I raised that possibility back in early August after the two rounds of backlink updates in July (and no PR update). Now I see that I am not alone in that reasoning -- some people called me too speculative back then.

The article you referenced above shows two tool bar updates that coincide with those backlink updates -- the toolbar revisions showed up about a week after each event.

I strongly feel that Google is working around this checksum problem in some fashion. Just changing the checksum will not do anything for them, because it will be cracked again with brute force methods.

What we need to look at now, is when the new version of the toolbar propogates totally and they cut off the old one. What will happen to all the tools on the web? Which ones will resurface and be functional again? (ie the DigitalPoint tools for instance).