Harald Nesland

Finally the fact that the “cryptography” used in Brønnøysundregistrene has been broken has been made public. Digi.no has an article about it in Norwegian. The first time I came across this “cryptography” was a couple of years ago. Strange no-one else talked about it before now.

Anyway, the data being obfuscated is the national identity numbers for owners and contact persons in companies. There is no reason for that data being available, it has no use and is most likely a technical mishap :-)

UPDATE: I just got a call from some people at Brønnøysundregistrene, they asked me to remove this disclosure paragraph. So well, it’s gone. Sorry.

We came across this obfuscation when we were porting the database from Brønnøysund to another database system (MS Access doesn’t really scale, contrary to common belief..). Most fields were obfuscated, and the software for reading the database is useless :-)

They should have used Blowfish instead. That would at least take one Morris O’Brian to crack! Because Bruce Schneier has a backdoor in the encryption algorithm!

Finally I can try out the 3D-plugin for Sesam Maps. This is actually pretty cool. Got lots of nice pictures from Kristiansand too. View the town from different angles.rn

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rnrnVisit Sesam! (I can’t link anything because Safari 4 messes with some z-ordering in Wordpress so the link-dialog appears below the shadow or something.. stupid webbrowser.. also, the plugin doesn’t work anymore so I can’t really link something useful anyway :)

I’m currently writing a new application for the iPhone and iPod. The initial version will be norwegian-only, but I’ll probably put out an english international version later on. I need to see if the concept is allright and useful. Hopefully it will be available at the AppStore at low cost soon!

Also, I’ve got a new job and there’s lots of new things to be done.