Would you like me to register you a nicer domain name?
No, thank you. Even if you can find one (most of them seem to have been registered already, by people who didn't ask whether we actually wanted it before they applied), we're happy with the PuTTY web site being exactly where it is. It's not hard to find (just type ‘putty’ into google.com and we're the first link returned), and we don't believe the administrative hassle of moving the site would be worth the benefit.
I wonder if they changed their mind because Google ceased to be a reliable way to find them.
ahmedfromtunis · 7h ago
The first link I get when I searched for "putty" was `putty.org` which, according to the footer: "The PuTTY project or its authors have never owned this domain, registered it, or purchased it."
Nevertheless, I can't consider relying on probabilistic algorithms controlled by 3rd parties to be a wise strategy.
Also, these days, after decades of habit building and a rise in awareness about scam-related stuff, I think people expect to see the name of the project early on in the URL, not in 7th position as it is currently.
sambull · 21m ago
> I can't consider relying on probabilistic algorithms controlled by 3rd parties to be a wise strategy.
That's pretty much all of the AI industry and clients.
I suspect that the recent kerfuffle motivated people to finally clean out bogus hyperlinks that casually listed putty.org as the download site, which would have been contributing to inflated page rank up to that point. I found one on a wiki and fixed it, myself, and I'm sure that I was not the only person who went looking.
whizzter · 4h ago
It's not inconceivable that some Googlers reads here or otherwise and took note to punish that site.
reader9274 · 32m ago
Hmm why punish that site?
pandemic_region · 4h ago
Assuming he owns the green end.org.uk domain, why not letting people land on putty.greenend.org.uk ?
hammock · 40m ago
I barely know what SSH keys are, but last week when I was asked to provide one for an stfp site at work they said create a pair using putty.
Well I googled putty and found a couple different .org domains, one who which said it was legit but not official, and another which said it was official but looked wildly out of date.
Neither one I could find a download for Mac that worked. The one I tried gave a scary “we no longer allow putty sudo access as it’s dangerous” and when I googled this error I could find no explanation to assuage me.
And since I wanted to make sure what I was doing was legit, I searched for alternatives.
Eventually I discovered I could use command line in mac to generate the keys I needed. But first I installed Xcode then ran the command (I used chatgpt to tell me exactly how to get the type and length I needed). It was easy.
Side note, the whole culture of downloading random software and using it with just a single line in a terminal is always sketchy to me too. But I’m not a coder so I’m not used to it.
ok_computer · 21m ago
If you hadn’t discovered this already with you mac CLI commands, OpenSSH from OpenSSL ‘ssh-keygen’ command is a good way to create SSH keys in ClI and ships in many OSes or is a lightweight download. The OpenSSL website name is unambiguous, which is a benefit.
As much as I like fedi, it does make it hard to understand which user on which instance is the correct one.
pferde · 6h ago
Luckily, fediverse has an account-to-website verification feature, see https://joinmastodon.org/verification . Mr. Tatham's account on hachyderm.io uses it, so we can be reasonably certain that it's the correct account for him.
throaway920181 · 9h ago
Cool, but hachyderm.io also is not a trusted/recognizable domain for me. Trust issues all the way down!
andrewflnr · 9h ago
It's definitionally the correct domain for Simon Tatham's social media. What are you expecting here?
closewith · 9h ago
How would the average person know that?
viraptor · 8h ago
Average person aware of trust on social network / internet - because https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham has a validated link to the author's homepage.
Others - they don't understand the trust anyway, so there prerequisite steps missing before the main question anyway.
jstanley · 8h ago
hachyderm.io says it has a validated link to his homepage, but if you don't already trust hachyderm.io that means nothing.
aembleton · 4h ago
If you check the source of the website that it links to [1], on line 168, we have this
<p>I'm on Mastodon as <a rel="me" href="https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham">@simontatham@hachyderm.io</a>.</p>
If you trust that website, then you can be sure that this Mastodon account is the right one.
Looks like it's as complicated as a parts inventory system developed in house for a half a million employee company...
viraptor · 5h ago
There's a link on one side and a meta tag on the other. It's as simple as you can make the validation between two sites. It's not even fediverse-specific really - there were other services doing something similar before.
closewith · 7h ago
No, it really means nothing. Identity on the internet is not a solved problem.
pferde · 6h ago
You are wrong.
