Talk:Sloot Digital Coding System

2017 Cleanup

This is literally my first major article clean-up so please go easy on me.

I had some colleges translate and verify some translations of the wikipedia article as well as their sources where available, and re-wrote some major portions of the article. A few notes:

• The source text literally says, translated, ... Sloot moved to Utrecht where his wife was also from. ... I don't know if this some dutch phrase meaning he met and married his wife or literally they're just saying "his wife was also from here so that's why they moved". Anyway, it doesn't seem that relevant anyway so I didn't press on to figure out what was meant.
• I don't know really what happened between Jos van Rossum and Sloot. Some texts say the partnership, directly translated, "stranded", "ended", "was deserted". I don't know if the partership went sour, or if it simply just ended on good terms, or if Rossum ran out of money, etc -- no sources to back up anything other than the business partership ended.

My edits are mainly a mashup of the German & Dutch Wiki Pages and their sources, translated by Google, with some human assistance translating / verifying but I know zero Dutch/German and none of my translaters were native, ... so they aren't perfect. I likely introduced some inaccuracies. I'm going to attempt to find a better translater and clean it up further. Among some claims I left out for one reason or another:

• There seems to be some agreement that Sloot is the subject of conspiracy theories, but there really aren't any reliable sources to say that, and given the nature of the claim I left it out, pending some sort of reliable source.
• Can not figure out a reliable timeline of the guys job's pre-1995. Some have sources, some don't, -- I put it together with reasonable certainy that it's accurate but may not be totally perfect.
• Same with the company name's post-1995. Dipro, Davoc, are among the company names that seemed to float around Sloot, .. I just left those out because no source / no clue, but the rebranding as The Fifth Fource is a certainty.

The last couple paragraphs don't flow together very well, -- they could be written better, but they are better than they were.

Probably most importantly, little attention is paid to the technical detail and implausability of the system. I will try to clean this up later.

nezZario (talk) 08:02, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Untitled

A Dutch "hyve" about his invention.

http://de-broncode.hyves.nl http://jan-sloot.hyves.nl

The above URLs point to a game website, now. Somebody should check with the way-back machine.--37.182.149.65 (talk) 23:13, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

POV

Removed the following:

Such grandiose claims of "too good to be true" compression are not uncommon, but somehow the so-called inventors never manage to produce a functioning product.

as didn't feel it to be in any way neutral. --Black Butterfly 23:26, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

it is untrue. According to Dutch magazine Quote, the functioning prototype was working and shown to potential inventors. I personally believe that it contained a Hard disk. The Dutch magazine stated that the inventors listend to the "black box" that they were not allowed to investigate or open, to hear whether it contained a HDD. They did not hear anything, but some HDDs do not produce much audio noise. (You can buy 100 HDDs and sort them on low audio noise). Another option is to contain the HDD in a noise reducing inner box. Andries (talk) 00:34, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

It's possible Sloot developed something working as a 'video font'. The decoder would contain a dictionary of primitives - common shapes, motion paths, textures, transforms etc. and produce the output by compositing them. That way a very small amount of data could encode a long video as most of data required is already stored in the decoder, as the 'dictionary' and the 'movie' only distributes it - a bit like Adobe Flash vector graphics animations, or stretching the analogy further, as ASCII text plus font versus photos of the manuscript. Of course the encoder for that format would be more than challenging to create.

8 KB?

I'm certainly not an expert on compression technology, but the idea that you could compress a feature length movie to appx. 8000 bytes sounds rather extreme, coming out to far less than one byte per frame. Possibly Sloot claimed to be able to compress down to eight Megabytes?

No, he really claimed 8 kB, which is propbably why everybody thought/thinks it was just a scam. —Ruud 02:50, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Claims like this are clearly fantastic, but sadly, not terribly uncommon. --Stormie 07:28, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

You can not compress a full-length movie down to 8 KB and have anything watchable. Using Lossy data compression, you can make it that small, but you won't be able to view the result. Bubba73 (talk), 04:12, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Back in the day, people claimed that mankind cannot fly, or that computers could never be so small that they fit on a desk. Saying "can't" is an immediate error when it comes to technology. Wether -Sloot- could do it, though, is another matter entirely.

