An overreliance on technology by Israel's intelligence agencies and military has continued to shape the current conflict in Gaza, analysts say, while also being partially responsible for the failure to detect the Hamas attack on October 7. Hamas's surprise attack on army outposts and surrounding villages in southern Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,200 Israeli and foreign nationals, mostly civilians, took the Israeli intelligence agencies by surprise. Hamas fighters also took about 240 people captive. Israel, in its brutal military response, has killed more than 17,000 Palestinians in Gaza since then. Within both Israel and the wider Arab region, many have asked how Shin Bet, one of the world's most respected and feared intelligence agencies, which is responsible for Israel's domestic security, could have been outmatched by Hamas using bulldozers and paragliders. The world's disbelief has sparked a bounty of conspiracy theories in some quarters.

The world of magic had Houdini, who pioneered tips which can be nonetheless carried out as we speak. And knowledge compression has Jacob Ziv. In 1977, Ziv, working with Abraham Lempel, printed the equal of Houdini on Magic: a paper within the IEEE Transactions on Info Principle titled "A Common Algorithm for Sequential Knowledge Compression." The algorithm described within the paper got here to be referred to as LZ77--from the authors' names, in alphabetical order, and the 12 months. LZ77 wasn't the primary lossless compression algorithm, however it was the primary that might work its magic in a single step. The next 12 months, the 2 researchers issued a refinement, LZ78.