It means that whoever owns the website marked as verified also owns the social account. See https://joinmastodon.org/verification for a quick overview of how it works.
closewith · 6h ago
No, it means a certain link exists on the website. On Hacker News of all sites, I would think we should all know that's not sufficient evidence of identity for an update regarding the source of critical software like a terminal.
viraptor · 5h ago
Nobody claimed it validates the identity in any way. It validates that the person at the other website confirms it's their social account and the social account matches the other direction. The real identity is not involved here in any way and never was. You're disagreeing with someone nobody here raises.
But the link validation confirms that if you believed that the original download site belongs to the author, then you would have almost the same guarantee about the social account. (+/- the chances of the putty website being hacked)
closewith · 5h ago
Yes, your caveat at the end there is exactly why this method shouldn't be trusted, as it's indistinguishable from an attacker with access to embed a single link.
So it doesn't confirm the account belongs to the author, it confirms the site has a specific link and nothing more.
Adding a <meta> tag or creating a page with certain content are already used even for more impactful verification, like getting issued a certificate for that domain.
If an attacker does have broad access to edit the HTML of your website, I feel that's already the issue and Mastodon verifying that "this person controls this website" isn't even really wrong.
closewith · 2h ago
So you have read that page and understand its purpose is to link social media profiles for informational purposes, but don't understand that it's not suitable for any kind of auth, let alone in a software supply chain?
Ukv · 2h ago
By the XFN spec, it "demonstrates that the same person has control over [the pages]". The docs page I linked links to two further specs for using it for authentication in the way that Mastodon does.
closewith · 1h ago
I'm sorry. The XHTML Friends Network rel tag is neither reliable identification nor authentication. It's designed to say "this is my blog" in low stakes environments.
No sane sober person would use it to authenticate messages about changing URLs in a software supply chain.
nickv · 17m ago
No, if somebody has access to edit your home page directly, your blog, your company site, etc - you've already lost the game.
How is this any different than your email address being compromised? How is this different than having your laptop compromised and somebody downloading your .ssh folder?
The issue here isn't "is this reliable identification" - because it IS reliable. Your concern is "how likely is this to be compromised vs other things" and that's a fair concern - but there are plenty of very secure web sites out there. This isn't saying "I am john doe and this is my identity", this is saying with some confidence "this person on mastadon is the same person as the person who wrote this web site copy" and that's a totally fine piece of identification for the right context.
Ukv · 44m ago
If an attacker has control over the page to edit arbitrary HTML, that chain is already compromised. Even if the attacker's exploit only allowed certain attributes, just the href and rel attributes needed for this protocol would already be enough to execute javascript and load stylesheets on that page.
This is in addition to the original site linking to the new one with a news post. Does that also mean nothing because an attacker could add a news post to the page?
zo1 · 3h ago
It was bad enough that we had to tell developers to trust some rando website to download a tool that we'd use to potentially plug in sensitive production usernames + credentials.
And now they've gone and made it worse by posting some new site and confirming the new link is real on their weird "hachyderm" social media post thing. Yeah, talk about a grey-beard get-off-my-lawn developer screaming at the wind and wanting to make it worse for themselves and their "brand".
viraptor · 1h ago
> on their weird "hachyderm" social media post thing
At this point tech people should understand what Mastodon is. For their own benefit. It's been years.
closewith · 1h ago
10 MM MAU estimated. Not exactly foundational to online discourse.
jachee · 9h ago
So… what would be a trusted domain, for you, then?
Exactly. Which nicely confirms all this by saying:
Latest news
2025-08-14 New website, putty.software
We have a new domain name for the PuTTY website!
...
roman_soldier · 7h ago
What if someone hacked his site and inserted that news item? Better to visit the guy in person and verify.
rzzzt · 6h ago
What if someone planted the idea of adding a new website for the project while he was asleep?
cyphar · 7h ago
Which is what the original response linked to. :P
horizion2025 · 3h ago
Hi that sad. I remember years ago sitting with a colleague and we had to download putty. Then we found the usual page. There is always the concern if it is legit or a fake site with malware. But I remember my colleague saying "it has to be genuine, only a computer scientist could make such a primitive web site"
dlcarrier · 9h ago
Simon Tatham's most important work is keeping its page:
I love these kind of webpages with little programs to discover.
bayindirh · 7h ago
That's a great variation of the game. Thanks for sharing the page. It's a gem!
vovavili · 3h ago
This is a perfect version of the game, nice.
zvr · 5h ago
The first thing I install in every Android device.
torginus · 6m ago
I like putty, by for the sake for all that is holy, why doesn't it take .pem keys?
MortyWaves · 10h ago
Ever since Windows gained Terminal and OpenSSH, my usage of Putty has almost entirely ceased except for serial for embedded systems work.
