I noticed that only the first 8 characters of passwords seemed to matter

Have you got some code that demonstrates that ? Here is some code that negates that statement: 
use warnings;
use strict;
use Digest::MD5 qw(md5_hex);

my $pass1 = '12345678zy';
my $pass2 = '12345678ab';
my $pass3 = '12345678mn';

print md5_hex($pass1), "\n", md5_hex($pass2), "\n", md5_hex($pass3), "
+\n";

[download]
For me, it produces:

653080cea849964e8bd43ef33355c01b
b86ffaf7de29e8aa87785572741025f3
25c8c10a5673749bb097eea0e407addb

I defy anybody to come up with an MD5 collision for any strings of equal length.

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to Re^3: Would Like Recommendation for an SHA256 module by syphilis
in thread Would Like Recommendation for an SHA256 module by TheEnigma

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