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I tend to figure that there must be people other than me who don't read Slashdot regularly but still find this stuff interesting. If I'm wrong, ignore this posting.

Seems an archivist at the Ivar Aasen Centre for Norwegian Language and Literature died recently, leaving a database for which he had been the only person who knew the password. The Centre posted the database online and asked people to try to find the password to it; five hours later, a Swedish programmer sent them the password, which turned out to be the last name, spelled backward, of the original owner of the book collection that was catalogued in the database.

There are all sorts of interesting issues here, including the question of how to go about ensuring access to your password-protected data after your untimely death (and it turns out there's a really cool approach to this "secret sharing" based on polynomial equations; you can give each of n people a piece of information that can't be used to reconstruct the secret number unless they all (or a subset of a size that you determine) share their information with each other), but mostly I'm mentioning this here because of the sweet note posted by the director of the Centre: "When a public institution like ours ask for help from the so called data hackers, we show that their expertise must be regarded seriously and that it can be helpful for the society." Made me smile.