Then I realised Putty ships with a CLI version which I now use in Terminal for accessing serial.
throaway920181 · 9h ago
I haven't used Putty since I stopped using Windows for anything serious (in the early 00s.) It was my favorite quick and dirty SSH and serial client before then though!
sshine · 7h ago
I have to say, I liked SecureCRT a lot, too.
PuTTY was just easier to get ahold of on a new install.
I think that's why it won out for me. That and its simplicity.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 · 10h ago
I always used mingw and similar projects. IMO, putty was always annoying (but very useful) software. The "ecosystem" seems better now though.
MortyWaves · 10h ago
Indeed, that and “git bash” were always the weird outliers. I’m glad there’s now native options.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 · 9h ago
mingw predates git on windows (and in general), but yeah, indeed.
I remember my journey trying to disambiguate Git Bash, Git for Windows, MinGW and MSYS2. To this day, I'm still not sure I have the full story right.
Helmut10001 · 9h ago
I don't trust Windows with my SSH keys. Since about 2 years, I am actively preparing my final migration to Linux. There's some Windows software left that I need to replace before this move is possible, but I am close.
Bender · 3h ago
I agree with you and just wanted to add that for what it's worth one can optionally limit where ssh keys are useful by adding network restrictions on the public key / server side. e.g.
or wherever your system is configured to look for public keys, typically /home/username/.ssh/id_dsa.pub. I use a different location. Even being really broad like adding a /16 or /8 for a home ISP is still better than allowing the entire internet. This can also be useful where machine-to-machine ssh keys are utilized one can limit the access to that network so that should keys leak the potential blast radius of damage is reduced. For example, the keys for an Ansible account can be restricted to the Primary/Secondary Ansible server IP addresses or at very least the CIDR block(s) of the network(s) they reside in. Broad restrictions are not perfect but perfect is the enemy of good or good enough.
Example use case would be that lets say a contractor from Microsoft tries one of your keys. Your restriction limits the key validity to 24.0.0.0/8 and they are coming from 207.0.0.0/8. They will be denied Authentication refused and you now have log entries that can be shared with their fraud department, the world, whomever. Obviously the tighter the restrictions the better, at the risk of requiring a static IPv4 or IPv6 address if too tight. One can always have lighter restrictions on a fall-back account that requires additional hoops to sudo / doas / su.
gregoryl · 8h ago
Just pull the trigger. A surprisingly large amount of software just works on wine.
I'm a c# dev with near 20 years experience, and I finally got the shits with advertising in the start menu. Arch Linux, because I figured why not do it properly?
I game a fair bit, and find most things on steam just work.
magnat · 7h ago
> I'm a c# dev with near 20 years experience
Which IDE do you use? JetBrains Rider?
mystifyingpoi · 9h ago
Is such paranoia warranted? Millions of corporate laptops run Windows 11 just fine. I know M$ is evil and spying on you, but not to such degree.
miahi · 8h ago
Having a Windows 11 corporate laptop with a domain/Entra login, I actually trust it more than a home Windows 11 with a Microsoft account. Because if I lock myself out, I have a contact (corporate support) that is actually interested in helping me recover everything. With a Microsoft account it's a mess. I had so many problems with Microsoft accounts that I lost count of how many I have, and most are broken in some way, because of different issues and different service integrations over time. The Skype account is now useless. I never recovered my paid Minecraft account after one event. With a machine with a local account, now I have to be very careful on what I click related to MS accounts, because trying to solve various issues with Teams, I managed to get the local account linked with that MS account. I spent hours trying to recover a different account after I randomly filled one nagging question about birth date - who wants to give the real birth date to Microsoft - and then I got locked out because I said was underage :). So yes, one of the big issues is the push to have a linked OS account where you have to rely on MS support to solve your issues, otherwise you basically get locked out of your machine and other things you paid for.
Also, domain policies offer more control over the corporate PCs (this is how some of the MS spying is shut off on corporate PCs; it's debatable if the corporate spying added by other domain policies is an improvement).
RyanHamilton · 8h ago
I have to agree, I've also suffered account problems. I was locked out from an email address I used for 20 years. It refuses to take my password which is still valid. I've changed phone number since 20 years ago so can't use that and the security questions were nonsense as I was a teenager. Originally my account never had phone number, they insisted I add it when they integrated my Skype account perhaps. So I didn't expect access to that phone number to be a strong ongoing requirement.
