"I'm embarrassed to say, on the very next day Chris's very own code grid was found in the back of his address book. It was almost like Chris Sievey was going, 'There you go, now we've all had our fun, there's the explanation.'"<p>And they say the universe doesn't have a sense of irony...
If Frank Sidebottom is an unfamiliar name, I recommend the short audiobook Frank by Jon Ronson as an entertaining story. Jon played keyboards in his band and is an entertaining writer.
An example of Frank's original worldview.<p>Anybody who's only seen the fictional film representation may find it surprising.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/yrM6sLx_DXo" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/yrM6sLx_DXo</a>
> I spent a while just looking at them going, 'What could he be saying, what could this mean?'<p>> But it was impossible to crack them […]<p>Confirmed uncrackable. He looked at it Jim, what else was he supposed to do??
A couple of quotes from OA with a personal 'translation'<p><i>"GCHQ told Sullivan that Sidebottom "had a small but dedicated following" among its staff."</i><p>Couple of people do Sidebottom dialogues as an in-joke to the extent that it begins to annoy co-workers.<p><i>"[After random outer triangles explained] 'Right, we've cracked it during a light-hearted training exercise.'"</i><p>Took a couple of minutes as a starter in a session.<p>PS: I use a Playfair style grid to jumble up my pass phrases to try to make them less susceptible to rainbow table attack. Am I wasting my time?
"The country's top codebreakers too seemed flummoxed until Sievey's son Stirling recalled how his dad would get the children to fill an outer row with random symbols, while Sievey would insert real code into the inner row."<p>Is it really that hard to fool some of the worlds top code breakers, simply by including some random digits?<p>So a code where every {x} symbol is random, and suddenly you've got an uncrackable code? Surely it cant be that simple?