[HN Gopher] The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)
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The Stick of Jan Sloot (2004)
Author : schnitzelstoat
Score : 32 points
Date : 2021-12-20 11:13 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.spronck.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.spronck.net)
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I worked and lived in Nieuwegein at that time (the quite small
| Dutch city he lived and died) and I heard many things before and
| after his death. The book is a nice story but it was and is clear
| to any computer scientist that this was just nonsense. Funnily
| enough Sloot managed to the then Philips ceo on board who was not
| a dumb guy (although his investments around the bubble actually
| would make you think he was and this did not help).
|
| My though was (and still is), is that this was a clever fraud
| that went too far and that the stress about this fraud actually
| killed him. He was a nervous wreck at the end which supports that
| theory (although his family says this was because he was feeling
| paranoid and threatened).
|
| Two years after his death I was contacted by a man who said he
| was a friend of Sloot and in private conversation Sloot told him
| the secret. As I was co-owner of an IT company in Nieuwegein and
| had studied math, he ended up on our doorstep. Our ceo told him
| to go somewhere else, but I was curious so had a few meetings
| with him. He showed pics of him with Sloot and explained how the
| system worked. He said the analog story was to throw clever
| guessers off (he indeed was at least paranoid enough for that
| this man said) and the system was, in fact, digital. It was
| revolutionary lossless digital compression. Of course I do not
| know if this guy knew anything or if Sloot ever told him
| anything; I will never really know. But it seems to fit the
| scenario I thought what had happened.
|
| He drew this all out and wanted to pay me to implement this
| algorithm. I said it was basically worthless but to humor him I
| implemented it anyway (for free; he said when he would be rich
| soon, he would fix that crime). The way it worked, and I suspect
| so did Sloot's version indeed, is that the 'compressed' version,
| which indeed had 10 movies (or more) compressed in 64kb, was kind
| of an index for the decompression data.
|
| So, you have 10 movies of 500mb (rather normal back then), you
| would end up with a memory stick with 64kb file on it which are
| those 10 'compressed' movies and you would have a roughly 5gb
| decompress.exe to uncompress them.
|
| To the spectator it looks like you stick different sticks into
| your computer which have 64kb files with 10s of movies or 1000s
| of images, all without quality loss from their original. Which
| was, in my opinion, the reason no one could inspect 'his device';
| it was an easy sell for the secret could be stolen that way. Of
| course there are very easy tricks in fat32 to show a different
| file size for decompress.exe which could further help the ruse.
|
| Anyway: what he suggested is not possible and cannot be
| possible(kolmorogov complexity?); lossless compression of
| countless movies in 64kb, ergo it was nonsense. But intriguing so
| many people fell for it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sloot's 'prototype' demo apparently worked but it didn't do
| what he said it did. He was strongly convinced that he needed
| just a little bit more time to make it work for real and in the
| meantime he probably justified his fake demo by telling himself
| that once it worked all would be forgiven. It's a sad story and
| a good reminder that the most dangerous start-up founders for
| investors are the ones that believe their own bullshit.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Yeah, maybe it was not an intentional scam and maybe he
| believed it. The guy I spoke with who claimed to know him
| said that his prototype did actually work to what he said.
| But I was not there and it still seems an interesting story.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The prototype _looked_ like it worked, but it didn 't. It
| was pretty clever though and even though I don't know 100%
| sure how they did it I had figure out enough to make them
| very uncomfortable.
|
| The setup was a small device plugged into a TV, and then
| you could pick any one of iirc 8 movies that they would
| then show a sizeable chunk of. As far as it being a scam:
| they believed they could make it work, but there is no way
| that they did not know that they were presenting a rigged
| demo.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| This story reminds me a bit of the modern cryptocurrency stuff -
| I wonder how many of those involved are like Pieper and likely
| know it is bullshit but continue with the charade nonetheless as
| a vehicle to enrich themselves at the expense of the less savvy.
| anotheraccount9 wrote:
| Define bullshit.
| InfiniteRand wrote:
| Well, if you're a bit too bullish about your shit, your shit
| is probably bullshit
| jacquesm wrote:
| Other investors back in the day passed on this and told him
| they believed it to be a scam, but that did not stop Pieper
| from taking the CEO role in the company that was to
| commercialize Jan Sloot's 'invention'. Pieper did a lot of
| stuff that was questionable (Ring!Rosa for instance), but the
| list is much longer.
|
| The biggest thing he messed up was probably killing Philips as
| a viable brand (but to be honest that giant was already on the
| way down for a while).
| gpvos wrote:
| The difference with crypto is that Sloot's scheme is
| information-theoretically impossible. For crypto the math
| actually is correct; whether it is viable is a societal/human
| matter.
| afandian wrote:
| I didn't see it explcitly mentioned: arithmetic coding was one of
| the more mind bending things to learn about.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding
| Maursault wrote:
| Article contains a good number of sloppy inaccuracies. Here is
| one.
