Hacker News Reader

Comment by bovermyer | Hacker News Reader

This is excellent. Now I won't have to rely on that terrible, terrible program PuTTY.

As for those who are claiming this is a harbinger of Microsoft trying to take over SSH... well, get those tinfoil hats ready, kids. Looks like Nadella's Microsoft is willing to play nice in a wide variety of arenas, so you'll have all kinds of things to be foolishly terrified of.

View on HN

Not sure if 'kids' is the right address for people who remember the bad old Microsoft ways.

absolutely, I guess only "kids" say things like that.

google and see what microsoft did initially, now it's basically doing "if I can not beat it, I'll have to join it". microsoft does what it is doing now not because it favors open source, but it really has _no_ choice, and time is running out fast.

Micrsoft has not really earned my trust, still in IRC I use "M$" for it, but I do welcome their changes, let's wait and see, that what real contribution it will do for the OSS community.

I know exactly what Microsoft's history is. I remember the Halloween memo. I remember Czar Ballmer and his Machiavellian practices.

I also know that companies are not people, and as the old guard retires and/or dies off, new people and new ideas come into play. Microsoft appears to genuinely want to work with the wider tech community now, and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

To put it another way - do you still think that Germany is out to conquer the world?

"this is a harbinger of Microsoft trying to take over SSH... well, get those tinfoil hats ready"

Because MS never tried that? See Kerberos, for example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish...

The Microsoft of today is not the Microsoft of 15 years ago. Nadella has a long history of embracing openness, especially with the Cloud Services division he was heading until his appointment as CEO. I think the open-sourcing of the .NET platform is a big testament to that. The old Microsoft guard would have ran the company into the ground before doing that.

Where is the evidence that this is not the Microsoft of 15-25 years ago?

What was going on 20 years ago at Microsoft?

    * implementing POSIX application compatibility to compete with UNIX for gov. contracts
    * giving away IE
    * embrace and extending Java

Compare to today

    * additional compatibility with tools typically used in Unix administration
    * giving away windows
    * Objective-C/Cocoa support for Windows applications

The steps they were taking didn't seem bad until the end game was obvious, but they started out very similarly to the current initiatives. A lot of the actions seem exactly like 20 years ago - do whatever it takes to get market share, make it incredibly difficult for that market share to migrate.

Are we talking about the same Microsoft? That Microsoft, that was bullying MPs in UK (http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/2409808/microsoft-b...)?. That one, that lobbies in India against their policies (http://techrights.org/2015/05/29/microsoft-vs-india/)?

Yeah, but incomplete .net on github, yeah!

I agree, it's not the same MS.

Just don't forget about the royalties MS charges from Android manufacturers as well.

They might be on the right reinvention path, but they're still a giant company, and one to be respected.

s/respected/regarded with suspicion/

Embracing, extending, and ...?

Terrible? Concerns over how to obtain it aside, what's wrong with PuTTY?

All the configuration is stored in the registry so it's difficult to hand-edit or export/import. Also it mashes a terminal emulator together with an SSH client so if you want one you're stuck with the other.

> Also it mashes a terminal emulator together with an SSH client so if you want one you're stuck with the other.

That's not (completely) true, you can easily use the SSH client (plink) without the terminal emulator. It is actually quite common to do so.

I don't think it works the other way around though.

> It is actually quite common to do so.

So common I've never seen it done. Ever.

> Also it mashes a terminal emulator together with an SSH client so if you want one you're stuck with the other.

Well, honestly, this probably covers 99% of use cases - i.e. "I'm on Windows and I need to connect to a remote shell". Having the two separate sounds like overcomplicating things.

There is various forks of Putty that now store the configuration in files instead of registry.

Try starting with Futty.

Try http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/it's much much better, works with pageant, behaves closer to iTerm, but better than both iTerm and Putty in every way (IMO).

Where do you even get a trusted copy of the putty binary?

You download it from an unencryped, unsigned website, and there are GPG signatures available, but you can download the keys from the same unencryped, unsigned website.

A MitM attacker could easily manipulate the executables, sign them with his own keys, and do a MitM attack on the key page too.

This is not mere paranoia; we know now that the NSA has infrastructure to do such attacks fully automated and at scale.

The same argument can be made about the OS itself.

Lack of modern key exchanges, ciphers, and MACs, for one?

You can't even use ECDSA, much less Curve25519-based solutions.

Another victim of failed sarcasm tag parsing.

PuTTY is life, PuTTY is love. At least it was till I got a mac.

If you really don't like PuTTY, PenguiNet is an alternative: http://www.siliconcircus.com/

MobaXterm is also a nice product: http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

There's also PuTTYTray: https://github.com/FauxFaux/PuTTYTray

cygwin?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com