If you're looking for hash collisions, you're not going to target a particular hash; you're going to leverage the magic of the birthday paradox and hash your way through a dictionary with passwords listed in order of decreasing probability (with "password" and "12345" listed first, then "p@ssw0rd" and "OU812", etc.) and match the resulting hash with entries in the password file. And you're going to do this once, building one rainbow table, and try it on every unsalted, SHA1 hashed password list you can get your grubby hands on, until you have a nice little dictionary of username / password pairs - and try it on whatever services you're targeting, because most people tend to reuse the same password over and over again (usually Joshua97 or MaryJune05 or some other combination of their kids' names and birthdates).

What's your syllabus look like? I just finished up my MSCS ...

Ever get the feeling that nobody else got the joke? I'm here to spare you from that feeling.

I have been posting anonymously for years; I also have another account that I usually use when I want to post something and get some feedback. But I wanted to log in to my original account, with my real name, to post just this short comment:

You, my friend, are a sensible human being. That's all I have to say.

I used to work for an academic journal (my usual writing style is a lot cleaner, when I'm not typing with my thumbs on a cell phone). Part of my job was to check references; another part was to read and sanity check the reader reviews. Just because your employer is incompetent, that doesn't mean every publisher is.