JdeBP · 5h ago
I recently, by playing around with the LAN's default PAC file and a dummy HTTP server, discovered that on a machine that says in System Settings that Proxy Auto-Discovery is turned off, the PAC file is still fetched and used by a too-large number of Microsoft/Google background auto-update services, from Windows Update to Office.
I had been lucky through having done my own experimentation, decades ago, with setting up a default PAC file on the LAN and having left it in just-send-everything-directly mode, keeping it as I upgraded things on the LAN, all of these years. Because otherwise I would have been vulnerable to a third-party in the search path for years, on a machine that clearly and unequivocally, including per direct inspection of the setting in the registry, has this switched off.
> Is such paranoia warranted? Millions of corporate laptops run Windows 11 just fine.
Yes. With Windows Recall data mining surveillance screenshots taken every 5-7 seconds, completely disregarding if this may compromise your security, safety or privacy, we move from "you're the product" to "you're a pet in a zoo, and we want to learn from your behavior."
> I know M$ is evil and spying on you, but not to such degree.*
I mean, they could be recording every second.
I'm pretty sure that's a bandwidth issue.
Not because they really feel like giving you 3-4 second pockets of security, safety and privacy.
delfinom · 42m ago
>Windows Recall data mining surveillance screenshots
Some of you people are just too far gone to turn off a setting.
chainingsolid · 21m ago
We don't trust them to not turn it back on later...
chneu · 8h ago
I don't trust microsoft to not push an update that exposes all my stuff. Their updates the last few years have been an absolutely shitshow in so many regards.
Kwpolska · 3h ago
If Windows were to steal your SSH keys (lol), would you really think using a third-party program would protect you? The evil code could just read the key you configured in PuTTY.
nine_k · 8h ago
Why replace it? Wine works fine.
malux85 · 8h ago
Can you tell us which software? (Even if it’s very niche) I’m really curious where the gaps are.
xobs · 6h ago
I know Altium doesn’t work, which is very important if you need to provide someone else files in Altium format. If you just want to work on designs there’s always Kicad, which is increasingly very good! But it can’t save in Altium format, and I’m not sure I’d trust it for manufacturing.
The other thing I’m missing is my 3D Gerber viewer called ZofZPCB. I’ve not gotten either it or Altium to even start.
oguz-ismail · 10h ago
> Terminal
Have they fixed font rendering yet? cmd.exe looks better on my laptop
Windows is basically spyware at this point. The only way to win is to not play.
perching_aix · 5h ago
Are you referring to the pixel-level font smoothing they use by default (as opposed to CMD's subpixel-level font smoothing)?
You need to define the "antialiasingMode" key in the settings JSON for the default profile to hold the value "cleartype", rather than "grayscale" (which is the default value). I don't believe this is exposed in the GUI settings page.
Note that this only affects the actual terminal emulation area. The rest of the application will still be pixel-level font smoothed (so e.g. the tab titlebars, the settings, etc.).
MortyWaves · 10h ago
I’ve never noticed any issues on any computer with it…
recursive · 10h ago
The first time I ever saw it, the text already looked better than cmd.exe via conhost.
Something wrong with my eyes? Doesn't cmd.exe look smoother in this screenshot?
recursive · 8h ago
I agree. In those screenshots cmd looks better. Not sure what's up.
DrinkyBird · 2h ago
It's the lack of subpixel anti-aliasing (aka ClearType). For some reason it's being erased from a lot of modern software. It's why Windows >= 8 UWP apps and GNOME look so blurry.
MortyWaves · 9h ago
I find the Terminal more readable because the white seems brighter in your screenshots
Looks like you’ve gone for something like the classic text mode 80x25?
Geezus_42 · 3h ago
cmd.exe looks worse to me. Particularly because of the lack of padding on the left.
Kwpolska · 3h ago
cmd looks pixelated.
mvdtnz · 9h ago
Terminal looks far better.
throaway920181 · 9h ago
I've only used it through RDP on Wayland and it's been fine visually. Downloading it can be a challenge if you don't know where to look (Github, not Microsoft's App Store...)
someodd · 7h ago
I was expecting a modern redesign when I read the headline, but I was so delighted to be greeted by such a nostalgic style!
Cheers to decades of memories with PuTTY!
Simon_O_Rourke · 7h ago
Thank you PuTTY for saving my butt so many times in archaic security-theatre companies who would block all ssh apps except leave the PuTTY website and downloads still available.
Y_Y · 11h ago
> Unlike other landing pages, this one is run by the PuTTY team itself, and not by a third party with their own agenda.
No idea what this means.
Anyway Simon Tatham's games are so good I think he gets a pass on anything else he does.
