The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel was the “real” reason why a congressional push to ban the popular app TikTok regained momentum on Capitol Hill, according to key U.S. political figures deeply involved with the 2024 legislation that laid the groundwork for the ban.

Lead Tech Correspondent Ryan Lovelace tracked that development in an in-depth story about the Denver-based tech giant Palantir and how, to at least some degree, several of its top officials have gone “off script” in recent weeks.

Former Rep. Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who now leads Palantir’s defense business, revealed at last weekend’s Munich Security Conference that the Oct. 7 attack by the Palestinian militant group on Israel revived momentum for legislation taking aim at TikTok, the popular video-sharing app which is owned by the China-based parent company ByteDance.

“We had a bipartisan consensus, we had the executive branch. But the bill was still dead until Oct. 7,” Mr. Gallagher said in a video captured by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein. “And people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform and our bill had legs again.”

The app’s future in the U.S. is still murky, though Mr. Trump has expressed his desire that it remain available to its more than 170 million American users.

Mr. Lovelace’s piece also covers a new book from Palantir CEO Alex Karp that calls for the “union of the state and the software industry.”

Here’s a potentially world-altering story: Microsoft says it has developed an “entirely new state of matter” to join the types we’ve all grown up with: solid, liquid and gas.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made the declaration in a lengthy post on X. The company says that the new state of matter — which it says has been “unlocked by a new class of materials, topoconductors” — will enable rapid advances in quantum computing. Quantum computers are designed to solve problems much faster than classical computers through the forthcoming machines’ usage of arcane properties such as entanglement, interference and superposition to complete calculations.

The company went into more detail in a blog post about the new “topological” state of matter.

“The topoconductor, or topological superconductor, is a special category of material that can create an entirely new state of matter — not a solid, liquid or gas but a topological state,” the company said. “This is harnessed to produce a more stable qubit that is fast, small and can be digitally controlled, without the tradeoffs required by current alternatives.”

Andrey Liscovich achieved something remarkable: Using his Silicon Valley background and logistical know-how, he says he helped build a “supply chain that was more effective than the [Ukrainian] Ministry of Defense” in helping get the right weaponry and supplies to frontline troops battling the invading Russian army.

Asia Editor Andrew Salmon dives into this fascinating story, which highlights the intersection between Silicon Valley innovation and the grueling wars raging thousands of miles away. Mr. Liscovich, a Ukrainian American, leveraged his tech expertise and industry contacts to broker deals and scour the world for high-tech equipment and munitions for Kyiv’s forces.

With a doctorate from Harvard, the San Francisco resident and former CEO of Uber Works returned to Ukraine after the Russian invasion in February 2022 and says he subsequently helped secure $300 million in supply deals for Ukrainian troops.

The encrypted messaging app Signal is the latest target for Russia-linked cyberattackers.

Dan Black, manager of cyber espionage analysis at Google, wrote in a blog post Wednesday the company saw an uptick in Russian-aligned hackers seeking to breach Signal accounts belonging to people of interest to Moscow’s intelligence services. That could be government officials, tech and business industry leaders, or other prominent figures who rely on the app for secure messaging.

And it’s going to get worse: Mr. Black said that “we anticipate the tactics and methods used to target Signal will grow in prevalence” moving forward. Specifically, the Russian attackers sought to gain access to victims’ accounts through Signal’s “linked devices” feature, which allows users to use the platform on multiple devices at the same time. Google said the attackers used malicious QR codes to link victim devices to others controlled by the hackers.

There’s a popular argument in some political and national security circles that Big Tech giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft and others have become so large and so powerful that they’re eating smaller firms too quickly and, in the process, stifling innovation. Washington Times columnist Stephen Moore says that’s “exactly backward.”

“The tech industry of 2025 in Silicon Valley and other tech corridors such as Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City’s ‘Silicon Slopes’ is characterized by thousands of smaller and often more nimble ‘Little Tech’ companies that are created and often flourish as partners, suppliers, potential merger targets or head-on competitors to Big Tech,” he writes in a new piece for The Times. “This healthy mix of established, scaled firms alongside smaller, nimbler competitors fosters the mad scramble for innovation and profitability.”

In fact, he argues, too much federal intervention to boost innovation will accomplish the exact opposite of its intention.

“Federal regulators and the antitrust cops are the poisonous disruptors of this creative destruction process that has placed America so far into the global lead of innovation,” he writes.

• Feb. 17-21 — International Defense Exhibition and Conference (IDEX) 2025, United Arab Emirates

• Feb. 20 — 2025 Charlie Allen Achievement Awards, INSA

• Feb. 23-26 — Web Summit Qatar, Web Summit

• Feb. 25 — The Day After: Yair Lapid’s Vision for a Peaceful Middle East, Foundation for Defense of Democracies

• Feb. 26 — 2025 Defense Software & Data Summit, Govini

• Feb. 26-27 — Global Space & Technology Convention & Exhibition, Singapore Space & Technology