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Comment by ComodoHacker | Hacker News Reader

> The open source TeamViewer alternative. Display and control your PC and Android devices from anywhere at anytime.

That's not what TeamViewer, AnyDesk and others offer. They offer display and control of anyone's PC, without a tech-savvy person on that end. There's no way any open-source project could compete in this space.

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> There's no way any open-source project could compete in this space.

That's needlessly negative. They offer their own relay server or the possibility to host your own. From the documentation it seems like they're aiming for the same UX as TeamViewer, for which we desperately need an OSS alternative that's equally user-friendly. Saying that it's an unreachable goal is defeatist and pure speculation.

Actually, yes, that's exactly what RustDesk does. Run the exe, get an ID and password, bypass all NATs, just like TeamViewer. After TeamViewer decided I was a commercial user for some unknown reason and started blocking my sessions, I've used it with less technical friends and family several times without any significant issues.

To compete in this space is its main purpose and I'd say it does a pretty good job.

Well, the space is remote support and assistance, not "using it several times with family and friends", we already have a bunch of tools for that.

Besides good UX, you need at least a Microsoft signed driver for efficient capture. You need extensive testing on a wide (and wild) variety of legacy hardware and OSes.

Maybe RustDesk does a good job, I didn't try it, but it's absolutely not an alternative to TeamViewer.

You shouldn't need a M$ signed driver for capture, what makes you say that? I don't think it does a great job in the position it's in now, but it's hard to say it's not at least covering most of the big points that TeamViewer does, which qualifies it as an alternative.

RustDesk does have a quick connect style runner like TeamViewer that works just the same. It wasn't super performant, and on Windows it did not gracefully handle UAC prompts, so it definitely has some rough edges, but it functions much like its closed source predecessors did early on in its life.

What would stop someone from setting up a server that listens for connections? Kind of like a reverse VNC (or, by extension, reverse ssh tunneling). It may not be a feature of the program yet, but that doesn't mean it isn't possible. I could compile and distribute my own binary that automatically connects to me.example.com:1234, make sure that server is accessible from the internet, tell the user to bypass non-signed executable restrictions, and we're good to go.

Yea this is likely what we’re gonna see in scams in the coming months, years, go to helpmenow.com download/install look at that you’re scammed.

This has been happening for very many years now. It is very common for a shady scam company to buy an enterprise license for remote access software preconfigured to allow unattended access via predefined variables. This is something very very useful in actual enterprise scenarios where you want to deploy remote access software, but equally dangerous in the wrong hands. The only thing you can do to stop it is educate end users.

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