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.
… Well, I guess that's what they've done. Surely nobody could ever have been this naïve, though; it's not as though Google massaging results into unusable mess is anything new.
How else would you find it? By typing domain name guesses into your address bar until you hit the right one? How would you be sure you've hit the right one and not a scammer/squatter?
This is not a particularly easy problem to solve, and I agree that relying on Google to accurately and safely deliver you to the correct web site isn't great either, but I think we'd be much worse off without search engines.
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domains, one who which said it was legit but not official, and another which said it was official but looked wildly out of date.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.
The idea is that you will need to put some trust in the project anyway, since you’re trying to install it. Might as well make it easier with a one line install.
Edit: You should only do this if someone reliable tells you to, honestly. Doing this with truly random projects you aimlessly find is not a good idea.
https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith...
This recently [1][2] got a lot of attention on the web and here on HN, along with a post on Mastodon from the author [3]
I imagine trying to disincentivize this and provide another shorter more official looking link is the hope here.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/17/puttyorg_website_cont...
One weird trick to make your insignificance seem significant!
I'm trying to grok this, but all of the posts sort of obliquely refer to things that happened in the past (even the old HN links here), rather than explicitly just explain what the hell happened.
The same thing happened with Facebook "pages", when they became a personal "soap box" by the owner of the page. It was downhill from there... You might as well turn the whole web into FB/Twitter/X/Insta promotional spam at that point.
> Unfortunately the person who owns putty.org
> started to use it to spread misinformation
> about vaccines and[...]
Isn't that rather fortunate in the grand scheme of things? It could have been a landing page monetizing various SSH clients for windows.Instead it's just some guy's website clearly unrelated to PuTTY. He's even gone out of his way to point people looking for PuTTY in the right direction. Who cares what his opinion is about anything else?
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.
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.
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.
grep AuthorizedKeysFile /etc/ssh/sshd_config
AuthorizedKeysFile /etc/ssh/keys/%u
cat /etc/ssh/keys/bender
from="[192.redacted]/24,[redacted]/20" ssh-ed25519 AAAAC[snip...] comment
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.
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.).
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
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250728091154/https://www.putty...
The homepage and the downloads page both seem fine to me.
(BTW, the collection of one-player puzzle games is super!)
* 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.
I work in OPs and use Putty daily. For people like me, finding and downloading the correct app is simple. For non-technicals, this just seems like the perfect way to download malware and destroy a company's reputation.
Puzzling, imo.
puttyclient.com
puttyofficial.com
puttytools.com
puttydownloads.com
downloadputty.orgThen 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/
This sounds like a virus site.
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.
That's how domain validated certificates that are used on most website today work.
And yes, it's bonkers that we need to rely on authorities like Let's Encrypt for this instead of just delegating trust via the same hierarchy as DNS.
Huh? The source is available on the original site and TTBOMK always has been, you're welcome to compile it yourself.
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. . (-:
Even a .com/org/net with something like getputty or similar as the domain name would feel less sketchy than putty.sofware.
putty.net is also up for sale but probably will be an unreasonable price and paying the troll toll would suck.
PuTTY's website is fairly clean and accessible, unlike this landing page.
Putty is a terminal emulator and an SSH + telnet client all in one. Now Microsoft offers a number of platforms that overlap to provide similar functionality.
WSL2 (aka WSL) is the Linux system that runs a Linux kernel and apps within Windows (technically a hidden HyperV VM) with some loose bindings to the OS resources for networking, files etc.
OpenSSH is the SSH client installed with Windows. It can be used via CMD or Windows Terminal + Powershell . You don’t need WSL installed. So it’s great for VMs or remote shells.
Powershell is the Windows Shell (like bash on Linux or CMD on earlier windows) that lets you run openssh and other windows CLI Apps
Windows Terminal is the new-ish (6+ years) terminal emulator that lets you run a variety of shells. Most commonly Powershell , Bash (WSL), or you can SSH to any host using openssh . It works like tmux with tabs/windows into any remote host .
I decided to lay this all out because Windows apps for SSH and terminals are a little different than Linux.
That said, some people like PuTTY. It is much easier to setup and use. It also offers other features (like serial communications).
Just open a terminal and type ssh just like you would in Linux.
I'm pretty happy with Windows Terminal these days, but before then, it was all PuTTY + SecureCRT.
Come on, even ChatGPT can do a better job than this.
It is a reasonable change to make. Do the rest of their native Win32 UI controls still use MS Sans Serif (Windows 98) or Tahoma (XP) instead of Segoe UI (Vista)?