Red faces all round

The organisers of the conference set the attendees a challenge at the start of the show. They gave delegates a string of numbers and asked them to crack the code and reveal the message. At stake was free admission to next year's conference.

Many of the 13,000 attendees, including the finest minds in the security industry, tried to break the code. I've heard discussion of it all over the show, with some outlandish ideas using higher mathmatics and one guy who was convinced the answer lay in statistical analysis of the speaker program. Still, as the show closed, no-one had cracked the code.

So there was justifiable shame for all when the encoding device was revealed - a Dick Tracy comic code book. It seems sometimes we can be too clever for our own good.