Re:40 years of UNIX (Score 2, Informative)

In a non-bonehead password scheme, user passwords are stored after running them through a one-way hash function. A quantity of random data can be added to the password before hashing, to prevent identical passwords from producing the same hash, thus revealing the fact that they are identical. This is called a salt, and can be left out in the open. To check a password, you put the entered password and the unprotected salt together, hash them, and check the value against that stored.