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NearZero enters beta
NearZero started as a stubborn question: why does looking at your own computer from another room involve somebody else’s cloud? The tools that answer latency (game-streaming stacks) assume a trusted LAN; the tools that answer distance (commercial remote desktop) route your screen through servers you don’t control and accounts you didn’t want. We thought the two halves belonged together — Sunshine-tier latency, on a wire that treats every network as hostile — and spent the last year building it in Rust.
Today the beta opens to a first small group.
What’s in the box
- Two hosts. Windows (Graphics Capture into NVENC over a shared D3D11 device — the frame never leaves the GPU before it’s encoded) and macOS (ScreenCaptureKit into VideoToolbox), sharing one engine, one crypto stack, one admin UI.
- Three clients. Windows, macOS, and iOS — the phone client has a real gesture vocabulary, a modifier row, and a display picker, not a desktop UI squeezed onto glass.
- A rendezvous you own. One small container that introduces your machines, punches through NAT, and relays only as a last resort — carrying ciphertext it cannot open.
- The features the last three releases hardened: multi-display with an extended spanning canvas, curtain mode, multi-viewer sessions, positional keyboard input, and loss recovery that heals in one frame instead of one keyframe.
What “beta” means here
It means the hardware paths are proven on the machines we own, and now they need machines we don’t. Every network is weird in its own way — that’s the data we’re after. Expect versioned wire breaks between releases (host and client upgrade together; the handshake says so plainly when they don’t match), unsigned installers for now, and release notes that tell you the truth.
If you’re holding an invitation: downloads are here, and the guides take you from installer to encrypted session in about fifteen minutes. Found something odd? That’s the job — send it in.