Context: "The domain name putty.org is NOT run by the #PuTTY developers" (https://hachyderm.io/@simontatham/114846017785770922 discussed before at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44558328), but by a competitor who historically used the site at that domain to promote their own product.

It's much weirder now.

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.

The guy behind that page and bitvise appears to have gone totally crazy during the pandemic. On his blog, he said in 2021 "I forecast that 2/3 of those who accept Covid vaccines are going to die by January 1, 2025."

And in 2022, he wrote "Covid-19 is mostly snake venom added to drinking water in selected locations. There may also be a virus, but the main vehicle of hospitalizations is boatloads of powder, mixed in during 'water treatment.' Remdesivir, the main treatment for Covid, is injected snake venom. mRNA vaccines hijack your body to make more snake venom."

> mixed in during 'water treatment.' Remdesivir, the main treatment for Covid, is injected snake venom. mRNA vaccines hijack your body to make more snake ven

Whaaaaat the fuuuuuuck

Can anyone debug this statement?? I’m not looped into weird this realm of paranoid delusion torecognizs what they’re referring to here.

There's no sense debugging the output when the hardware that produced it is clearly defective.

That looks like an open and shut ICANN trademark case to me.

https://web.archive.org/web/20250728091154/https://www.putty...

They publish (right at the bottom of that page) the emails where a journalist asked them why they're squatting the PuTTY domain and somehow think they make the journalist look bad?! https://web.archive.org/web/20250728091156/https://www.putty...

They do kinda make the journalist look bad. That email exchange opened with a bunch of extremely-loaded questions, and quickly transitioned into the journalist actively advocating for the transfer of the domain, and using "I'm going to report about this" as a threat.

Plus, I can find absolutely zero evidence of the existence of a German journalist called "Mirai F", so I'm a bit suspicious. (It might be the "PuPRed" person being maybe-doxxed -- but that's a blog site which entirely consists of a single article about PuTTY, so I'm not convinced "journalist" applies in a meaningful sense.)

The Bitvise answers also don't look good, of course. Nobody comes out of that one smelling like roses.

I say this as someone who thinks putty.org was pretty sketchy before it went full anti-vax, and is currently looking like a slam-dunk example of the kind of thing trademark law was meant for.

The guy who runs putty.org is absolutely the South Park basement guy

There isn't a trademark for PuTTY.

Wrong. There isn't a registered trademark.

Do they have a trademark? It costs $325 per year plus roughly $650 for the initial application (even if rejected). Is he paying that?

You're talking about registered trademarks, that's not the only kind.

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection (https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/) is a fantastic set of logic games that's been ported to practically every platform imaginable.

I don’t really want to give it credit by linking to it, but this seems to refer to putty[.]org which is using its search ranking to push things unrelated to PuTTY.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44558328 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44579265 for background.