author here ... it's not THAT easy, that specific piece of code was highly obfuscated by proguard ( you know the a.class, b.class, c.class thing? XD ) and everything made me think about the "correct" algorithm, still I can't find where that 0xFF... is being set :P
In other words, obsfuscation was used instead of just applying good practice, and good practice is seemingly harder to debug for development than obsfuscation.
