Hackers earn their place in history

NEWS

A Norwegian educational centre for cultural preservation lost the password to a historical database cataloguing 11,000 original books and manuscripts, but was able to recover it with help from the Web. Email messages from more than 100 good Samaritans flooded the Ivar Aasen Center for Language and Culture, starting on Thursday afternoon after the organisation called for aid in hacking into one of its own databases to which the password was lost, said a message posted to the center's Web site on Friday. Among the messages was the correct password to the locked database, which the centre had posted online. "Our computing expert is now on the case," Kirsti Langstoyl, librarian for the center, wrote in the posting. "On Monday we (will) know if we have the original database working, and we will present the name of the person with the final solution." It's unknown whether the helpful hackers that provided the correct answer decrypted the database, guessed the correct password, or used a flaw in the database's security to obtain access to the data. In its online message, the center said it would post more details on Monday. The centre had publicly requested aid from security experts on the Web last week after its employees were unable to open a digital catalogue obtained from the family of Reidar Djupedal after his death in 1989. Djupedal was a professor and an expert on Ivar Aasen, an itinerant Norwegian researcher who, in 1850, established a new language for Norway that bridged all the country's dialects. The new Norwegian, or Nynorsk, is spoken regularly by about 20 percent of the country and is the main language in Western Norway, where nearly 25 percent of newspapers use it. The widely used Dano-Norwegian language, or Bokmål, a written language based on Danish, makes up the other 80 percent, according to the center. Nine years ago, an archivist registered 11,000 of Djupedal's 14,000 titles in a DBase IV database, but the man died before the collection and the database reached the center, leaving the password-protected catalogue inaccessible. "We have no known information from him which can help us solve the problem," the centre lamented on the Web site. The centre called for help from anyone who could break the encryption on the database or find the password. The first email received by the centre on Thursday not only had the correct password, but also included the unencrypted files of the database. Submissions included "ladepujd" -- the late professor's last name spelled backwards -- "maiendaiog" and "vmaarett." It's unknown whether the latter two words are Norwegian.

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