During the early eighties, Ernie from Sesame Street was used by the Americans to pass information to Cold War spies. Even simple counting and word games were in fact highly complicated ciphers. This practice was brought to an end when it was found that a recording of the stripes on Ernie's sweater played at 10 times its normal speed through a cassette player actually loaded "Daley Thompson's Decathalon" on a ZX-Spectrum.