We're two 20 year olds building free open source software and we just launched our new project Ulterius: a brand new way to access your computer from any web browser. AMA!

Are you concerned that your project name looks a lot like "uterus"?

I embrace it

You've stated that it's a brand new way to access your computer from a browser. But in what ways?

The focus of the project is to create a simple to use solution that gives you instantaneous access to various parts of your machine. So if you just need to start a process or download a file, you can do that without actually needing to do a full remote desktop session, of course you still have that option.

Okay, great. But how is that different from other web based clients that allow you to do the exact same thing?

I'm not sure any exist that match our project, let alone work in the browser. Check out our blog for details on all our features.

https://blog.ulterius.io/meet-ulterius/

Apache Guacamole?

Guacamole is simply remote desktop and nothing else. This is a complete administration solution that allows a multitude of different things.

In addition some features coming out this month include job/script scheduling, plugin support and a more advanced remote terminal. The benefit of Ulterius is that you're able to take advantage of your computer, without needing to completely remote inside it thus saving bandwidth and increasing productivity.

There you go, that's a little better. If you guys wanna sell this thing, you have to be able to talk about it.

SSH connection for non-visual interaction, Chrome Remote Desktop for visual interaction. I can't possibly imagine there being enough of a niche between those options for me to try whatever these guys are building.

Seconded. These two cover just about everything I could imagine wanting to use.

Well just to give you and /u/Dudebromancer a heads up Google is killing Chrome apps on every OS except ChromeOS so Chrome Remote Desktop will be losing support soon.

Um .... Teamviewer have a web client, I almost exclusively use it for machine access

TeamViewer is simply a remote desktop application, Ulterius focuses more productivity and ease of access. While Ulterius has screen share abilities, it gives you the tools needed to avoid needing such a session.

So this lets you do the same things that remote desktop solutions or SSH let you do?

Or does the tool give you some special UI for specific tasks, on top of being a remote desktop solution?

It isn't just remote desktop. you can check it out for yourself right here https://blog.ulterius.io/meet-ulterius/

We have a lot more administration features planned for this month.

I suppose I didn't ask the right question. How are your administration capabilities meaningfully improved over what other web based or native remote desktop do?

I'm not so much asking about what your software is or what it does. I'm asking why I should consider using this instead of, say, plain old remote desktop?

It may seem obvious to you that the extra features you built are different than how remote desktop does it, but that doesn't seem obvious to me. Is it just another way to peel a banana, or is it a better banana peeler?

If we're just focusing on remote desktop, Ulterius has less of a footprint on your network, in test we attempted to playback a video using RealVNC which had data usage sitting at 60mbps, it would refresh the entire frame each second, thus you weren't able to achieve smooth playback. With Ulterius however you saw data usage peak around 1.5mbps while maintaining 30fps playback. That's just remote desktop.

Ulterius gives you the tools to access and manage your computer without ever needing to use remote desktop. Try it, its free after all.

How are you financing this?

Entirely self-funded at the moment.

will it stay that way?, or are you planning to put ads later if ends don't meet?

There will never be ads, we have plans for centralized commercial features and those will be paid. The core features will always be free and open source however.

From the start we said if we ever added commercial features they would be affordable, we believe it shouldn't cost you more than a sandwich too get your foot in the door.

Is any information collected? If your servers were to get "hacked" would that give the hackers the ability to remotely use your desktop easier? What measure do you guys take to ensure safety from these type of threats?

We ask to collect hardware information for development reasons, it helps us better understand the types of systems running Ulterius and in some cases fix rare bugs. You can deny the request, you get a prompt when you first run the software.

Nothing routes through our servers, so even if our servers got hacked, your computer would still be fine. You can control if Ulterius can even be connected to outside your local network. All traffic is encrypted and is only ever between you and your computer.

Nothing routes through our servers

How do you reach a computer behind a NAT? Do you need to remember your home IP to reach your home computer? What if your IP is dynamic, would we need a domain?

Traversal servers will be setup soon, the easiest solution if you have a dynamic IP would be to use a free dns solution. We also plan to offer subdomains

How could you have traffic 'only ever between you and your computer' if you are able to collect hardware information?

When you first start Ulterius, if you choose to give us hardware information, it only does it once. We never receive or see your primary traffic.

Speaking of bugs where do we report? My install was unsuccessful, error said "Ulterius Server setup ended prematurely because of an error."

You can open an issue here

https://github.com/Ulterius/server/issues

How is safety on this in terms of Security? :) This sounds neat btw. I love seeing new project ppl are working on. Any views on how this will change current ways to remote desktop? Ill give it a try and read up more on it. Good luck!

**Reading the blog helped a lot lol. This sounds pretty awesome!

Ulterius uses AES/RSA to encrypt traffic, nothing is in plaintext. It uses a similar handshake to TLS. Instructions for installing a certificate will be on the wiki very soon. The login currently supports local and domain account authentication. There are plans to make it extendable into custom methods of validation (say by your own api). 2-FA authentication is coming in the next major update.