The current holder of that domain is using it to host a single page that pushes anti-vax nonsense under the guise of fighting censorship... but also links to the actual PuTTY site. Very weird mix of maybe-well-meaning and nonsense.
kahirsch · 10h ago
The guy behind that page and bitvise appears to have gone totally crazy during the pandemic. On his blog, he said in 2021 "I forecast that 2/3 of those who accept Covid vaccines are going to die by January 1, 2025."
And in 2022, he wrote "Covid-19 is mostly snake venom added to drinking water in selected locations. There may also be a virus, but the main vehicle of hospitalizations is boatloads of powder, mixed in during 'water treatment.' Remdesivir, the main treatment for Covid, is injected snake venom. mRNA vaccines hijack your body to make more snake venom."
mock-possum · 7h ago
> mixed in during 'water treatment.' Remdesivir, the main treatment for Covid, is injected snake venom. mRNA vaccines hijack your body to make more snake ven
Whaaaaat the fuuuuuuck
Can anyone debug this statement?? I’m not looped into weird this realm of paranoid delusion torecognizs what they’re referring to here.
chuckadams · 1h ago
There's no sense debugging the output when the hardware that produced it is clearly defective.
neilv · 10h ago
That looks like an open and shut ICANN trademark case to me.
They do kinda make the journalist look bad. That email exchange opened with a bunch of extremely-loaded questions, and quickly transitioned into the journalist actively advocating for the transfer of the domain, and using "I'm going to report about this" as a threat.
Plus, I can find absolutely zero evidence of the existence of a German journalist called "Mirai F", so I'm a bit suspicious. (It might be the "PuPRed" person being maybe-doxxed -- but that's a blog site which entirely consists of a single article about PuTTY, so I'm not convinced "journalist" applies in a meaningful sense.)
The Bitvise answers also don't look good, of course. Nobody comes out of that one smelling like roses.
I say this as someone who thinks putty.org was pretty sketchy before it went full anti-vax, and is currently looking like a slam-dunk example of the kind of thing trademark law was meant for.
tanepiper · 9h ago
The guy who runs putty.org is absolutely the South Park basement guy
commandersaki · 9h ago
There isn't a trademark for PuTTY.
immibis · 5h ago
Do they have a trademark? It costs $325 per year plus roughly $650 for the initial application (even if rejected). Is he paying that?
I don’t really want to give it credit by linking to it, but this seems to refer to putty[.]org which is using its search ranking to push things unrelated to PuTTY.
I hope they only change the domain name, and keep the spartan websiste.
nine_k · 10h ago
The regular page looks designed by the rules of the earliest version of HTML from 1993: no colors, no fonts, no graphics; it could be a port of a Gopher page. But the new landing page goes all the way to 1995, with fancy custom link colors, and colorful bitmap graphics!
aembleton · 4h ago
The new one even has CSS making it much more modern.
Little bit unrelated, but it is super annoying that this site breaks back button in browser.
bayindirh · 7h ago
I'm sure it's a great piece of software, but sometimes, the simpler is better. I used PuTTY for a decade or so, and while it was kinda ugly and clunky, it's very beautiful and perfect because of its imperfections.
Geezus_42 · 2h ago
I used to. Being able to store all my configs in simple text files that I could easily move from machine to machine was the killer feature for me.
JdeBP · 5h ago
There are two pieces of software named Kitty. That one is the other one. (-:
userbinator · 5h ago
When the first sentence on the page is "This website requires Javascript to be enabled.", I leave; but not before looking at the source and discovering a relative monstrosity, unlike the original PuTTY site which is almost pure content.
flowerthoughts · 8h ago
Is it just me that feels www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ has some kind of sentimental value? I built a locked-down version fof PuTTY for their termainl-based (book) library system in 1998. It's been with me a long time.
indigodaddy · 6h ago
Not sure what all the negative comments are trying to accomplish. It's a perfect and simple little landing page. Simon has finally done what everyone has been asking for, so why are some people still complaining and harping about "trust" ? Get a grip.
roguebloodrage · 6h ago
If they are opening or changing the main page, then the main page should be spamming everyone that it is their new legitimate page, but it is not.
This looks like a PuTTY/WinSCP hijack all over again.
Get over yourself.
nulbyte · 3h ago
It is. The very first news item on the original page mentions it. It's plain as 1993.
ozim · 9h ago
Since windows started shipping open ssh I don’t have any use for putty.
snvzz · 1h ago
It requires an extra click to get to the actual website.
