[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!

[1970-01-01]

Hilarious how putty.org hasn't been updated, and still has a FINAL WARNING video on the landing page.

Extrapolated to the present time, all of us vaccinated individuals are now suffering the big consequences.

Too bad all nutjobs aren't so easy to disprove by simply taking a single large breath. :)

[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.

[Macha]

It used to link to Putty _and_ to the domain owner's competing software:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170822083048/http://www.putty....

The domain owner seems to feel he was providing a service to putty by providing the short domain name and feels slighted that they are moving to have their own now that he is taking actions that they find more objectionable than just also linking to his competitor, but to be honest it always seemed some unethical squatting to me, based on the Putty devs not having the time to complete a UDRP process.

[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.

[kryptiskt]

It's not at all similar, and that doesn't have anything to do with the quality or lack thereof of the viewpoints.

The Notepad++ site is run by the authors and reflects their stance. Putty.org is run by an outside party who hijacks the reputation of the PuTTY project to push their agenda.

[rokkamokka]

It's one thing to say "stand with Ukraine", and an entirely different thing to spread vaccine misinformation...

[account42]

Sure, one is virtue signalling while the other has the potential of actually helping someone stay safe.

[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]

[zettabomb]

Argument from authority is not particularly strong. The information on putty.org is considered misinformation by the vast majority of professionals in the field of infectious diseases.

[nailer]

I thought it was argument from expertise? And while you’re on the topic of epistemology truth isn’t determined by how common an idea is.

[0manrho]

He's not an expert on vaccines or infectious disease and pushed known provably false narratives during the pandemic.

[nailer]

I don't think being a medical and phramaceutical expert disqualifies him speaking about vaccines, do you?

[perching_aix]

"God has all positive properties. Existing is a positive property. Therefore God exists."

Amazing things happen when you crank up the level of simplification.

[f1shy]

This is the modern world that we live in. If being “Vice President and Worldwide Head of Research in allergic and respiratory diseases at Pfizer” with 25 years of career does not qualify to talk about vaccines (in the context of of Covid, I assume because I do not know him or the videos), I frankly don’t know what does

[account42]

The irony of complaining about an appeal to authority only to then counter it with an appeal to authority.

[f1shy]

In this case more stupidity than irony.

[RALaBarge]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Yeadon#COVID-19_misinf...