Thank you for this, I appreciate it! That's unfortunate to hear. I may have to swap out the example I used in this article, and maybe also include a note that this technique has limitations. I think that using compression/Kolmogorov complexity metrics for classification is a fruitful endeavor and that the philosophy of groups like the Hutter Prize are sound, but the kNN + gzip example looks like it has some problems with it.
https://kenschutte.com/gzip-knn-paper2/
The moral: the methodology is cool, but implementation details matter, i guess...