Justin Fletcher writes:

"For immediate release"

I've always wanted to write that :-)

NettleSSH is an experimental spin-off from the Nettle terminal client which supports new protocols and has a more experimental structure.

Important features :

• New protocols support :
  RExec, RLogin, SSH 1
• Improved key handling on certain windows.
• Large scale changes to the internals.

Because NettleSSH is based on the same sources that Nettle is updates to Nettle will benefit NettleSSH, and because NettleSSH source is available to all (although not under SourceForge control) back-ports of the more stable features should be possible. Similarly, because it is experimental, some features may not operate as advertised and documentation is a little more lax.

I would like to thank the testers of NettleSSH in its various versions, and in particular to Alex and the core Nettle developers for their work and their criticisms of this project.

NettleSSH can be downloaded from http://nettlessh.mine.nu/.

Now, why is this important? Well, as security on the Internet becomes ever more important, standard telnet has become all but obsolete as it's too easy for black hat hackers to snoop on unencrypted transmissions and pick out your username and password. SSH is the standard way of doing basically the same things as telnet used to, but in an encrypted form. This is one area where RISC OS has been playing catchup for some time - there's been the SSHProxy that you telnet to on your own computer and use it to tunnel a secure connection out, and Peter "Chocky" Naulls had an SSH binary that Nettle could use, but both had their problems; this is the first time a RISC OS client has native support for secure comms of this nature. Of course, some will point out that SSH1 can also be vulnerable to attack under certain circumstances and SSH2 is the new standard, but hey, let's walk before we can run: SSH1 is better than no SSH at all.

Link: NettleSSH