Hopefully it encourages people to move away from overpriced solutions as we start rolling out more and more commercial features.

Mac support on the roadmap? Or will this be left up to someone else to develop a Mac server? How about mobile clients?

How will this be monetized?

What data passes through your servers during use, and what is the encryption situation?

Is direct connection / self-hosting possible, to avoid data passing through your servers?

What does your service do differently to avoid the account-based vulnerabilities that hit TeamViewer?

Mac, Linux, Android and iOS are all coming. Mac is scheduled for the end of October with Linux following shortly after. The native apps are being worked on currently as well.

As for making money, I answered that here

Nothing passes through our servers, the connection between you and Ulterius however is protected using AES and RSA. You'll have the ability to install your own SSL certificate in a few days. Ulterius is already self-hosted.

Because Ulterius was designed with self-hosting in mind, account authentication is based on your actual Windows account (local or domain), because of this even if our main site was ever hacked you'd never see your machine at risk.

We do plan to eventually add some centralized features and measures will be taken then to avoid anything like the TeamViewer breach ever happening.

What core problem do you believe you're solving by creating this software?

As an experienced coder, I can ssh into my own computer at any point and do the things you're saying you can do. As a non-coder, what do I gain by having this access?

Remote desktop lacks innovation, all the major solutions you see do the same thing, however with Ulterius you're able to do more using less; I can kill an unresponsive process, I can turn on a webcam to see what my cats up to, I can flush my dns, all without ever remoting into the actual desktop. Because it works in the browser, you never have to worry about losing access. You may not always have an SSH terminal on hand, but you will always find a web browser.

How does Ulterius handle multiple monitors on remote machines?

That seems to be the main falling-down point for remote desktop software, IMO.

Monitor switching is coming in the next patch, right now it defaults to the primary. With the next patch you should be able to quickly go from monitor to monitor.

Will the page at the web browser end be easy enough to use on smaller devices like on a mobile or is this a computer to computer thing only?

The client will work in any modern browser, desktop or cell phone. We are creating native apps for iOS and Android for optimziation however.

This seems like a really cool project. Is the login method independent of the current network that the server computer is on? For instance, if my computer is connected to an internal University network, a typical FTP setup won't work unless I got the University IT department to do some port forwarding. Will I run into any issues like this when using Ulterius?

This attempts to use UPNP to give you public address access, I would say your best bet is to try and if it doesn't work I will add it to the TODO list for the week.

Does the world needs another PC remote access solution? There are so many and they have been around for as long as the internet!

Innovation is needed when older solutions stagnate.

Will you plan to implement tokenised authentication for logins? What sort of security are you planning to implement?

Having access to personal computers requires lots of security I'm interested to know what steps will be taken to ensure data security. Thanks!

Currently authentication is based on your computers login, we are implementing 2-FA authentication, because Ulterius is self-hosted there is no need to worry about our servers being breached. Traffic is encrypted to ensure privacy.

What sort of 2-FA will I be able to generate a temp passkey with an app on my phone? That sort of thing?

We are going to use Google Authenticator or Authy.

Does it work through firewalls ? Routers ? Do we need to open any ports ?

You should be able to install and use it without any additional steps if your router supports UPNP.

Can I help test it out when you're ready to have public beta tester's?

The software is already downloadable and in beta, get it from https://ulterius.io/ and report issues over on the Github https://github.com/ulterius

Can I open and edit files on my computer with the application that is installed? Example: Editing and saving an Adobe Illustrator files from the web browser. Follow up question: Can I also use all of the short cuts I have set up?

If you use the screen share feature, yes.

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I'll be sure to check out your project, I love seeing other peoples solutions. We started seriously working on Ulterius about 8 months ago, it started as a media remote and became this.

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If i'm not mistaken, doesn't the Windows Domain system use certificate authentication under the hood? We will have a lot more authentication options in the near future.

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We are working on 2FA ASAP, your account authentication is based on your existing Windows account, so if that password is secure, you are pretty safe.

It's Kerberos. Full client certificate authentication is present in DirectAccess, and maybe other stuff.

You could add client certificate authentication to your web server, but that wouldn't do much for the Windows auto portion unless you've got something ultra special on the client that delegates Kerberos authentication into some type of certificate verification scheme, which is awfully complex....

DirectAccess for example uses certificate auth to establish a (IPSec?) tunnel into the network, then the machine communicates to the DC via that connection with traditional Kerberos authentication. As far as I'm aware, anyway—never had the chance to use it.

Open up an issue over on Github and I'll look over this all later tonight

https://github.com/Ulterius/server/issues

Why do you develop free software? How are you making money?

It's fun, I love coding, I build software that people will love. I figure out the money part later.

Really interested in this product. Can you provide me with an example of how this is helpful. And also there is a company with the EXACT same name, advertising you as a data cloud service/ routers. Can you explain?

