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Using Google to reverse MD5 and how I almost revealed my password to the world
In this article Steven explains how he used Google to find the password for a given MD5 hash for a user that hacked into his site.
In one of the comments a reader points to this website that offers a direct database of md5 hashes. You enter a string and get its MD5, you enter an MD5 and (if it’s known) you get the original string.
The database only works on known (text, MD5) pairs. If I ask for the text of an MD5 the db hasn’t seen before, it won’t give an answer.
I use a single password to all my internet activities, because I’m lazy. So I almost went ahead and entered that password into the md5 database in order to check if the md5 is known. Then I realized how stupid this would be – it would actually add the information to the db, and actually reveal to the world my password.
Instead I privately checked what my MD5 is (using this C# code), then entered the MD5 into the DB to check if it knows the original password.
The result? No it doesn’t 
Some xkcd
http://xkcd.com/341/
http://xkcd.com/342/
What’s amusing, beyond the Kill Bill 2 analogy, is that “hacking” and “algorithm complexity” are almost orthogonal concepts. An 1337 hacker doesn’t necessarily knows his algorithms, and of course algorithm designer (אלגוריתמיקאי?) is usually a lousy hacker if anything.
IMHO.
Good Programmers
See a discussion on the selection of programming languages on Eli’s Blog, and my note about general qualities of good programmers.
Contet-Aware Image Resizing
A new way to resize images based on the content, while maintaining the way “important areas” appear.
Watch the YouTube demonstration.
Cool Computer Science Stuff!
First, the simpler one. A really cool algorithm that finds holes of any shape in a given image, and “patches” them from an exiting bank of other images. This might be similar technology to Photosynth.
Second, a historical moment for Computer Science. It appears the first NP-Complete problem has been solved in polynomial time. They use some sort of “optical solution” and not a Turing machine, and the number of photons used is proportional to N^N. I don’t know if this will have deep theoretical implecations (haven’t read the article yet), but it’s interesting (to C.S geeks).
Checkers Solved
I always said the game is not interesting, compared to chess and Go.
This Slashdot post confirms it – someone solved Checkers (שש בש), by creating a big ass database containing all possible positions…
