Are you asking if the leading zeroes are unnecessary? If so, probably.

The original article I found ( http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/hackers-pinch-obfuscation-technique-defcon-presentation-060911 ) mentions "8 digit pieces". When I was researching this, I found a few sites that had the conversion tables ( http://www.pcguide.com/res/tablesASCII-c.html ) and they were 8 bit.

I guess I just never really considered it. \:\/