Sources: the Pentagon plans to audit how it conducts online clandestine information warfare after Meta, Twitter, and others removed pro-US operations (Ellen Nakashima/Washington Post)

Andy Chalk / PC Gamer:
Blizzard will require Overwatch 2 and Modern Warfare 2 players to use SMS Protect, a 2FA system, to combat toxicity, but won’t accept prepaid and VOIP numbers  —  Just like Overwatch 2, you’ll need to attach a phone number to your Battle.net account to play Modern Warfare 2—and prepaid phones aren’t allowed.

Jordan Novet / CNBC:
The Pentagon awards Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle a cloud-computing contract of up to $9B each through 2028 under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability  —  – Of the four companies receiving cloud-computing contracts from the Pentagon, all of them had received requests for bids from the U.S. federal agency last year.

AJ Vicens / CyberScoop:
In its Q3 Adversarial Threat Report, Meta attributes a pro-US campaign to US military-run phony Facebook accounts, Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts  —  People associated with the U.S. military were behind dozens of phony Facebook accounts, more than a dozen pages, a pair of groups …

Tim Hakki / Decrypt:
The White House releases a “comprehensive framework” for crypto regulation, outlining the recommendations of various federal agencies after six months of study  —  The White House’s recommendations are built on six months of wide-ranging research across the digital asset sector.

Debby Wu / Bloomberg:
Taiwan pledges to work closely with the US and other allies to implement “very firm” export controls and prevent China’s military from acquiring advanced chips  —  Taiwan pledged to work closely with the US and other allies to prevent China’s military from acquiring state-of-the-art technology …

Michael Sheetz / CNBC:
SpaceX announces Starshield, expanding Starlink for military and government applications, initially focusing on imagery, communications, and “hosted payloads”  —  – Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expanding its Starlink satellite technology into military applications with a new business line called Starshield.