[pbhjpbhj]

>an ivory tower example (yours) and the reality of user passwords //

So you don't think that 'md5 is only as difficult to read as plaintext is actually hyperbole'?

If this is the case then surely someone has a plaintext for the hash I wrote - how much more real can one get. It's a simple English language password.

[nnnnnnnn]

I can't get it for you because I have a single laptop at my disposal. However, any meagerly funded criminal enterprise which can front a few tens of thousands of dollars could tell you the answer quite easily.

It is not reliable cryptography, and if you provide an incentive to reverse that hash (rather than merely challenging people who have better things to do) then it will be reversed. When it comes to the type of enterprise which cracks systems for profit, it is as good as plaintext.

[pbhjpbhj]

>it will be reversed //

I don't doubt it could be reversed relatively easily. It doesn't appear to be in the online rainbow tables I tried. But having to look something up, have domain knowledge, making multiple computations, program a parallelised attack using GPUs or however one approaches such a problem I still contend it's significantly (though not greatly) better than plaintext.