Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Downloading PuTTY Safely Is Nearly Impossible (2014)

noncombatant.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 173 posts

Re: Downloading PuTTY Safely Is Nearly Impossible (2014)

#31

Post by astrodust »

cturner wrote: post #17
hughes wrote: post #4

Putty is pretty awful anyway. Git for windows installs a shell that is not terrible, includes an ssh client, and is distributed over https. It is my go-to when I have to use a windows machine.

What causes you to say that putty is pretty awful?

How about the fact that it's awful?

Can you seriously compare PuTTY with even the most lacklustre terminal available on OS X or Linux? It's an atrocity of UX design straight out of the Windows 95 era.

Their home page is also the epitome of not caring about user experience even to the slightest degree. Nearly zero effort: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

I've seen people construct more impressive pages given only a few hours of HTML and CSS training. I'm not even kidding.

I'm not saying everything has to be slick and beautiful, but there's a thing called pride in craftsmanship, and PuTTY has none of that. It's just sad.

Re: Downloading PuTTY Safely Is Nearly Impossible (2014)

#33

Post by Igglyboo »

Someone1234 wrote: post #6

None of which would have mattered if Putty.exe was codesigned. Unfortunately it is not. Code signing certificates are insanely expensive. The cheapest one I could find from a CA was $73/year (3 year minimum). I could go on a long rant now about how much CAs are in collusion and how they're making everyone more insecure though their pricing, but that would be redundant as I think "everyone knows that" by now. Let's En…

$73/year is not free but calling it "insanely expensive" is pretty unfair.

Re: Downloading PuTTY Safely Is Nearly Impossible (2014)

#34

Post by wildpeaks »

Another reason to prefer the unix-like tools (that are included with Git for Windows (http://git-scm.com/downloads) but are also available separately) over PuTTY is Vagrant, it can't run "vagrant ssh" on Windows otherwise.

Also, you'd always need dedicated key files because PuTTY uses PPK instead of regular OpenSSH ones.

Re: Downloading PuTTY Safely Is Nearly Impossible (2014)

#35

Post by joshstrange »

ceejayoz wrote: post #18
Someone1234 wrote: post #6

None of which would have mattered if Putty.exe was codesigned. Unfortunately it is not. Code signing certificates are insanely expensive. The cheapest one I could find from a CA was $73/year (3 year minimum). I could go on a long rant now about how much CAs are in collusion and how they're making everyone more insecure though their pricing, but that would be redundant as I think "everyone knows that" by now. Let's En…

If SSL is free and easy (especially if it's automatable) to generate through Let's Encrypt, the use case for wildcards mostly goes away.

> When Let’s Encrypt launches in mid-2015, enabling HTTPS for your site will be as easy as installing a small piece of certificate management software on the server:

"When" being the keyword. Also they don't, as of this post, do code signing...

Re: Downloading PuTTY Safely Is Nearly Impossible (2014)

#36

Post by jff »

astrodust wrote: post #31
cturner wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What causes you to say that putty is pretty awful?

How about the fact that it's awful? Can you seriously compare PuTTY with even the most lacklustre terminal available on OS X or Linux? It's an atrocity of UX design straight out of the Windows 95 era. Their home page is also the epitome of not caring about user experience even to the slightest degree. Nearly zero effort: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ I've seen people construct more impressive pag…

Maybe he should put that same content into a Twitter Bootstrap site

Re: Downloading PuTTY Safely Is Nearly Impossible (2014)

#37

Post by mkr-hn »

meritt wrote: post #25
mkr-hn wrote: post #5

Title should be "Downloading Putty Safely Is Nearly Impossible" Don't most people install stuff in Windows through Ninite when possible these days? I know it has at least one SSH client. And in my experience, the vast majority of good software is at the top of any search query.

Windows user for 20+ years. I've never heard of Ninite.

It's a bit like a package manager. You tick all the things you want to install, and it'll install them with sensible defaults and no prompts.

Re: Downloading PuTTY Safely Is Nearly Impossible (2014)

#38

Post by fl0wenol »

lelandbatey wrote: post #22
hughes wrote: post #4

Putty is pretty awful anyway. Git for windows installs a shell that is not terrible, includes an ssh client, and is distributed over https. It is my go-to when I have to use a windows machine.

I agree. I find installing Cygwin, which installs MinTTY, is a much better experience, especially since you get normal ssh instead of a Gui-wrapped ssh.

Oh yes, I almost forgot about MinTTY!

A more focused, no-networking kind of PuTTY. Reads your settings from your "home directory" on windows, very handy.

People don't like writing terminal emulators. I don't blame them!!!

Re: Downloading PuTTY Safely Is Nearly Impossible (2014)

#39

Post by joshstrange »

Igglyboo wrote: post #33
Someone1234 wrote: post #6

None of which would have mattered if Putty.exe was codesigned. Unfortunately it is not. Code signing certificates are insanely expensive. The cheapest one I could find from a CA was $73/year (3 year minimum). I could go on a long rant now about how much CAs are in collusion and how they're making everyone more insecure though their pricing, but that would be redundant as I think "everyone knows that" by now. Let's En…

$73/year is not free but calling it "insanely expensive" is pretty unfair.

While I fully understand where you are coming from let's try and remember that putty is 100% free and I'd bet money the author puts in more time/energy/money than he gets back from it. That means that ANY money spent is more money in the hole making $73/yr ($219 all at once b/c you have to pay for 3 years) quite a bit of money.

Re: Downloading PuTTY Safely Is Nearly Impossible (2014)

#40

Post by jkot »

fl0wenol wrote: post #28
hughes wrote: post #4

Putty is pretty awful anyway. Git for windows installs a shell that is not terrible, includes an ssh client, and is distributed over https. It is my go-to when I have to use a windows machine.

It's actually including a subset of cygwin built with a fork of mingw, which includes the openssh-clients. It's the same as if you installed cygwin and used ssh from that. That being said, when I'm looking for git and friends I like to go further and install more of cygwin to run the native port of rxvt and then run ssh inside of THAT. So it's not really a solution for a shell in the way that PuTTY is, since PuTTY al…

> I like to go further and install more of cygwin to run the native port of rxvt and then run ssh inside of THAT.

Let me buy you a beer. I just run linux.

Post reply on HN