I think Mike is correct. My reasoning by analogy follows.

There's a game called Skedaddle, and a Usenet group, rec.players.skedaddle. A well-known player, Mike, offers a $5000 challenge for a feat, called the four-froot-hoot, which he believes is simply impossible to achieve.

A fellow skedaddling enthusiast, Patrick, takes him up on the challenge, some baseline terms are negotiated, and Patrick presents his putative four-froot-hoot. Some might say it meet the terms of the challenge.

Mike objects, he says "you're a rat, Pat! look at the FAQ, Jack, that's not even skedaddle" and indeed, the F.A.Q. of rec.players.skedaddle does indeed state in plain language, that it ain't even skedaddle so it can't be a four-froot-hoot.

You make a bet in the club, you play by the club rules.

But the challenge wasn't for performing four-froot-hoot, the challenge was described in text and adhered to. Mike thought he was describing four-froot-hoot, but accidentally only made the challenge about four-froot. The club rules even described why four-froot was not an interesting challenge unless it were four-froot-hoot, which makes it doubly on Mike to issue the challenge for four-froot-hoot and not just four-froot, yet he flubbed it.

The "it ain't even skedaddle" aspect is just incorrect. Compression is a term of art, and it is very general. Saying that "hiding" things in the filesystem is cheating is no different than saying that using the previous frame to reduce the size of the following frame in a video compressor is cheating. Yes, you do have to be careful of exactly what your inputs are, but there is great value in taking advantage of additional forms of input even if they might be initially unexpected.

Besides, Mike's smugness deserves some comeuppance.