PuTTY's website is fairly clean and accessible, unlike this landing page.
userbinator · 10h ago
Somehow, these new long TLDs just feel spammy and "fake" and I usually ignore them when they show up in search results. Unfortunately the .com, .net and .org are already taken.
CalRobert · 9h ago
They were originally a protection racket to shake down brands on the idea they’d have to register them all. Donuts even had the Domain protected marks list which let you pay to block registration but not have the domain yourself
JdeBP · 5h ago
The org. one being already taken being the straw that broke the camel's back in this case. It has been a FAQ item for years. But the org. domain squatter's recent behaviour crossed the line, from what M. Tatham has said on the FediVerse.
I (and I suspect several others) suggested a TLD that you would probably have no qualms about, a few weeks ago. M. Tatham went with software. instead; which is fair enough. software. has been around for a while, and is stable and a fairly on-point choice.
Be thankful that it was not putty.party. . (-:
neuralkoi · 9h ago
I agree, there's some good alternatives available too of about the same length (if you include name + TLD):
Those actually feel spammy too; e.g. seeing "official" or "download" in a name has always triggered a suspicion, because normally there's no need to specially say your site is "official" or "download" besides to mislead.
Then again, I may be biased due to always remembering PuTTY's official page being someone's personal site hosted on a .org.uk server.
anything with "download" in the domain name looks scammy to me
crossroadsguy · 9h ago
All of these are better than and I assume cheaper than that .software one.
Even puttytelnet.com/org/net is available.
Hell the puttytel.net is available
TZubiri · 10h ago
Certificate by Let's Encrypt, issued to "putty.software" no other info.
Sometimes I feel like we are training users to disregard safety mechanisms for phishing.
Using putty was never the pinnacle of professionalism and open source auditing anyway, it's just a binary you download on windows before you hear the gospel of linux and ssh.
viraptor · 8h ago
Why would that be disregarding safety? There's no extra text you can put on the website that would prove anything else (apart from messages signed by a known key, but honestly nobody would check those). Certificates don't provide any identity validation in practice.
nottorp · 6h ago
I'm sure you could ask Mr Tatham to offer a version with feel-good certificates for the low low price of a couple Silicon Valley lattes per month...
akoboldfrying · 9h ago
> Using putty was never the pinnacle of professionalism and open source auditing anyway
Huh? The source is available on the original site and TTBOMK always has been, you're welcome to compile it yourself.
epigramx · 9h ago
Not a big deal, because they tend to be trusted eventually by the search engines and the language models, though I don't trust much the latter to tbh.
crossroadsguy · 9h ago
And thus NextDNS blocked it under NRDs blocking criteria :)
roguebloodrage · 7h ago
People have tried to hijack PuTTY and WinSCP forever.
This landing page looks suspicious. Even though the HTML links look like they go back to the legit site (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty) I'm not clicking through to find out. There have been spoofing of links for 100's years.
layer8 · 2h ago
Browsers have been giving you the ability to view what the actual link URL is since forever.
yreg · 1h ago
There is the homograph attack, but browsers do their best to mitigate it nowadays.
I do see this type of versioning as an indictment of such a technology for production scenarios, it's all a house of cards if that's what you are building upon.
It's a liability disclaimer versioning schema
IshKebab · 3h ago
lol is this a joke? Why are the screenshots blurry and miniscule? And randomly spaced in the middle of the page.
Come on, even ChatGPT can do a better job than this.
thrown-0825 · 7h ago
What is the point of PuTTY these days?
wainguo · 9h ago
wow! I used PuTTY about 18 years ago.
gjvc · 7h ago
JFC I wish they would stop using Courier as the default font. It's like looking down the barrels of a shotgun. Consolas ftw.
blueflow · 2h ago
I like Courier. Are we gonna bash our heads in and argue over personal preferences?
nereid · 8h ago
Why not add a link on the old page to the new one? Bad practice and suspicious.
Would you like me to register you a nicer domain name?
No, thank you. Even if you can find one (most of them seem to have been registered already, by people who didn't ask whether we actually wanted it before they applied), we're happy with the PuTTY web site being exactly where it is. It's not hard to find (just type ‘putty’ into google.com and we're the first link returned), and we don't believe the administrative hassle of moving the site would be worth the benefit.
I wonder if they changed their mind because Google ceased to be a reliable way to find them.
Nevertheless, I can't consider relying on probabilistic algorithms controlled by 3rd parties to be a wise strategy.
Also, these days, after decades of habit building and a rise in awareness about scam-related stuff, I think people expect to see the name of the project early on in the URL, not in 7th position as it is currently.
