Octospider@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Well, it’s sort of possible to compress large things into small sizes. But I don’t think it would work for this situation.
There are things called “.zip bombs”. Where an otherwise small file, when unpacked, can take up a large amount of space.
A famous example of a zip bomb is titled 42.zip, which is a zip file of unknown authorship consisting of 42 kilobytes of compressed data, containing five layers of nested zip files in sets of 16, each bottom-layer archive containing a 4.3-gigabyte file for a total of 4.5 petabytes of uncompressed data.
Otherbarry@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz 2 weeks ago
Zip bombs wouldn’t apply here, from what I understand to create those you’d have to start with uncompressed data. The typical example is using a bunch of zeroes as the starting point, not only is that compressible but the compression algorithm will look for redundancies in the data to increase the compression efficiency (a bunch of zeroes would have tons of redundancy).
Stackoverflow has a good discussion on it stackoverflow.com/…/how-does-one-make-a-zip-bomb