Cloud Internet Explorer - how does it work?

[Deleted User]

So I was traversing the Internet the other day and I happened to chance upon this:

http://www.cloudinternetexplorer.com

It's made by a company called Ericom and it seems to be a browser-based IE9 VM/Simulation in HTML5.

Could someone educate me on how this works? It's pretty interesting.

Screenshot of said site running in Google Chrome:

<image removed>

Thanks.

calvinb

It's an actual Windows server. The secret is an HTML5/JS RDP client.

calvinb

I had another look - their IE is heavily restricted by Group Policy, but you can open up Windows Explorer by typing C:\ in the address bar and there's a bunch of stuff. Prodding around, it's an AWS instance due to Amazon licensing and Xen devices. Office and SketchUp are installed, amongst other stuff.

BlueSun

Yup... funny how they restricted IE with GPOs but didn't go further to restrict access to the C: drive.

You can RDP directly to it by connecting to 54.225.114.111 and using demo / demo.

SomeGuy

Nice, and it works with the older RDP clients too.

calvinb

IIRC, XP SP2 dropped RDPv4 client support, Vista dropped RDPv4 server support, and 8.0 dropped RDPv5 server support. (You can still connect to Windows 2000 with the Windows 10 RDP client though. And if you need to connect to an NT 4 TSE box, the NT 4/2000/XP pre-SP2 client will work.)

dosbox

Apparently they don't block any sites but since it's RDP, you won't be able to use it for porn. Also, solitaire won't run.

stitch

dosbox wrote:

Apparently they don't block any sites but since it's RDP, you won't be able to use it for porn. Also, solitaire won't run.

Unless you're content with just JPEGs. Clearly you have not had to live in the world of 56k

dosbox

stitch wrote:

dosbox wrote:

Apparently they don't block any sites but since it's RDP, you won't be able to use it for porn. Also, solitaire won't run.

Unless you're content with just JPEGs. Clearly you have not had to live in the world of 56k

I did have to deal with dial-up as a very young kid, but I really don't remember what it was like.

stitch

dosbox wrote:

stitch wrote:

dosbox wrote:

Apparently they don't block any sites but since it's RDP, you won't be able to use it for porn. Also, solitaire won't run.

Unless you're content with just JPEGs. Clearly you have not had to live in the world of 56k

I did have to deal with dial-up as a very young kid, but I really don't remember what it was like.

It was pretty shitty. Everything took forever to load and if your family wanted to use the phone you better hope you had printed out some images beforehand. Videos were of ham sandwich quality if they existed at all and took more time buffering than they were in length.

Bry89

stitch wrote:

dosbox wrote:

stitch wrote:

dosbox wrote:

Apparently they don't block any sites but since it's RDP, you won't be able to use it for porn. Also, solitaire won't run.

Unless you're content with just JPEGs. Clearly you have not had to live in the world of 56k

I did have to deal with dial-up as a very young kid, but I really don't remember what it was like.

It was pretty shitty. Everything took forever to load and if your family wanted to use the phone you better hope you had printed out some images beforehand. Videos were of ham sandwich quality if they existed at all and took more time buffering than they were in length.

Oh yes, I remember this very clearly, back when I was with AOL. Don't forget those noises you would hear when you connect also. Oh, the nostalgia.

garirry

The sad part about dial-up is that it's still offered in some Canadian ISPs. The ISP I'm using currently had it until one year ago. I believe I have experienced dial-up at one point (approx. 11-10 years ago), but I believe my family switched to (what I assume to be) DSL sometimes after dial-up. It was still pretty bad but at least as far as I can remember it worked fine for what I was using the Internet for. Granted, I'm really Internet-greedy nowadays, so even fairly low cable speeds are not okay with me anymore. But I'm a bit younger than most people here so my memory was pretty blurry when we had dial-up. I think what we did was going to the network settings in Windows XP and connecting there, and I think there have been constantly problems with it, until we never used that connection tool again, which is why I assume my family switched to DSL (not Cable because I don't think that was mainstream yet, and I don't think there was anything else). Damn my memory from long ago is bad. It was fun though.

dosbox

Yeah, DSL just isn't cutting it for me anymore but what's the alternative? Throttle happy Time Warner?

