Hash

Patrick Stach has announced the availability of his source code for finding MD5 collisions and MD4 collisions (Coral cache links provided to prevent slashdotting). MD4 collisions can be found in a few seconds (but nobody uses that any more), while MD5 collisions (still being used!) take 45 minutes on a 1.6 GHz P4.

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Yeah, it's kinda old news; but MD5 is still used extensively in the realm of bittorrent! The fear is that fakes will flood torrents and render them useless (I wonder who's a big enough jerk to do that... One name comes to mind). Fear not, however, a lot of clients including Azureus and BitComet use SHA-1 hash functions.