Seems like NickFitz was right - Telegraph hacked

[BlightyBoy]

An apparently random sequence of alphanumeric characters of variable length but with fixed bounds.

Actually, that depends...

If you use SHA or MD5, then DaveB is correct. However, I have implemented an encryption algorithm that produces a 32-bit unsigned integral number. This is particularly useful for either a) doing faster numeric, rather than textual comparisons, and b) using the "hashed" value of a alpha-numeric (text) as a key value in a binary search tree.