On Tuesday, March 5, 2002, at 12:13 PM, Donald W. Larson wrote:
> Seth said:
>
>> So, the odds of running into two URL's which produce the same MD5 hash
>> are 1 in that loong number. Not very likely at all. Certainly not a
>> guarantee, since there are an infinite number of possible URLs and
>> therefore there are an infinite number which could all produce the
>> same MD5 hash string. In reality its safe to say that we'll never see
>> it happen.
>
> Seth,
>
> There are only so many characters and a length limitation that can be
> used to make up a url regardless of the character set. Therefore, there
> is a calculated number of combinations, not an infinite number. ;-)
Don,
You misread Seth's sentence. He said because there are an infinite
number of URLs, there are an infinite number of URLs that all create the
same MD5 hash... ie: collisions are guaranteed given the set of all URLs.
Then he says that's not likely to ever happen in practice for this
situation... which is something I agree with.
Jim