You people underestimate the power of technology, you CAN compress things down to that size as long as you have something to interprit it at the other end, he was murderd simple as that

The foundation of the concept seems to be that the 8kb doesn't comprise the entirety of the data of the movie, only a tokenized extract that requires a sizeable static 'dictionary' to rebuild/restore the data that has been stripped. A dictionary coder for video, where most of the movie data is already present on the recipient's device, and what you send is just instructions of assembling the stored primitives into video. Obviously it's a seriously lossy compression as the primitives of the dictionary won't reflect the source 1:1, but it would allow for massive reduction of the amount of data that needs to be transferred. Sharpfang (talk) 12:48, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

I'm not an expert on data-compression: What level of compression was he professing to be able to have, and what can we use now?

You find an multinational conspiracy to murder a man who has invented the greatest piece of technology since the microprocessor more believable than the idea that he was just another one of those dozens of people who make these sort of unproven claims every year?

He showed it to a Dutch specialist working for Oracle who was impressed as what he saw should not be possible. Roel Piepers also got a personal demonstration and was so impressed he [i]left[/i] Philips to start a new company set up around the invention. There were many investors (from Sillicon Valley). ABN Amro (Dutch bank) invested 50 million. If it is so easy everyone could whip some hoax up in their garage and prepare to be a millionaire and backed by the richest most influential IT people. More over his attic (where he did the research) was completely cleaned after his "natural" death and the invention he used during the demonstrations has never been found. They even dug up the garden to no avail.77.250.158.145 21:06, 18 September 2007 (UTC)

If a man left his job; then found out the whole thing was a scam, and couldn't get his old job back, that could make a person pretty livid. I'm not accusing Pipers of murder, in fact I can't even say whether or not he got his job back 24.189.136.119 (talk) 17:03, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

Feel free to add this information to the article, IF you have a reliable source for these claims. --Stormie 01:33, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I got this information from a 40min newspiece "Netwerk" did. This is a respectable Dutch news program. They interviewed the major people involved and also talked with the writer of a book about this whole issue (he's a journalist). The book is called "De Broncode" (i.e. the sourcecode) and chronicles the whole thing from beginning to the end. I don't know if it has been translated in English. I don't do wiki, but the Dutch article on nl.wikipedia is already much bigger; and judging from the info based on the book and newspiece. Only a translation would already make for a much more comprehensive article than it is now.77.250.158.145 17:15, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Could you translate it to English? 24.189.136.119 (talk) 17:03, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

Yes, the nl wiki article does look a lot more comprehensive, it would be fantastic if you could translate some of it's content into English. --Stormie 22:45, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

---

The only problem with all cynical comments I've read so far is that Jan really showed his invention to dozens of people, amongst them several captains of industry and venture capital providers, yes really the most stupid people in the world..;) So come on, can't somebody start thinking 'out of the box' here in stead of producing only narrow minded comments?

Did anyone bother to read the Patents, registered in the European Patent Office? Than you can find out, that Jan never mentiones the 1 kilobyte key limitation!

If you can't imagine that the number of movies all lasting say 120 minutes, is limited, try to imagine how many books of say 256 pages you could write - yes the number is limited! Why? Because a book is nothing but a combination of bytes representing characters, with a number of limitations, such as that the characters must represent text in a particular language, the text must be readable, understandable, meaningfull... Believe me, it's the same for movies, for sound, etc. The secret of all form of human communication is - repetition of parts of information, that's where Jan's secret is hidden! Jan discovered how to deal with those repetitions - it's all in his Patent, just read it!

Think of this: A whole human being can grow out of a combination of one egg-cell with one sperm-cell. Now an interesting dilemma comes up: what do you think - is all the info needed to expand this one cell beginning to a complete human being enclosed in this one cell, or is information added-on later as the organism grows? If you believe, like I do, that all needed info is all there right from the beginning - please re-think about the single cell, re-think about what it means to be an organism like a human being!

