Log Message:
Update to 1.7.6:

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.5.1 and 1.7.6:

* Generic crypt(3) support (enabled with "--format=crypt") has been \ 
added for
auditing password hash types supported by the system but not yet supported by
John's own optimized cryptographic routines (such as "SHA-crypt" and \ 
SunMD5).
* Optional parallelization of the above has been implemented by means of OpenMP
along with glibc's crypt_r(3) or Solaris' MT-safe crypt(3C).
* Optional parallelization of John's own optimized code for the OpenBSD-style
Blowfish-based crypt(3) (bcrypt) hashes with OpenMP has been added.
* A more suitable version of 32-bit x86 assembly code for Blowfish is now
chosen on Core i7 and similar CPUs (when they happen to run a 32-bit build).
* More optimal DES S-box expressions for PowerPC with AltiVec (making use of
the conditional select operation) contributed by Dumplinger Boy (Dango-Chu)
have been integrated.
* The bitslice DES C source code has been reworked to allow for the use of
arbitrary SIMD intrinsics, which was previously only implemented for AltiVec
as a special case.
* Support for SSE2 and MMX intrinsics with bitslice DES (as an alternative to
the supplied assembly code) has been added (currently only enabled for SSE2 on
x86-64 when compiling with GCC 4.4+).
* Support for mixed-type longer virtual vectors (such as SSE2+MMX, SSE2+ALU,
AltiVec+ALU, and other combinations) with bitslice DES has been added (not
enabled by default yet, primarily intended for easy benchmarks on future CPUs,
with future compiler versions, with even more SIMD instruction sets, and with
different DES S-box expressions that might be available in the future).
* The obsolete 32-bit SPARC assembly implementation of DES has been dropped.
* The loader will now detect password hashes specified on a line on their own,
not only as part of an /etc/passwd or PWDUMP format file.
* When run in "--stdin" mode and reading candidate passwords from a \ 
terminal
(to be typed by the user), John will no longer mess with the terminal settings.
* John will now restore terminal settings not only on normal termination or
interrupt, but also when forcibly interrupted with two Ctrl-C keypresses.

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.5 and 1.7.5.1:

* A new numeric variable has been added to the word mangling rules engine:
"p" for position of the character last found with the "/" or \ 
"%" commands.

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.4.2 and 1.7.5:

* Support for the use of "--format" along with "--show" or \ 
"--make-charset" has
been added.
* The choice of .rec and .log filenames for custom session names has been made
more intuitive.
* Support for "\r" (character lists with repeats) and "\p0" \ 
(reference to the
immediately preceding character list/range) has been added to the word mangling
rules preprocessor.
* The undefined and undocumented behavior of some subtle word mangling rules
preprocessor constructs has been changed to arguably be more sensible.
* Some bugs were fixed, most notably JtR crashing on no password hashes loaded
(bug introduced in 1.7.4.2).

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.4 and 1.7.4.2:

* Major performance improvements for processing of very large password files
or sets of files, especially with salt-less or same-salt hashes, achieved
primarily through introduction of two additional hash table sizes (64K and 1M
entries), changes to the loader, and smarter processing of successful guesses
(to accommodate getting thousands of hashes successfully cracked per second).
* Many default buffer and hash table sizes have been increased and thresholds
for the use of hash tables lowered, meaning that John will now tend to use
more memory to achieve better speed (unless it is told not to with the
"--save-memory" option).
* Some previously missed common website passwords found on public lists of
"top N passwords" have been added to the bundled common passwords list.
* Some bugs introduced in 1.7.4 and affecting wordlist mode's elimination of
consecutive duplicate candidate passwords have been fixed.

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.3.4 and 1.7.4:

* Support for back-references and "parallel" ranges has been added to the
word mangling rules preprocessor.
* The notion of numeric variables (to be used for character positions
and substring lengths along with numeric constants supported previously)
has been introduced into the rules engine.  Two pre-defined variables
("l" for initial or updated word's length and "m" for initial or
memorized word's last character position) and 11 user-defined variables
("a" through "k") have been added.  Additionally, there's a \ 
new numeric
constant: "z" for "infinite" position or length.
* New rule commands have been added: "A" (append, insert, or prefix with a
string), "X" (extract a substring from memory and insert), \ 
"v" (subtract
and assign to a numeric variable).
* New rule reject flags have been added: ":" (no-op, for use along with the
"parallel" ranges feature of the preprocessor) and "p" \ 
(reject unless word
pair commands are allowed, for sharing of the same ruleset between "single
crack" and wordlist modes).
* Processing of word mangling rules has been made significantly faster in
multiple ways (caching of the current length, less copying of data, code
and data placement changes for better branch prediction and L1 cache usage,
compiler-friendly use of local variables, code micro-optimizations,
removal of no-op rule commands in an initial pass).
* The default rulesets for "single crack" and wordlist modes have been
revised to make use of the new features, for speed, to produce fewer
duplicates, and to attempt additional kinds of candidate passwords (such
as for years 2010 through 2019 with "year-based" rules).
* The idle priority emulation code has been optimized for lower overhead when
there appears to be no other demand for CPU time.
* The default for the Idle setting has been changed from N to Y.

The following changes have been made between John 1.7.3.1 and 1.7.3.4:

* "make check" has been implemented (for Unix-like systems only).
* The "--test" option will now take an optional argument - the \ 
duration of each
benchmark in seconds.
* Section .note.GNU-stack has been added to all assembly files to avoid the
stack area unnecessarily being made executable on Linux systems that use this
mechanism.
* Some very minor bugs that did not affect normal operation have been fixed.
* Some unimportant compiler warnings have been fixed, a source code comment has
been made more verbose and more complete.