There are not even 7,000 Mossad agents, period.
7,000 is the highest estimate publicly available for the TOTAL number of employees in the Mossad, and 95% of them are not agents - just like most US intel are not field agents. Real numbers for agents are far, far lower without a doubt.
Also - Israel got burned so bad with the idiotic Pollard affair, there is zero chance Israel would put so much of their assets in the US when they have a 7 front war. They are many things, but they are not idiots, and they clearly care far more about their immediate security interests than what the US thinks.
These theories make absolutely no sense, my dear fried.
> Someone who works for an intelligence agency: whether an officer or employee thereof or anyone else who agrees to help their efforts (for ideology, for money, as blackmailee, or otherwise).
That said, I also asked ChatGPT and it says you're right.
I think wiktionary will suffer from the fact that the "incorrect" usage of agent is indeed the more common one. 007 is an agent, even though in real life the MI6 would certainly call him an officer.
"Agent" is a term of art with a rather strict meaning, but that's obviously only true when used in conversations within that specific field.
Iran was well on that path anyway.
The US strike absolutely did turn Iran from a peaceful actor with no interest in nuclear weapons into a regime bent on acquiring nuclear weapons.
I used to think the same way, and I loved UBNT.
Sadly, after 2 different more advanced configs I had caused wild stability issues - affecting APs, a USG and the controller itself to the point of making them less reliable than a random TP-Link router, plus an ERL randomly dying on me without warning and never booting again - I decided to pull UBNT from anything and anywhere.
I now exclusively use open-source projects with a strong history and community - or used high-end enterprise gear that I pick up when it reaches EOL so it's dirt cheap.
Stability has been so much better, even with the most advanced configs I ever created.
Storage will never work. Quote me on this.
Nuclear or a mix of nuclear and renewables will be the only way to seriously get away from fossil fuels.
Also, even if storage works some day, hoping we manage to discover how, scale and implement it across human civilization in time is a crazy bet to make. Even if we seriously go all in on nuclear and renewables tomorrow - it might already be too late, so betting on some miracle tech to be found, scaled and implemented in time is not only unwise, it would require several miracles to have any hope.
The storage plan for the EU is a mix of battery and hydrogen storage. It has a timeline that will take a while, but so does nuclear. There is a roadmap for converting europe’s gas transport and storage infrastructure over to hydrogen as part of the EU hydrogen strategy. I know there are people who don’t believe in the feasibility of the hydrogen strategy, but the people actually in the field working as experts seem to believe in it, so I remain unconvinced by the critics.
It already does work though, and it growing exponentially without any tedious political debates since just about anyone can do it at any time, at any cost and any scale. Companies store their own energy, counties store their own energy, private individuals store their own energy.
I see no way of stopping it unless corruption somehow manages to make private power production and storage illegal. There certainly are no technical or economical showstoppers.
This is more of an argument for how pure economic thinking and the current constraints/processes have poor correlation to actual impact and desired outcomes.
It's similar to how Enron would make the most money when California had rolling blackouts - by operating right at the edge of the network crashing, they would make the most money because reserves were low, so they intentionally shut power stations down and caused small grid crashes.
If you really believe in renewables, if anything, we need to go all in on nuclear for the base load, but no one seems to be headed in that direction other than China and India, because the don't have the same market failures we do.
It's much worse - if the data isn't just a ton of tiny files, and you're able to spin up a bunch of workers for parallelism, you can get up to 120 Gbps per storage account (without going to the extreme of requiring a special quota increase).
That means in a little bit over 5 minutes, the data could have been downloaded by someone. Even most well run security teams won't be able to respond quickly enough for that type of event.
At a former team, we went from spending quite a bit of time on code style comments and disagreements to spending no time at all on it, with the simple act of making the code linter a breaking step in our CI build, and deciding no review will start until the build is green.
We had to adjust our linter settings here and there - but it was still super efficient for everyone's time compared to what we had before...
The difference between theory and practice, is that in theory there is no difference, but in practice - there is.
So far, every "provably secure design" I've seen ended up being insecure in practice due to the things people abstract away.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I have not seen it done perfectly thus far.
We've seen more success by having many many iterations and widespread usage of common designs and patterns. These are not perfectly secure by any means, but they are secure enough against common threats to make it functionally equivalent until we figure it out.
I just feel that our proven insecure system, with default authority, is a really bad foundation to have settled upon. We couldn't have picked a worse default.
Okay, name the "provably secure designs" that were actually proven and validated by a competent security standard such as the Orange Book Level A or Common Criteria EAL 6/7 that turned out to be insecure in practice.
Most people who say that point to designs that were never proven and never validated against anything meaningful, but I am open to seeing a actual example.
For enterprises, it's hard to have a ton of different tools.
I worked at a very large software company, and our security tech stack was so big and convoluted, that just maintaining a compliant CI/CD pipeline was a 5 person job, because there are ~20 different tools to integrate and debug, and each of those changes every year or two, so you're constantly re-learning, re-integrating, debugging,etc.
Having a single (or just a couple) vendor(s) sounds like a dream!
Also - Israel got burned so bad with the idiotic Pollard affair, there is zero chance Israel would put so much of their assets in the US when they have a 7 front war. They are many things, but they are not idiots, and they clearly care far more about their immediate security interests than what the US thinks.
These theories make absolutely no sense, my dear fried.
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