Kind regards,

Christ van Wijck --84.27.241.199 20:23, 7 July 2007 (UTC)cvwijck@gmail.com

There's an error in your statement -- the genetic material in the egg does indeed grow into a person, however the food that makes the baby grow comes from the mother and the environment; then the child grows up in an environment: While genetics plays a role, the environment plays a role too and this can range from being picked on as a kid to being shot and losing a leg. 24.189.136.119 (talk) 17:03, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

Think of each unique movie as a unique representation of a prime. No matter what numbers you use for any of the variables, it would truly suck if your movie happened to represent a prime that wasn't within the subset of the maximum number of combinations. And who decides what is meaningful communication? Language evolves. Not a single person who lived a century ago would be able to comprehend what my mobile phone's user manual is about, or most of the text messages on it, or most of the "noise" I call music. What good is any kind of compression system if it can't be used for creative and original thoughts, words, sounds and images? Robert John Kaper (talk) 01:29, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Sorry guy but your magical principle is already implemented in the data compression, that's what we call compression, it is a PROCESS. You can compress big size of data in small ones, like HDD capacities are almost limitless, but not exactly, you always need some information that grows with the size of the file.Klinfran (talk) 12:54, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Did he also invent the perpetuum mobile? Andries (talk) 00:08, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

The whole point with the wiki entry of Jan Sloot is that most contributors have passed judgement without really trying to understand what Mr. Sloot had claimed. Please remember that all (100 procent) of everything that was and is said in the media about Jan Sloot has never been confirmed by Sloot himself. As a result, many assumptions have been made in the media, on the internet and in wikipedia that are factually incorrect. E.g. in the Dutch wikipedia section there is an entry that tries to prove that a coding system for a movie cannot result in codes of fixed length. The truth lies of course in the question what you are trying to code. Sloot never claimed he could code an infinite amount of movies into a 128 KB chip. The man has never said anything of the sort. Besides, there is no evidence whatsoever that Mr. Sloot claimed he was able to code an infinite amount of movies onto anything. Even better, Sloot has never referred to an "infinite" amount of movies in any documentation that he has left behind. What Sloot coded on his chipcard was nothing more than some security keys needed to jumpstart his application. The real work was done inside the boxes he took with him. Boxes half the size of suitcases and stuffed with microchips and IC's.

The truth about the Sloot matter is far more complicated than has been presented so far. I will gladly provide more info, depending on the reactions. Mr. Van Wijck here is regrettably on the wrong track. But Andries's reaction is of the destructive kind, suggesting Mr. Sloot was a fraud or a kook, and discouraging any serious debate. Mr. Sloot was neither. He really had something unique and could explain it to anyone intelligent enough to understand. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.10.187.124 (talk) 01:22, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Is there any documentation or recording of anything Sloot ever said himself, or documents that made reference to him when he was alive 24.189.136.119 (talk) 17:03, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

If "the real work was done inside boxes half the size of suitcases, stuffed with [technology]", then whatever Mr. Sloot demonstrated in 1995 was not unique from a third-party perspective because it was no more impressive than a handful 1.5 Mbit MPEG-1 videos (Video CD, 1993) together with a laptop with either CD-ROM (1985, required 2x speed soon after) or a 2 Mbit Wavelan wireless device (1990) accessing the videos through a stream from a server. Robert John Kaper (talk) 02:39, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

So you're saying he was doing some kind of slight of hand scheme where he claimed he compressed the data and was merely relaying it from one area to another? 24.189.136.119 (talk) 17:03, 7 August 2015 (UTC)

When?

"this is orders of magnitude greater compression than the best currently available technology.[when?]"

