gemsling

Blu-ray/HD-DVD decryption key?

No, but thanks for playing. It's an MD5 hash. Now, what string might be hashed so frequently that it appears 210,000 times on public webpages?

the decryption key for HD DVD is 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0 :)

but I'm surprised that the MD5 for "" (ie a zero length string) has 210k search results for it.
(yes Nathan, I'm ashamed that it took me a little bit to recognise that particular MD5 string)

Why would you recognise it? Hashing NULL is not the type of thing you'd do often... But I was interested to see if anyone would think of NULL as a special case.

Why would you recognise it? Hashing NULL is not the type of thing you'd do often

Cause null is a good reference. :)
Especially when you use MD5 hash as a means to generate your passphrases.

I searched for it - still didn't know what it was. And frankly I'm still none the wiser, LOL. What's an MD5?

Dom figured it out. MD5 is a hashing algorithm. Use MD5 on a file and you get a "hash" - a string of hex digits that is highly likely to be unique.

Good for verification: eg. download software and check the MD5 sum to make sure it hasn't been alterred.

Good for dealing with passwords: eg. for this OpenID script, I store the MD5 sum in the config, so my password can't be seen.