Crack a Password, Save Norwegian History

Christian writes "With the death of the only person who knew the password to an archive held at a museum in Norway, suddenly the data became inaccessible. The result? A nationwide radio appeal asking for "hackers" to volunteer to help solve the problem! The Norway Post has the story." I wonder if they looked under his keyboard yet..

Comments

THe secret password is:

[ElCagado]

firstpostmotherfuckers!

Slashdoted Text

[Technician]

5. Juni 2002

Hackers respond to password challenge

Hackers have responded in large numbers to an appeal from the director of a culture center and literary museum on the west coast of Norway.

The password to one of their library archive systems is missing.

The museum built in honour of the famous Norwegian linguist Ivar Aasen received a gift of more than 1600 books and documents which had been catalogued and registered in a national data bank, which researchers and interested people may access.

Only trouble was that the expert who had helped the donor with the archiving work had died, and had failed to pass on the password.

In order to get access to the data base, Director Ottar Grepstad appealed on nationwide radio for help to solve the problem.
The response was above expectations, and the director is now busy chosing the expert most likely to solve the problem.

(NRK)

(this loaded very slow, but I got it.)

Re:I wonder....

[viffer]

Norwegian for "password" is "passord".

I wonder if they've tried that already...

Re:'Famous Norwegian linguist' = oxymoron.

[vegardolsen]

Ivar Aasen is famous in Norway. Created the language New Norwegian (Nynorsk). Norway use two languages. nynorsk and bokmaal.

Re:If I were to pass

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out the Dead Man's Switch

http://daisyman.arsware.org/dms/

More info

[Man Eating Duck]

A little info:

The database is from Dbase 4, I don't know how the security is on that format. It contains data about the norwegian linguist Ivar Aasen. For those interested in giving it a try, just search on norwegian pages to find the directors email address (name in another post). He's received quite a few emails already... (No, won't give the address here, pity the one who gets his email published on Slashdot).

Please excuse crappy english, save your grammatic flames.

Typhoon rips through cemetery; hundreds dead

[I am Jack's username]

I've put the contact details of who should take over the stuff I run (and the required passwords) in my testament. The only hassle is updating it regularly.

Re:I see 5: (slightly OT)

[caca_phony]

Rep (standing for "read evaluate print") is a dependancy for sawfish, which is probably why you have it. May be phased out in sawfish in favor of guile, but the sawfish author wrote rep, so don't hold your breath.

Information on Aasen, the Aasen museum and nynorsk

[say]

Here is some information gathered from the Ivar Aasen museum.

The National Centre of the New Norwegian Language and Culture

• Opened June 2000, as a centre for adventure and information on language and cultural matters.
• Designed by the architect Sverre Fehn, who has received the most outstanding international awards of architecture. Mr Fehn has also designed the Norwegian Glacier Museum at Fjærland.
• The most modern and sophisticated building in Norway, and a traditional Norwegian country courtyard with four old buildings.
• Presents a modern exhibition on language throughout the world (you may even find your own language there), the New Norwegian language, Norwegian culture, and an Ivar Aasen Museum, using modern electronic facilities as well as traditional, elegant presentation.
• All information in the exhibitions will be in Norwegian and English.
• An in-door concert hall with 110 seats; an outdoor amphitheatre with 300 seats.
• Concerts, readings, theatre, library, art gallery, conferences, the annual New
• Norwegian Festival of Literature and Music.
• In our cafeteria with 50 seats, we plan to serve traditional food and sophisticated new dishes created especially for the Ivar Aasen Centre by some of the best Norwegian cooks.
• A place for surprises, a nice meal, relaxing walks on easy paths into the nearby woods with glimpses of the Norwegian fjords.

The New Norwegian Language

• Norwegian consists of two written languages, Norwegian Bokmål (Dano-Norwegian) and Norwegian Nynorsk (New Norwegian), which are mutually understandable, but based on very different historical traditions.
• A long union with Denmark (1380-1814) made Danish the only written language for all Norwegians, but in the dialects the old Norwegian language lived on as an oral language.
• About 1850 Ivar Aasen published a dictionary and a grammar which set the standards for a new written language, The New Norwegian, as a common denominator for the dialects. Improving the cultural and social status of the lower classes; this language played a major role in the development of democracy in Norway.
• Today, New Norwegian is the main language of 20 % of the inhabitants, mainly in rural districts. Although it is a lesser used language than Dano-Norwegian in general, it is the main language of Western Norway and is used daily in mass media, at schools, churches and in public administration all over the country. 25 % of the Norwegian newspapers are published in New Norwegian, and some of the major theatres and publishing houses use only this language.
• Some of the best authors write in New Norwegian, e.g. Jon Fosse, whose plays were performed in 14 European countries in the 1990's.

Ivar Aasen

• Born at Aasen, close to the Hovden airport, as a son of a poor farmer in 1813. Died in Oslo 1896 as a highly respected intellectual, also abroad. Poet, linguist and founder of the New Norwegian language.
• Collected words and expressions from the living dialects by walking throughout most of Norway, altogether about 5000 km - more than 3100 miles.
• Knew more about Norwegian customs, traditions and everyday life in the 19th century than anyone else.
• Even today, some of his poems and songs are among the most popular.
• An eager botanist; his collection of 500 flowers and plants is in a very good condition.
• His linguistic methods are today used in several countries in both Africa and Asia.

oh-oh

[new death barbie]

Guess who's become the latest poster child for password escrow?

Re:so.. how are we supposed to store passwords?

[cowbutt]

Any -minimally skilled- IT operator knows he should never tell passes to other people. But, what if this person dies? How can we safely store passwords so that those can be retrieved if "shit happens"?

Google for "secret sharing" and you'll find plenty of references. Essentially, the secret (i.e. the password) is converted into a value that intercepts an axis of a n-dimensional graph. m points in n-dimensional space are then generated such that they lie in a straight line on a single plane. You can then distribute the values of the m points safe in the knowledge that you need at least n of them in order to calculate the point of interception of the secret.

AFAIK, this is how things like launch codes for nukes are stored and distributed (to counter the twin threats of elimination of keyholders preventing nukes from being launched, and to prevent a single rogue keyholder launching without appropriate authorisation).

Apologies to the maths/crypto purists out there if my description is fuzzy, over-simplified, or plain wrong, but it's been a while... ;-)

Better explanations can be found on RSA's site and in Ross Anderson's book "Security Engineering"

--

Re:so.. how are we supposed to store passwords?

[edp]

Er, I'm not sure what you're getting at. For example, any set of points (in a space of more than two dimensions) that "lie in a straight line" are necessarily also in a plane and are in fact in infinitely many planes.

Shamir's secret sharing is easy to describe: Any polynomial of degree k-1 can be completely figured out from k points on it but not from k-1 points. So to share a secret among any number of people so that any k of them can figure out the secret and any k-1 of them cannot, you make up a polynomial whose value at x=0 is the secret and you tell each person the value of the polynomial at other points (at x=1, x=2,...).

For example, any 2 points define a line (a polynomial of degree 1). If you tell me where the line is at x=1 and x=2, I can figure out where the line is at x=0. But if you only tell me where the line is at x=1, I haven't got a clue where it is at x=0, because it could still be anywhere. If you gave a million people different values for x=1, x=2,... x=1000000, no one of them would know the value of the line at x=0, but any two of them could figure it out.