[cap-talk] use of hashcodes?

[Raoul Duke]

hi,

I'm wondering how people feel about using hashcodes wrt making
promises about the behaviuor/quality/security of a system, since
hashcodes have collisions. E.g. i was skimming the recent
waterken-joe-e paper and it mentioned using hashcodes to make caching
work well, and it said, "two responses with the same ETag must yield
the same text" so i'm wondering about the case of 2 different texts
colliding in ETag space. Thanks for any edification -- i might be
totally confused here -- and/or thoughts.

sincerely.