[thristian]

From the PuTTY FAQ: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/faq.html#...

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]

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]

> 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.

[herf]

Google right now lists the title of putty.org as "PuTTY", even though right now this text is only in the footer. Up until August I guess it provided a download link, but the title was not "PuTTY".

[swah]

My first 3 matches are https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.ht..., https://www.putty.org/ and https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

[nelox]

I can sell you some AdWords to solve it.

[1970-01-01]

Google.com > putty > I'm feeling lucky > https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

[zapzupnz]

It seems almost hostile to users. Why should I need to use some third party tool to find your thing? If you're paying for a domain anyway, pay for a meaningful one.

… 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.

[kelnos]

> Why should I need to use some third party tool to find your thing?

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.

[whoamii]

Should’ve used a goo.gl short link. ;)

[account42]

Also a weird choice to go with a nuTLD which may or may not price gouge them in the future leaving them with the choice to either pay up or potentially have someone malicious taking over tons of inbound links.

[hammock]

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.

[lanyard-textile]

It is sketchy. :) Your intuition is correct.

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.

[ok_computer]

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.

https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith...

[avhon1]

The wikipedia article has links to the official websites, and not to the scams: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PuTTY

[jbaber]

My decades long habit has been to search for "chiark putty". Never fails :)

[account42]

That trick requires you to already know the correct website though.

[rezonant]

Unfortunately the person who owns putty.org started to use it to spread misinformation about vaccines and the pandemic, as you can see on the site today.

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...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44579265

[3] https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/114846017785770922

[teaearlgraycold]

> Since 2020 I have been speaking out against the fraudulent pandemic and the intentionally dangerous injections and my experience has been to have been censored and smeared. If you have not heard of me before, that's the reason.

One weird trick to make your insignificance seem significant!

[rconti]

Did putty.org once link to the putty software? Or an alternative SSH client? Why did the site ever become popular?

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.

[zo1]

This seems similar to the Notepad++ team using their platform to promote political viewpoints.

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.

[avar]

    > 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?

[nailer]

[flagged]