MD5 is a hashing algorithm that turns any input into a 32-character hexadecimal string. It's been around forever and was once used for security.

Why It's Still Around

MD5 is broken for security purposes - you can create collisions. But it's still used for checksums. You can verify a file downloaded correctly by comparing its MD5 hash to the expected value.

I use MD5 hashes to verify downloads all the time. It's a simple way to check file integrity!