LZIP Advanced File Compression Utility

n8willis writes: "There's a project called lzip at SourceForge that lets you compress your files down to 0% of their original size. How's it work? The "L" stands for "lossy.""

Incoming...

Batten down the hatches and hide the women and children -- April 1st is here again. The Register [theregister.co.uk] is already in the spirit. Believe nothing you read until, oh, say, Wednesday, just to be safe.

BTW, I wonder if I could use lzip's license on my next source distribution?

Excellent package

The nice thing about it is that the "lzip" and "lunzip" utilities work on all modern platforms. I've tested them on Linux, Win32, MacOS and a WebTV so far.

On a related note...

Unisys and Compuserve have just announced that they also hold the patent for lossy compression and will be collecting royalties from all open and closed source implementations.

Interesting Output

I just ran the program and it produced the following output:

All your bytes are belong to us!

Nice Logo :)

I love the "lossy" logo image, on which they obviously tested their code.

I love this program!

I just compressed my huge college Thesis with it. I won't need any back up when its that small! Now I'm just haveing a bit of trouble uncompressing it....

Actually, it's quite upsetting

I mean, this story isn't nearly as good as the "Apache on PalmOS" story from last year. Now *that* was a good April Fool's story.

Practical application

If someone ran Jon Katz through lzip, would anyone notice?

Or...

lzip 1.0 bug found - when I ran a Jon Katz article through lzip and the file size INCREASED. I suspect it has to do with an entire file being composed of worthless bits but I'm not sure.

Or...

The US Government has been using this for months now, witness speeches by the Pres...

this is bunk, I think

I am pretty sure this is a joke, as unless the data is somewhat specialized (sound, pictures, moving pictures, to name a few), then it is very difficult to quantify which parts of the data to get rid of when compressing.

You can't just take some random file, drop a few bits here and there, and expect it to be usable on the other side. It works for JPEG, MPEG video, and MPEG audio because they know precisely how human senses work.
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Their licensing agreement is hilarious

Take a look:

The Free Object-Oriented License [sourceforge.net]

Ultimate Data Compression

was the old system that reduced everything down to one bit

1 = "You had data"

0 = "Now you don't"

very efficient under some situations :P

Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

Nothing new here . . .

Another case of open-source programmers stealing ideas from Microsoft. Heck, Windows has been doing this kind of compression to random files on my hard drives for years!

Introducing Microsoft ActiveLZip

REDMOND (A.P.)

Founder of Microsoft Corproation, Bill Gates, announced today the release of a new compression engine for use in Microsoft Windows compressed volumes based on the popular Open Source LZip compression format.

"ActiveLZip will enable Windows users to achieve the kind of file compression they've always wanted and needed. Also, we've added several new features to the compression format you won't find in that low-end Open Source crap," Gates Said in an interview.

Gates went on to list the new featuers of ActiveLZip, including MicrosoftShred, a feature designed to encrypt documents before they are compressed, and MicrosoftIPRights, a feature designed to allow music distributors to designate rights on whate files can and cannot be compressed using ActiveLZip.

Initial usage reports from industry critics indicate that ActiveLZip doesn't quite compare to the open source products. Exhaustive testing on the lossy compression algorithm indicates that it is not capable of reproducing the 0% file-reduction size offered by the Open Source application. When questioned about this discrepancy, Microsoft Chairman, Steve Ballmer responded, "Leave me alone, Damnit! I'm trying to make sure that the Sate of New York is paying for all their Windows 2000 licenses".

RIAA settles: NAPSTER to use LZIP

April 1, 2001, Redwood City, CA -- Representatives of the Internet music sharing service Napster announced today that they have reached an agreement with the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Under the terms of the agreement, all music files shared via Napster will pass through Napster servers where they will undergo LZIP compression. As part of the agreement, the RIAA and all of its members will drop all pending lawsuits against the music sharing service and will grant Napster licenses to distribute their extensive catalogs of copyrighted music via LZIP compressed files. At today's press conference, Napster founder Shaun Fanning hailed the decision as being "good for the record companies, good for the artists, and good for Napster users -- who will experience much faster downloads while needing far less hard disc storage." Mr. Fanning went on to say that Napster will continue to offer MP3 downloads of music by artists that no one wants to hear and that users should "keep an eye out for the latest single from The Flaming Pit Bulls -- an accordian power trio that skillfully blends punk, country, hip-hop, and new age."

steganographic compression techniques

While tinkering recently with Outguess [outguess.org], I took a simple image about 28k and used a 1k text file to combine it into a new image (steganography owns). Well in certain instances depending on what I decided to embed into the image, the image would drop in size to about 7k some times, and other times it would still drop in size. Only once did it ever go over 28k which was when I embedded about 50k worth of text into the image, which still looked crisp to the naked eye.

Just thought I would share this. At one point I was thinking about making a script to lower the sizing of the many pics I have on my porn [antioffline.com] section, but I never bothered.

I also noticed there were other tricks to saving space on files but again, never got around to mentioning them, maybe some time I will who knows.