections otherwise. Yes, it's possible to obtain locations with phone carriers' co-operation,
Faraday's cage-style bags were suggested to avoid phones announcing their presence to networks, but that would cut off communications completely in which case you might as well post the device to Donbas or Moscow as it's no use anyway.
I stopped reading that thread after suggestions that removing the battery was the best way to stop phones, when not in use, passively acting like beacons. M'dudes (for it is mostly men arguing about these things): have you seen newish smartphones recently? The battery doesn't come out of them.
It does seem like the Russians weren't able to rely on Google Maps to find their way around Ukraine, or to pick off various targets. Makes sense as the military wouldn't want soldiers to talk about the invasion or send pictures to their families. Also, even if Ukraine telcos were to allow Russians to roam onto their networks, see above for carriers being able to locate the "tourists".
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have in one sense come into their own, with millions in virtual money flowing into Ukraine. The flipside of that is Russia being able to do the same to bypass sanctions like some of its banks being cut off from the SWIFT global money transfer system, and losing access to euro and dollar markets.
Putin's oligarch mates could also use cryptocurrencies to shift their money out of Russia, but that would require considerable effort to hide, because of that pesky immutable blockchain that records all transactions permanently.
There's not much Putin can do as sanctions cause the Russian rouble to become worth just kopecks. Ordinary Russians will be hard hit with a double whammy of worthless income and massive inflation.
War was devastating and stupid in the past, and arguably even more so now. Nevertheless, Slava Ukraini and #GoHomeRussia.
