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Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

andrewducker.dreamwidth.org

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Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#111
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me putty is still preferred way to ssh with Windows. Nowadays windows is shipping openssh.exe, so I can run it from cmd and it kinda works for quick simple actions, but clipboard works weirdly, basically I have to use right-click/paste to reliably paste data, shift+insert works in some apps and does not work in others. Putty just works like it worked 10 years ago, it's good old reliable tool.

I moved off PuTTy to WSL plus the new terminal. It's just easier because you have all the things available like scp etc. That said PuTTy (or rather its derivate Kitty) served me well for years. But it's just so much easier to do key management in Linux via WSL.

I've added unxutils on every single windows machine I've owned since... almost ever. I can't imagine living without it.

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#113
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because his puzzle-games collection are computer games you can play yourself, they can be found here: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ Or in the appstore/playstore. My current timewaster is 'patterns',a nonogram puzzle

Interestingly, I JUST finished reading (many years after it was published) The Player of Games written by Iain M. Banks. In it, there is an orbital habitat named Chiark. I assume that the interest in games and the hostname of his webserver are very much related.

The server is named after that orbital habitat, but not by Simon - it's someone else's webserver.

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#114

This is a nice post from a healthy person who is comfortable with his position, and isn’t overburdened. However, what would happen if that were not so? What would happen if he Could not, Would not, or were Unable to work? It would all fall apart. And that is the inherent fragility in these small critical opensource projects.

I think somebody else would pick it up. Simon is not the only person who works on PuTTY and there are several people who might reasonably pick up the security side of things. The various UI bits might be slightly less well distributed, but I am sure somebody could be found in pretty short order.

there are between 0 and 1 people in the world who have cohesive understanding of how all the shell, terminal, and stuff between need to interact + the requisite knowledge to know what and what doesn't have security implications

DAY OF THE SEAL SOON

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#115
post #36

These days, there seems to be (at least) two kinds of open source software developers: 0. Those who release their code under an open source license, in the hope that it will be useful to others in some way. 1. Those who do the same as above, with the additional hope that they will be paid for in some ill-defined way. And when they are not, take to twitter and blogs to proclaim, "somebody should really do something ab…

That's not how it works. You start writing the code thinking it will be easy. You'll be done in a few weeks. You can see it all in your head. But in fact, it's never done. And it takes more and more time. Now you can't justify the effort because it's interfering with the rest of your life. You need relief from time spent doing paid work to keep working on the project.

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#116
post #27

I once used PuTTY as the base for an internal SSH tool. We needed to provide data entry teams with access to a green screen but didn’t want to expose any more servers than what they were authorised to use and a simple interface because a lot of the data entry guys were technologically illiterate. After spending hours looking for solutions that were purpose built for this kind of thing I gave up took PuTTYs source and…

For me putty is still preferred way to ssh with Windows. Nowadays windows is shipping openssh.exe, so I can run it from cmd and it kinda works for quick simple actions, but clipboard works weirdly, basically I have to use right-click/paste to reliably paste data, shift+insert works in some apps and does not work in others. Putty just works like it worked 10 years ago, it's good old reliable tool.

Windows terminal has a lot of weird behavior. I found it impossible to enter vim block mode using ctrl+v, for instance. It kept on doing some combination of insert and paste.

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#117
> If one of them is rude to me, then the quintessentially British approach of a faint frown and a tone of mild reproof (or its email analogue) generally gets good results – probably a lot better than mouthing off like a sweary 13-year-old in return.

I love this.

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#118
post #27

I once used PuTTY as the base for an internal SSH tool. We needed to provide data entry teams with access to a green screen but didn’t want to expose any more servers than what they were authorised to use and a simple interface because a lot of the data entry guys were technologically illiterate. After spending hours looking for solutions that were purpose built for this kind of thing I gave up took PuTTYs source and…

For me putty is still preferred way to ssh with Windows. Nowadays windows is shipping openssh.exe, so I can run it from cmd and it kinda works for quick simple actions, but clipboard works weirdly, basically I have to use right-click/paste to reliably paste data, shift+insert works in some apps and does not work in others. Putty just works like it worked 10 years ago, it's good old reliable tool.

Good to hear - I was using Putty and Pageant before openssh.exe on Windows became available. Works great - with WSL (1 _and_ 2), and with KeeAgent (KeePass Addon for SSH Keys). I enjoyed reading the post from simont, it resonated with my own observations (not that I contributed anything comparable like Putty to the open source movement). It is more that colleages (at university) expect me to fix/improve my oss as soon as they email me, and even get angry when I can't (due to time constraints etc.).

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#119
post #14

It took me until the footnote to remember that this is Simom Tatham, who indeed also authored a fine no-nonsense collection of little puzzle games, which has been ported to a bunch of platforms. Here they are playable online on Tatham's site: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ And here's the Android version: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/name.boyle.chris.sgtpuzzles/

I like Mines. It's Minesweeper but you never have to guess.

Re: Putty maintainer on his attitude towards security and open source

#120
post #14

It took me until the footnote to remember that this is Simom Tatham, who indeed also authored a fine no-nonsense collection of little puzzle games, which has been ported to a bunch of platforms. Here they are playable online on Tatham's site: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/ And here's the Android version: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/name.boyle.chris.sgtpuzzles/

His puzzle game collection is as perfect in its domain as PuTTY is as an ssh client. 'unruly' and 'signposts' are neat little timewasters, but devolve into a lot of counting at larger sizes.. 'flip' with random shapes is a great fidget-style toy 'galaxies' at 'unreasonable difficulty' gets pretty crazy and plenty more, eg 'solo' provides every version of sudoku that you might want

Solo with 3x3 jigsaw + killer at unreasonable difficulty is the most fun I've ever had solving sudokus, requiring some really novel logic. In comparison, the normal 3x3 at unreasonable difficulty is really tedious, often devolving into a series of trial and error decisions.
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