No, I'm not serious. But if everyone wakes up for a second, checks if they are vulnerable and maybe, accidentally stumbles upon 'Why you don't want to use MD5 for your authentication' posts.. Wouldn't the world be a better place tomorrow?
Of course I don't want to advocate using MD5, even iterated a thousand times, for both of the reasons you state. There are better alternatives. scrypt appears to be one of them, and if it stands up to analysis, it's better than PBKDF2 and bcrypt, which in turn are better than MD5-crypt.
However, MD5 iterated 1000 times is still 1000 times better than MD5 iterated once (which an alarming number of codebases still use!) and the vulnerabilities that have been published in MD5 are not sufficient to speed up an attack on an MD5-crypted password file.
So MD5-crypt is still vastly preferable to many alternatives, including traditional Unix crypt(), even though MD5 has been broken and DES hasn't.
MCF is an ad-hoc cruft because the orginal crypt() is weak.
Anyway guess who did it :
"let's use strlcpy/strlcat instead for these static string copies" - Rasmus I guess that's Lerdorf himself
Whoever it was also didn't check the return values for error. Strlcat returns the length of the new string which might not be the same as strlen(dst) + strlen(src).
"I'm not a real programmer. I throw together things until it works then I move on." - Rasmus Lerdorf
Here's where he broke it : Sun Aug 7 16:10:34 2011 UTC http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/trunk/ext/standard/php...
Here's it being fixed : Fri Aug 19 22:49:18 2011 UTC http://svn.php.net/viewvc/php/php-src/trunk/ext/standard/php...
[1] http://packages.python.org/passlib/modular_crypt_format.html
Tests, I'm in charge, I don't test.