This is a complete administration solution that allows a multitude of different things. In addition some features coming out this month include job/script scheduling, plugin support and a more advanced remote terminal. The benefit of Ulterius is that you're able to take advantage of your computer, without needing to completely remote inside it thus saving bandwidth and increasing productivity.

First off, this is awesome! I'm very excited to try this out.

Secondly, have you done any experiments using this through nginx or other reverse proxy setups?

Obviously some of us aren't keen on straight port forwarding and would prefer an ssl encrypted reverse proxy.

Thanks!

You can find an example reverse proxy config on our blog post here

I'm a little unfamiliar with the limitations of something like this, but could this service give you the ability to run programs with high cpu or ram requirements on a computer that would normally not be able to run said processes?

Unfortunately no, this just allows you to access and manage your computer from anywhere.

When looking at your client code, which seems to be the code base on the nine-home machine, I noticed that it will set up more or less a server on the client machine which will process everything, while having a front end to manipulate the data. At first I was under the assumption that this was a chrome extension or equivalent which directly connects browser to machine.

I kinda feel like this is false advertising, as you will need to have a webserver up and running on your machine which will assumingly tunnel to the target machine. It's not really a true browser connection given such reliance on an installable which needs to be placed on each machine, which may be a security risk in itself if I can Crack into one of the linked PC, no?

as you will need to have a webserver

You don't. You install Ulterius on your machine and that is it, the only way you're going to "crack" a machine is to know its username and password, if that happens only that single machine is compromised.

Like any remote administration solution, you have something running on the target machine. You are directly connecting from your browser to the machine.

I've used Guacamole with Windows 2012, Debian and Tomcat web server. For those unfamiliar, Guacamole uses a middle man Linux server that actually does the Windows RDP work and then broadcasts that to a web browser using HTML5. It's actually pretty amazing accessing Windows from your browser, you can resize your remote screen by resizing your browser window. Here's the problems I ran into,

1. Incredibly difficult to setup.

2. Didn't work with "Remote Apps". It worked, but so poorly I'll just say it didn't work.

3. Disconnects and sluggishness, like with any remote client, was an issue.

4. Issues with either Debian or Windows meant when an issue came up, I had to check on two systems to find the problem.

How is your system different? Your website doesn't seem to describe how it works or what exactly the installation will require. I'm personally not going to take the time to fire up a VM to test it on. We use Chrome OS at work, my only interest in Windows is direct access (Remote App) to MS Office applications through Chrome OS, is it able to do this?

Ulterius installs a local server on the windows machine, it's completely standalone. You just need internet to install it, when running it will attempt to forward ports using UPNP and then you can access the hosted web client via the machines address.

The screen share feature uses its own protocol, you'll get high frame rates and low data usage so you shouldn't see it being very sluggish. Because it doesn't use any middle man you can know for sure which system is acting up. So as Ulterius is up and running on your windows machine you'll be able to access it in any browser.

Can this work exclusively with ipv6? I've been looking for a solution that works across Direct Access

Should work fine. I am ipv6 across the board.

Do you like pizza? If so, what kind?

Do you like Mario or Luigi better?

I prefer meatballs

Luigi ;)

I am at work so can't test, but have you any experience with this on Windows 10 mobiles Edge browser?

Works fine in Edge

Would I be able to remotely wake my computer if it's in sleep mode? And access it to play games while I'm away?

We are adding wake on lan

What are your day jobs?

I'm a software engineer at a data firm.

How's performance? On a scale of mirrorless-VNC to Steam Streaming?

I'd be all over something that performed at least as well as Splashtop.

For screen share you'll see CPU usage around 7%, it uses very little bandwidth but has high framerates. I've actually played Quake through it before. It out performed RealVNC in the last test I ran.

What do you plan for the future of ulterius?

Bring it to every platform, provide commercial features that are affordable to everyone, help fund the space race.

Given all the static in the press about dark agencies and their incessant insistence on spying on everyone in the name of security; How can you ensure that my accessing my files will be secure and no open to attack?

The source code is open for review, traffic is encrypted and the only time data leaves your machine is when you connect to it. No 3rd parties involved.

Do you have a plan to scale up your ability to deal with security issues? It looks like an awesome project but given the product you are drawing a massive bullseye on it and 2 people can't hope to compete.

What issues would that be?

[deleted]

We accept pull request

Does this need a browser plugin to work?

No

Are you still working on the option to force a fullscreen application into windowed mode through Borderless Gaming?

I couldn't ever get it stable. It crashed most older games

How are handing ddos attempts? For example, client A wants to connect to client B. Client C knows the connection to B. How do you handle events where I will set up a multi threaded process to ping a computer and attempt to guess passwords and use names? It has to be open enough to accept a correct log in, but will my attempts to ping B throttle the bandwidth, or boot A from Bs connection?

The reason I'm curious is that ip spoofing is a thing, obviously so I can continually swap out options.

After enough invalid login attempts you'll be blocked. You won't mess with a currently valid session.

Does your computer have to stay on doe?

It has to be powered to work, you can be logged out however.

WakeOnLan support?

I just added it to the TODO list.