What in the world is all that junk to the right of PlanetMike.com? Is it the inner workings of the United States tax code? Or is it just a bunch of random characters? Well, technically it is the md5 hash of the phrase "planetmike" (no .com at the end).
Why would I do such a thing? Simple, this domain isn't going to be stumbled on by accident. So I will use this domain for registering with unique email addresses at different sites.
For one reason I wanted to do this, see the May 15th issue of Counterpane's Crypto-Gram. Using a hashed email address should reduce the likelihood of someone spoofing my email address, for example to make me think that Amazon.com is distributing my email address. To create a hashed address, I incorporate the domain name of the site, the date, and a password. Put these together and you end up with a fairly unique email address.
If you have any questions about this, please send me an email. 1026b1ddef4278a0249c51accd63c934@f79f65a2ea59016f063cb987424ed7b2.PlanetMike.com will work just fine. Yes, that's a total of 80 characters. :) Mike
July 30, 2003