If they were that serious about security-- the chips we made also implemented this same compression algorithm. It would have been trivial to hook one up to an arduino and feed it the data you wanted to encode. I assume someone realized this, or they never really had a need to encode their own data (we provided a extensive library of encoded data).

I strenuously disagreed with the business justification for keeping all this stuff secret. But it was my job to respect those decisions.

It was a lot of fun writing the (rails) app itself.