Isn't that kind of what it was created for? They had to know from the start that not all the people and groups who used it would have noble intentions.
I briefly switched from an iOS phone to an Nexus 5 and had the same issue. For other reasons, I switched back. A colleague of mine liked the Nexus a lot and made the switch after I did. He has been fighting this for months. Everything works properly for a while. Sometimes, several weeks will go by. Then, out of the blue, my phone tries to send the message to him as an iMessage. It's bizarre and frustrating.
I misinterpreted what I was looking at and I made a bad assumption that since the same hash for a known password appeared several times in my narrow view that it was the same for all occurrences of the known password.
Your comment that the maximum number of a given salt||hash was seven also threw me for a second. Am I correct that that is purely coincidental? Given the limit of only two characters for the salt (in what set? all printable characters?) and the sheer volume of accounts there is simply some unintended overlap? It just happens that the most it occured was seven times?
The thing is that they don't appear to be random. Everyone with the same password had the same salt. I guess default isn't the right word. Whatever algorithm they used to generate the salt always generated the same two characters given the same input. I'm curious as to whether anyone knows the details of that function.
This lead me to a question about DES. If no salt is provided it uses a static or default two character salt. In the gawker leak, the first two characters of the stored hash were the default salt. How is that two character default derived?