As a native Chinese speaker, I can assure you that even the simpliest Chinese character ("", meaning "one", http://www.fileformat.info/inf... ) cannot be found in known online md5 hash dictionaries. So if Chinese characters (or any non-combining Unicode characters) are allowed in password boxes, we asian guys can create very-easy-to-remember-but-very-hard-to-brute-force passwords since their entroy is bloody high compared to printable ASCII characters. And a friend of mine hacked his Chromium to allow Unicode characters to be input into password boxes. :-)

Is that possible that your ISP has a web proxy set up between you and the public Internet? Some ISP will do that to save bandwidth. This may explain why the first test is slow and the second test is fast.