That's pretty much all of the AI industry and clients.
* https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/115027646348662282
I suspect that the recent kerfuffle motivated people to finally clean out bogus hyperlinks that casually listed putty.org as the download site, which would have been contributing to inflated page rank up to that point. I found one on a wiki and fixed it, myself, and I'm sure that I was not the only person who went looking.
Well I googled putty and found a couple different .org domains, one who which said it was legit but not official, and another which said it was official but looked wildly out of date.
Neither one I could find a download for Mac that worked. The one I tried gave a scary “we no longer allow putty sudo access as it’s dangerous” and when I googled this error I could find no explanation to assuage me.
And since I wanted to make sure what I was doing was legit, I searched for alternatives.
Eventually I discovered I could use command line in mac to generate the keys I needed. But first I installed Xcode then ran the command (I used chatgpt to tell me exactly how to get the type and length I needed). It was easy.
Side note, the whole culture of downloading random software and using it with just a single line in a terminal is always sketchy to me too. But I’m not a coder so I’m not used to it.
https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith...
Maybe just call this the Future Home of Putty or something with a big link to the official page.
I suppose word will get around pretty fast but still.
Others - they don't understand the trust anyway, so there prerequisite steps missing before the main question anyway.
<p>I'm on Mastodon as <a rel="me" href="https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham">@simontatham@hachyderm.io</a>.</p>
If you trust that website, then you can be sure that this Mastodon account is the right one.
1. https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/
Looks like it's as complicated as a parts inventory system developed in house for a half a million employee company...
It means that whoever owns the website marked as verified also owns the social account. See https://joinmastodon.org/verification for a quick overview of how it works.
But the link validation confirms that if you believed that the original download site belongs to the author, then you would have almost the same guarantee about the social account. (+/- the chances of the putty website being hacked)
So it doesn't confirm the account belongs to the author, it confirms the site has a specific link and nothing more.
Adding a <meta> tag or creating a page with certain content are already used even for more impactful verification, like getting issued a certificate for that domain.
If an attacker does have broad access to edit the HTML of your website, I feel that's already the issue and Mastodon verifying that "this person controls this website" isn't even really wrong.
No sane sober person would use it to authenticate messages about changing URLs in a software supply chain.
How is this any different than your email address being compromised? How is this different than having your laptop compromised and somebody downloading your .ssh folder?
The issue here isn't "is this reliable identification" - because it IS reliable. Your concern is "how likely is this to be compromised vs other things" and that's a fair concern - but there are plenty of very secure web sites out there. This isn't saying "I am john doe and this is my identity", this is saying with some confidence "this person on mastadon is the same person as the person who wrote this web site copy" and that's a totally fine piece of identification for the right context.
This is in addition to the original site linking to the new one with a news post. Does that also mean nothing because an attacker could add a news post to the page?
A link that looks like this:
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.ht...
And now they've gone and made it worse by posting some new site and confirming the new link is real on their weird "hachyderm" social media post thing. Yeah, talk about a grey-beard get-off-my-lawn developer screaming at the wind and wanting to make it worse for themselves and their "brand".
At this point tech people should understand what Mastodon is. For their own benefit. It's been years.
Latest news
2025-08-14 New website, putty.software
We have a new domain name for the PuTTY website!
...
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/
Try Mines, you never have to guess.
Then I realised Putty ships with a CLI version which I now use in Terminal for accessing serial.
PuTTY was just easier to get ahold of on a new install.
I think that's why it won out for me. That and its simplicity.
interesting to scan the log on that: https://github.com/git-for-windows/build-extra/blob/main/Rel...
Example use case would be that lets say a contractor from Microsoft tries one of your keys. Your restriction limits the key validity to 24.0.0.0/8 and they are coming from 207.0.0.0/8. They will be denied Authentication refused and you now have log entries that can be shared with their fraud department, the world, whomever. Obviously the tighter the restrictions the better, at the risk of requiring a static IPv4 or IPv6 address if too tight. One can always have lighter restrictions on a fall-back account that requires additional hoops to sudo / doas / su.
I'm a c# dev with near 20 years experience, and I finally got the shits with advertising in the start menu. Arch Linux, because I figured why not do it properly?
I game a fair bit, and find most things on steam just work.
Which IDE do you use? JetBrains Rider?
Also, domain policies offer more control over the corporate PCs (this is how some of the MS spying is shut off on corporate PCs; it's debatable if the corporate spying added by other domain policies is an improvement).
