News You Can Bruise for 2000 January 13

OK, the mystery is solved. One byte of the JPEG was obfuscated; adding 16 to it fixed the whole file. Only problem is, the files on the CD are encoded using arithmetic coding, a Super-Huffman-Coding technique which is patented by IBM. According to the data compression FAQ, this technique offers 5%-10% greater compression than the normal Huffman coding technique. Well, I (or my mother) may have been bilked out of $70, but at least I learned a lot about the JPEG file format.