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 n

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.