* https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/114693762493884550
I had been lucky through having done my own experimentation, decades ago, with setting up a default PAC file on the LAN and having left it in just-send-everything-directly mode, keeping it as I upgraded things on the LAN, all of these years. Because otherwise I would have been vulnerable to a third-party in the search path for years, on a machine that clearly and unequivocally, including per direct inspection of the setting in the registry, has this switched off.
* https://jdebp.uk/FGA/web-browser-auto-proxy-configuration.ht...
Yes. With Windows Recall data mining surveillance screenshots taken every 5-7 seconds, completely disregarding if this may compromise your security, safety or privacy, we move from "you're the product" to "you're a pet in a zoo, and we want to learn from your behavior."
> I know M$ is evil and spying on you, but not to such degree.*
I mean, they could be recording every second.
I'm pretty sure that's a bandwidth issue.
Not because they really feel like giving you 3-4 second pockets of security, safety and privacy.
Some of you people are just too far gone to turn off a setting.
The other thing I’m missing is my 3D Gerber viewer called ZofZPCB. I’ve not gotten either it or Altium to even start.
Have they fixed font rendering yet? cmd.exe looks better on my laptop
You need to define the "antialiasingMode" key in the settings JSON for the default profile to hold the value "cleartype", rather than "grayscale" (which is the default value). I don't believe this is exposed in the GUI settings page.
Note that this only affects the actual terminal emulation area. The rest of the application will still be pixel-level font smoothed (so e.g. the tab titlebars, the settings, etc.).
Something wrong with my eyes? Doesn't cmd.exe look smoother in this screenshot?
Cheers to decades of memories with PuTTY!
No idea what this means.
Anyway Simon Tatham's games are so good I think he gets a pass on anything else he does.
The current holder of that domain is using it to host a single page that pushes anti-vax nonsense under the guise of fighting censorship... but also links to the actual PuTTY site. Very weird mix of maybe-well-meaning and nonsense.
And in 2022, he wrote "Covid-19 is mostly snake venom added to drinking water in selected locations. There may also be a virus, but the main vehicle of hospitalizations is boatloads of powder, mixed in during 'water treatment.' Remdesivir, the main treatment for Covid, is injected snake venom. mRNA vaccines hijack your body to make more snake venom."
Whaaaaat the fuuuuuuck
Can anyone debug this statement?? I’m not looped into weird this realm of paranoid delusion torecognizs what they’re referring to here.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250728091154/https://www.putty...
Plus, I can find absolutely zero evidence of the existence of a German journalist called "Mirai F", so I'm a bit suspicious. (It might be the "PuPRed" person being maybe-doxxed -- but that's a blog site which entirely consists of a single article about PuTTY, so I'm not convinced "journalist" applies in a meaningful sense.)
The Bitvise answers also don't look good, of course. Nobody comes out of that one smelling like roses.
I say this as someone who thinks putty.org was pretty sketchy before it went full anti-vax, and is currently looking like a slam-dunk example of the kind of thing trademark law was meant for.
* https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@thomastc/115031906344758192
Using putty as my daily driver was definitely part of my coming-of-age story as a windows sysadmin way back when.
putty.org is not run by the PuTTY developers
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44558328
Hijacking Trust? Bitvise Under Fire for Controlling Domain of FOSS Project PuTTY
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44579265
* https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/115026616955174986
This looks like a PuTTY/WinSCP hijack all over again.
Get over yourself.
PuTTY's website is fairly clean and accessible, unlike this landing page.
I (and I suspect several others) suggested a TLD that you would probably have no qualms about, a few weeks ago. M. Tatham went with software. instead; which is fair enough. software. has been around for a while, and is stable and a fairly on-point choice.
Be thankful that it was not putty.party. . (-:
Then again, I may be biased due to always remembering PuTTY's official page being someone's personal site hosted on a .org.uk server.
There is actually a mirror at https://www.puttyssh.org/
Even puttytelnet.com/org/net is available.
Hell the puttytel.net is available
Sometimes I feel like we are training users to disregard safety mechanisms for phishing.
Using putty was never the pinnacle of professionalism and open source auditing anyway, it's just a binary you download on windows before you hear the gospel of linux and ssh.
Huh? The source is available on the original site and TTBOMK always has been, you're welcome to compile it yourself.
This landing page looks suspicious. Even though the HTML links look like they go back to the legit site (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty) I'm not clicking through to find out. There have been spoofing of links for 100's years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack
I do see this type of versioning as an indictment of such a technology for production scenarios, it's all a house of cards if that's what you are building upon.
It's a liability disclaimer versioning schema
Come on, even ChatGPT can do a better job than this.