That When? tag is meaningless. Whoever put it there wants to know whether Sloot's claimed performance was better than 1999 tech, or 2012 tech. But because what he claimed isn't possible, it's better than any tech that will ever exist.173.58.37.123 (talk) 12:05, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Patent

Mr. Van Wijck above said there was a patent. Can it be linked to in the external links section? --37.182.149.65 (talk) 23:18, 12 September 2016 (UTC)

I added the links nezZario (talk) 22:48, 8 June 2017 (UTC)

"data compression " Was it?

he has said "its not data compression" "recipes can be transferred without the data actually being transferred" So basically its a signal telling the computer to use software that is already on the computer but its broken down so you cant access it even tho its there. So either he was doing a scam or looking for fame.--Apemonkey1 (talk) 07:26, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

"The full source code was never recovered" The company had the patent so it was never lost!

"The full source code was never recovered" The company had the patent so it was never lost! The company was headed by the philips guy had the patent which was granted in 1996 for 6 years so lasted 6 years after his death! Sounds like conspiracy nuts have been here! --Apemonkey1 (talk) 07:35, 10 February 2019 (UTC)

Need Translated De Broncode

Do anyone has the book? Can you please translate it and/or share the ebook version? Need as many informations as possible to deduce the principles used by the system itself. The patents are actually messy that whoever studying the patents need to re-read it again and again for different interpretation.

There's a problem with the second patent. By using first patent as reference, the so called reference memory in the second patent seems to refer something that is entirely different that what was told to the public. I'm pretty damn sure it's not used to store the so called *all possible values* as external storage to be used by all other devices (this misleading part screwed up almost everyone's brain). It's used to compare image blocks. Comparing color values between 16x16 blocks(single block of 16x16 - each p has 256 colors), comparing pixel in the block with other 2560 blocks (single frame - 2560 blocks, therefore each p has 2560 colors) and comparing pixels in the frame with other 39 frames (compare current frame with OLDER FRAMES. 40 frames - each p has 102400 colors, 1 pixel in a block x 2560 blocks x 40 frames = 102400 colors). It works the same way as 'indexed color' method in order to reduce the redundancy but do not consider it is 'indexed color' method. The reason why to not consider it as the same method as 'indexed color' method is because you need to know that Jan Sloot seems to be messing with something that is in a different league. His methods seems not limited by binary data limitation (as in bit and byte size, file size). Therefore, you need to think that, the indexing methods he used didn't even consider file size into the equations. With this clear, you can try thinking something different instead of repeating the same thinking process again.

The difference between first and second patents is that, first patent is the single image version of the system (and also older) while the second patent is the video version (and newer). Therefore, you can use first patent as reference to analyze the system. Once you do that, you will notice that, there's no so called reference memory in the first patent. Why do only the second patent has the thing called as reference memory? It's obvious that, it is used as temporary storage to reduce redundancy for video version where you need to store some frames to reduce redudancy according to Jan Sloot METHODS before applying algorithms and code those resulting data into smaller key.

By using reference memory, he reduced redundancy in image sequences. Then, with his KEY decoder, he reduced duplicates in data. Please remember this before any of you try to analyze the system again.

So... Please stop spreading the words where "all possible values is stored into the reference data" which is misleading. That is one powerful trap that prevents people to try thinking about this illogically.

Since the system is not about compressing data, my speculation about the system after considering all these informations I know is that, the system either use some sort data structure that use block code as coordinates to rebuild the data or numbers to be used in bunch of formulas similar to analog signal to rebuild the data. I'm a bit skeptical about the latter method because if it's true. then people would have already reproduced the system by now. Therefore, I'm more inclined towards the former method where some sort of data structure that doesn't use INDEXES but COORDINATES to rebuild data. This might be the unknown region. The prerequisites would be that, there must be a lot of small redundant sections and the coordinates data must be small. I could be wrong about the prerequisites. This is after all, just a speculation of mine. There's too many stuffs that is missing. The book might hold the informations SOME people needed. Especially on how to ignore the binary limitation. (Please don't talk on how binary limitation is not a limitation. That's bullshit. Else, Kolmogorov Complexity is a hoax)

I don't care how you skeptics think but, do not force me to think the same way as you. There's a lot of problems with Jan Sloot's case. Most of skeptics seems to be younger generations. In the old time, video buffering was a pain in the ass to wait for. It's not as fast as what you can see today. This makes the fact that playing 16 videos at the same time is a big problem for you to ignore. That's ONE. Every investor involved are fully aware of the old technologies limitations. That' TWO. That's all. <edited: I remembered my third point wrongly, they didnt take a look at the box, but listened for harddisk sound. http://www.gids.nl/techno/jan-sloot.html>

I myself aware about the limitations on data size all of you skeptics mentioned. That only applies to binary data. Is it not? Is it wrong to try consider something that works outside of your knowledge? OUR problem is that, IT IS TOO HARD for us to try and think about stuffs illogically. I think this might be a long-term problem.