|
| > What truly amazes me is that a man as Roel Pieper, who is a
| professor of Computer Science no less...
|
| > On 1 September 1999 Pieper was appointed as a _professor of
| Electronic Commerce,_ a newly created chair at the faculty of
| informatics and technology management of the University of
| Twente. Pieper ended as a professor of business administration
| and corporate governance at the university of Twente in 2013. [1]
|
| Information Science != Computer Science
|
| See also [2]
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roel_Pieper#Career_in_the_Neth...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sloot_Digital_Coding_System
| jacquesm wrote:
| Roel Pieper is a man with a long and interesting history, some
| successes but also a large number of spectacular failures, and
| not a few borderline (or even outright) scams.
|
| Falling for this particular scam was pretty dumb, especially
| for someone with his connections. Note that Jan Sloot worked at
| Philips before Roel Pieper and him joined forces.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Dutch "informatica" = English "computer science", although it
| was translated as "informatics" here.
| Maursault wrote:
| That is interesting, and seems perfectly reasonable at first,
| but then please explain what "Technology Management" could
| possibly have to do with Computer Science. Informatics
| (domestic meaning) fits with Technology Management, they're
| complementary. Computer Science, which is a subset of
| Mathematics, has nothing to do with _management_ of
| technology (or computers). Techs, administrators and SysOps
| are not computer scientists, and even if they happen to be
| (which is becoming more common), they 're not doing any
| computer science when they're managing technology. What is
| the translation of (western) informatics? Is it possible the
| translation is correct? [1], [2], [3], [4] Or is it more
| likely Dutch universities don't know what Computer Science
| is? Is there also a Dutch department of Veterinary Science
| and Pet Management somewhere? Or a department of Astronomy
| and Optometry? Mechanical Engineering and Machining?
|
| [1] https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roel_Pieper ??
|
| [2] https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=nl&text=informat
| ics...
|
| [3] https://translate.google.com/?sl=auto&tl=nl&text=computer
| %20...
|
| [4] I suspect, not that OP is necessarily incorrect, but that
| this is more interesting than I thought
| bondarchuk wrote:
| It's become a bit of a joke at this point, the way Dutch
| universities give their programs and departments English
| titles to appear hip and international.. It seems there are
| (or were) 2 faculties, "Informatica", and "Technologie &
| Management", and the chair "Electronic Commerce" was part
| of both.
| wernsey wrote:
| Fun read.
|
| This Jan Sloot reminds me of a conversation I once had with my
| dad, an electrical engineer, where he told me how many lay people
| he encountered throughout his career that proposed perpetual
| motion machines to him.
|
| My dad would see it as his duty to educate them on the
| conservation of energy, but it wasn't a pleasant experience for
| him to burst their bubble like that.
|
| I don't think he ever encountered anyone who refused to be
| educated, though.
| e2021 wrote:
| This is like the idea of using Pi for compression - if Pi
| contains all strings of digits, then we find whatever data we
| want to encode in Pi and store the index where it starts. But
| turns out the number of digits in the index is going to be (on
| average) greater than the number of digits pointed to in Pi
| anyway
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| I'm reasonably familiar with this case, and there's a book about
| it called De Broncode by Eric Smit. I haven't read it as my Dutch
| is extremely limited. It's been my understanding that his
| invention involved analogue processing (think along the lines of
| an electromagnetic frequency being used to transmit a data point,
| rather than a single bit). The article suggests it was supposed
| to be able to generate all possible movies but that looks like a
| straw man to me. There are a finite number of movies and you
| could restrict this further to the top (for example) 1000 movies.
|
| There's a patent here:
| https://patents.google.com/patent/NL1009908C2/en It's in English
| but as it's new to me I haven't read it yet either.
|
| Jan Sloot died the day before he was due to release details of
| his invention to investors. The timing seems suspicious. The
| obvious conclusions might be either suicide in anticipation of
| being exposed as a charlatan, or (if you're prone to conspiracy
| theories) murder by someone acting on behalf of companies who had
| invested in digital compression, but he died of a heart attack,
| i.e. natural causes, though no autopsy was performed, despite
| relatives requesting one. I don't know the known state of his
| health was at the time he died.
| gpvos wrote:
| A friend once gave me the book De Broncode, as they thought it
| might be inspirational for me. I must have hurt their feelings
| a bit as I immediately explained why it was an impossible idea.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Anybody with a cursory understanding of how technology works
| would have punctured that particular balloon. But in the
| present this guy would likely be sitting right next to one E.
| Holmes, M. Perry or anyone of a number of other CEOs that
| were 'faking it until they could make it'.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've had the demo in the offices of one Hugo Krop (of Textlite
| fame, later jailed for fraud).
|
| It was a complete fake and I told them that - and how I thought
| it worked, and for a counter demo disrupted theirs with $5 worth
| of electronics (VHF sweep generator). They left and never came
| back. I jokingly call it the first tech DD I ever did.
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