One of the most endearing

One of the most endearing - and enduring - things about technology is its ability to make those who say something is impossible look daft. So a Wired news story on a Florida firm's claims to have created "perfect compression" is interesting. Perfect compression would be a compression routine that could compress any computer file by at least one bit (many files can be shrunk by much more than this, but not all, depending on the patterns of data inside it). Perfect compression would mean you could repeatedly shrink files, again and again, until they were a tiny fraction of their original size. That would revolutionise data storage, modem speeds, you name it. Has this unknown firm cracked the puzzle? Or is it just (another) hoax?