Sorry for any grammatical mistakes since I'm not good with language you see.

Whoever read this and still analyzing the system, I hope that, with the informations I shared here, can help you try solving SCDS with different methods this time. Too many people stuck on the same problem known as "all possible values" for many years. SDCS smells something that's not limited by bit size.

Someone please translate "de broncode" book and share with us.175.143.213.79 (talk) 05:33, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

I re-read the link I've linked so that I can give out proper third point. Conclusion about the system contains harddisk itself is a problem too. The expert Abel didn't open the system but analyzed that the system contains a harddisk. While Jan Sloot was seen with harddisk before the the demo, he (Abel) keep denying the system while not explaining how the system display multiple videos at the same time with fast buffering speed? Is he gonna say Jan already loaded those videos into RAM? Sorry we don't have such good RAM capacity in the old time that can load up 16 videos at the same time. Just calculate how many GBs required to load into RAM using old codec. Loading up to 16 videos at the same time with old video system bound to cause very slow buffering waiting process. Now, will he say it's loaded using VRAM? Oh please. That's funny. Where's the buffering waiting process that occurs when you try to play specific scene? Jan Sloot's case is very fishy and smells misinformation. That's all.175.143.213.79 (talk) 06:26, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

Barium strontium titanate

Hi, I recall reading somewhere of early attempts at "analogue" memory chips that were used in voice recorders and talking cards eg the ISD1001.

Could this have been similar? The storace capacity might have been 8MB but in real terms if adaptive techniques were used to micro-adjust each cell once coarse written to overcome cell to cell variation, also a bugbear of the early voice recorders then yes you could get a lot of video data on that small memory chip. The quality wouldn't be brilliant but more than adequate compared to say a VHS tape as the human brain would fill in the gaps.

Incidentally the voice recorder chips were based on barium strontium titanate and could be mass produced very cheaply. For a more modern variant of this technology see

References

Inclusion on List of hoaxes

Do any WP:RELIABLE sources affirmatively characterize the Sloot Digital Coding System as a clear-cut hoax? I've questioned whether it belongs on the Wikipedia article List of hoaxes and I intend to remove it from that list if sources cannot be found. Discussion here. Please note that I'm looking for reliable secondary sources, not WP:BLOGS written by random self-styled 31337 h4ck3rs or tech gurus, and I do not intend to start a direct debate on the topic. Carguychris (talk) 16:26, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any. I'd be surprised if a source like that exists. Same old story: the professionals refuse to waste time debunking cranks, so unless there's a court case, the only sources are based on enthusiastic press releases from people who hoped to make money on the scam. ApLundell (talk) 00:13, 27 August 2024 (UTC)

Article is way to generous

For someone unversed in computing this article makes it sound way too much like it might have been a real thing that was mysteriously lost forever, when in fact it was an obviously impossible scam. (An unintentional scam perhaps but a scam nonetheless.) Timmmm3d (talk) 19:22, 7 September 2024 (UTC)

The article has "violating Shannon's source coding theorem" in the first sentence, but that's very jargony. It would be better to rephrase it, so even a layman clearly understands that Sloot's alleged invention is mathematically impossible.

The article is already saying that, but it's couched in jargon so that it's only clear to people who already know. ApLundell (talk) 04:39, 8 September 2024 (UTC)

I've extensively edited the article to incorporate the new cited source and clarify the significance of Shannon's source coding theorem. Carguychris (talk) 16:04, 9 September 2024 (UTC)