with the most recent and also, in my opinion, the most important one:
1. We’ve ported Openwall GNU/*/Linux (or Owl for short) to the x86-64 architecture (also known as AMD64 and Intel EM64T).”
The latest Owl-current binary packages for x86-64 have been made available under /pub/Owl/current/x86_64 on the FTP mirrors:
http://www.openwall.com/Owl/DOWNLOAD.shtml
Currently, these packages have to be installed off a system that is already running an x86-64 build of the Linux kernel. This “installer system” may use a 32-bit userland, though, as long as the kernel is built for x86-64 with CONFIG_IA32_EMULATION enabled.
We’re planning to create and make available a bootable CD image for x86-64 a bit later.
I’d like to thank Dmitry V. Levin who did the port and the bulk of the associated testing. I would also like to thank ALT Linux for letting Dmitry use their servers, and DataForce ISP for providing our current x86-64 build server.
2. The Owl 2.0-stable branch is now available under /pub/Owl/2.0-stable on the FTP mirrors. The changes since Owl 2.0 so far include security updates to tar and GnuPG, and the update of John the Ripper to version 1.7.0.2. The Owl 2.0-stable change log is available here:
http://www.openwall.com/Owl/CHANGES-2.0-stable.shtml
3. It is now possible to purchase a download of a compressed ISO image of our wordlists collection CD instead of placing an order for the physical CD. This may be preferable if you would like to gain access to the entire CD content immediately or if it is inconvenient for you to receive the CD by mail. The homepage for the wordlists collection is:
http://www.openwall.com/wordlists/
Please scroll down to the end of the above web page for paid and free download options.
4. John the Ripper 1.7.0.2 has been released adding a fix for a long-standing (pre-1.6) bug in the rule preprocessor which caused some duplicate characters to not be omitted on 64-bit platforms, resulting in some candidate passwords unintentionally being tried multiple times. The John the Ripper homepage is:
Since this change is irrelevant for 32-bit platforms, there are no builds of 1.7.0.2 for Win32 and DOS (they would have been exactly the same as those of 1.7.0.1).
5. The contributed netlist program listed on the Openwall Linux kernel patch homepage has been updated to version 2.1, featuring support for Linux 2.6.x kernels and better performance. netlist is a tool for users to list their own active Internet connections and sockets, especially when access to the /proc filesystem is restricted. The Openwall Linux kernel patches and netlist can be found here:
Link: Openwall Project
