Ask HN: What was the secret that Jan Sloot took with him to the grave?

[VertexRed]

This has to be one of the largest (and personally the most interesting) IT myths out there. I have my own belief of what happened (which I might share later), but I'm really interested in reading what others believe went on and how (or if) he was able to actually reduce a full movie down to a fraction of its size.

Brief summary for those who haven't heard of him: Sloot claimed to have invented a system that was able to compress a full digital movie down to 8 KB which he privately demonstrated to different groups several times. He was even in contact with Roel Pieper who was Philips CTO at the time and just before they were about to go big, he passes away.

Jan Sloot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Sloot

[lun4r]

He said it wasn't "compressing", but rather called it a "coding system" that used some "reference memory". His early patents describe some mechanism that uses a combination of RLE and references to lines of pixels stored in that reference memory. I haven't seen any materials that suggest something revolutionary. Claims like these have been made many times during the past decades but either got busted or their inventor mysteriously died or disappeared. IMHO just another story for conspiracy theorists :)

[VertexRed]

Another theory that I read was that Sloot had somehow linked analog and digital (he was supposedly a TV technician before) and that he was parameterizing data from an analog signal using a small amount of data.

Source: http://jansloot.telcomsoft.nl/Sources-1/More/CaptainCosmos/N... (comment by Koen near the bottom of the page).

Now conspiracy theory or not; one can't claim that it's not an interesting read since he privately demonstrated it to at least 20 people and was also able to get Philips to work with him.

[lun4r]

Here's a lot more on Sloot and others: http://www.endlesscompression.com

[VertexRed]

This sounds more like encryption than compression and I don't understand how it could save space the majority of the unique data is still needed for each movie.

I hate to say it and I would love to be proved wrong, but my theory is that it was a hoax (an impressive one as he was able to convince big names) and I think he did it with encryption. Here's what I think: what's fairly established is that Sloot used "shared resources" which each user of the system was required to have in order to decompress/view the movies (here's a picture of the box with the shared resources: http://www.nethwork.nl/images/kastjesloot.jpg).

Now this box had one or multiple storage devices which stored encrypted copies of the hundreds of movies that he used for the demos (with perhaps some RLE to save space). The chipcard contained the secret key for each movie and here is how I think it worked:

1. The chipcard (8 KB in size) containing a secret key is inserted into the machine.

2. The source code is decrypted using the key and compiled for each run (this would explain why no one was able to get their hands on the source code).

3. The movie is extracted/decrypted from the shared resources by following the sequence provided by the secret key.

In other words, he got away with storing the full sized movies on the disks simply by saying that they were shared resources.

Once they got a few days away from the release the realization that he be exposed, caused the stress that lead to his unfortunate death.