
 John the Ripper -- Changes History
====================================
The following major changes have been done since John v1.6:

* Two MD5 hashes at a time for extra ILP on RISC: up to +80% on Alpha EV5.
* Significant improvements to the generic bitslice DES code: +20% on RISC.
* Bitslice DES code for x86 with MMX: more than twice faster on Intel MMX.
* Bitsliced the LM hash code as well: now several times faster.
* Generic Blowfish x86 assembly code in addition to the original Pentium
version: +15% on the Pentium Pro family (up to Pentium III), +20% on AMD.
* First attempt at vectorization support for bitslice DES.
* Better idle priority emulation with POSIX.1b (POSIX.4) scheduling calls.
* System-wide installation support for *BSD ports and Linux distributions.
* AIX and DEC C2 files support in 'unshadow'.
* New make targets for Linux/PowerPC, FreeBSD/Alpha, SCO, NetBSD/VAX,
OpenBSD/SPARC, MacOS X.
* Bug and portability fixes, and new bugs.
* Bonus: "Strip" cracker included in the default john.conf (john.ini).


 Changes from v1.5 to v1.6
---------------------------
* Batch mode: easier to use.
* Kerberos AFS passwords support.
* WinNT passwords support (LM hashes only).
* Idle priority support on Linux.
* Rule reject flags: can reject entire rules on condition.
* New utility: 'unique' (removes duplicated lines without re-ordering).
* New options: '-stdout', '-status'.
* GNU-style long options support.
* New make targets for AIX, HP-UX, IRIX.
* Bug and portability fixes, and new bugs.

 Changes from v1.4 to v1.5
---------------------------
* Everything is re-coded, to be far more extendable, more portable (no
GNU C extensions used, unless __GNUC__ is defined), and more readable.
* Bitslice DES routines: up to 3 times faster on RISC.
* BSDI's extended DES-based ciphertext format support.
* OpenBSD's Blowfish-based ciphertext format support.
* Special assembly DES routines for x86 with MMX: +30% on a Pentium II.
* Improved MD5 routines (both C and x86 assembly), 10...50% faster.
* Smarter length switching in incremental mode.
* Wordlist rules are now expanded while cracking, not at startup.
* New options: '-session', '-groups'.
* Simplified the syntax of '-users', '-shells', '-salts'.
* Replaced '-noname' and '-nohash' with '-savemem'.
* Replaced '-des' and '-md5' with '-format'.
* Removed some obsolete options, to keep the thing simple.
* Added 'continue', 'break', 'return' to the built-in compiler.
* You can now use C comments in external mode definitions.
* Better default rule sets: variable length limit, less redundancy.
* Many internal algorithm improvements.

 Changes from v1.3 to v1.4
---------------------------
* MD5-based password files support.
* SPARC V8 assembly DES routines.
* A lot of bugfixes.

Versions earlier than v1.3 are probably not worth mentioning here now...