<rant>Fuck man. If I had a powerful machine and if I had COD infinate warfare legacy edition, how am I supposed to download 130GB of game data with AT&Ts shitty DSL? Why don't games come on optical media anymore? Don't devs realize that a lot of people still have shitty internet?</rant>

birdy

dosbox wrote:

Yeah, DSL just isn't cutting it for me anymore

This is why I do most of my computer related downloads at college. They are chill on what I download. Which is mostly linux related stuff, along with my learning of Centos 7 to a possible test in rhcsa.

dosbox wrote:

<rant>Fuck man. If I had a powerful machine and if I had COD infinate warfare legacy edition, how am I supposed to download 130GB of game data with AT&Ts shitty DSL? Why don't games come on optical media anymore? Don't devs realize that a lot of people still have shitty internet?</rant>

Well do what my little brother does. Download at night, he told me it takes a week to download a 50 GB file. So in theory it may take you a couple of weeks if you are patient. Since my home connection is shity DSL.

Deceiver

I switched to fiber internet about two years ago. The speeds you get are out of this world compared to DSL or cable. I can still remember the days when dial-up internet was your only option. It sucked when compared to speeds today, but back then it didn't bother me so much as my standards weren't as high as they are today.

The truth of the matter is that the internet has changed so much over the last decade or so, that higher speeds have become more and more of a necessity rather than a luxury. Almost all multimedia is being delivered through the internet nowadays, and websites have become riddled with all sorts of junk, which increases load time when browsing even further. It's getting ridiculous.

dosbox

Deceiver wrote:

I switched to fiber internet about two years ago. The speeds you get are out of this world compared to DSL or cable. I can still remember the days when dial-up internet was your only option. It sucked when compared to speeds today, but back then it didn't bother me so much as my standards weren't as high as they are today.

The truth of the matter is that the internet has changed so much over the last decade or so, that higher speeds have become more and more of a necessity rather than a luxury. Almost all multimedia is being delivered through the internet nowadays, and websites have become riddled with all sorts of junk, which increases load time when browsing even further. It's getting ridiculous.

Well it is a luxury when high speed internet is not available in your area, or when it's just to damn expensive and unreliable in the first place. We live in an age where even basic necessity are basically luxuries.

robobox

dosbox wrote:

Deceiver wrote:

I switched to fiber internet about two years ago. The speeds you get are out of this world compared to DSL or cable. I can still remember the days when dial-up internet was your only option. It sucked when compared to speeds today, but back then it didn't bother me so much as my standards weren't as high as they are today.

The truth of the matter is that the internet has changed so much over the last decade or so, that higher speeds have become more and more of a necessity rather than a luxury. Almost all multimedia is being delivered through the internet nowadays, and websites have become riddled with all sorts of junk, which increases load time when browsing even further. It's getting ridiculous.

Well it is a luxury when high speed internet is not available in your area, or when it's just to damn expensive and unreliable in the first place. We live in an age where even basic necessity are basically luxuries.

I takes like 5 hours for me to download 3.6 gbs of data.

pcgeek

This cloud datacenter internet thingy is a damn fancy thing. Managed to get FULL ACCESS with ZERO TRICKS into System32. Managed to fire up control panel. the CPU is an Intel Xeon E5-2670 running at 2.76 GHz and 15GB of RAM. Yes, this thing can be milked. The USERS folder has every demo user in it. So now you can enjoy a free Windows PC anywhere, from ANY OS!!!!

BlueSun

pcgeek wrote:

This cloud datacenter internet thingy is a damn fancy thing. Managed to get FULL ACCESS with ZERO TRICKS into System32. Managed to fire up control panel. the CPU is an Intel Xeon E5-2670 running at 2.76 GHz and 15GB of RAM. Yes, this thing can be milked. The USERS folder has every demo user in it. So now you can enjoy a free Windows PC anywhere, from ANY OS!!!!

It's an AWS instance.

pcgeek

Would you be kind enough to explain to me what an AWS instance is? Is this just a small section of the server specs I see?

msorri

pcgeek wrote:

Would you be kind enough to explain to me what an AWS instance is? Is this just a small section of the server specs I see?

An AWS instance is a virtual machine running on Amazon Web Services (hence the name AWS) (https://aws.amazon.com/).

pcgeek

Also, why is scrolling in the WinServer explorer so sluggish compared to the click-response and the web browsing speed?

dosbox

pcgeek wrote:

Also, why is scrolling in the WinServer explorer so sluggish compared to the click-response and the web browsing speed?

probably because RDP is slow?

BlueSun

Most likely due to the scrolling animation. Accessing a shared VM over the public internet is going to have some lag. It's to be expected. Frankly, it's amazing (no pun intended) that this crap works at all when you think about it.

dosbox

Apparently somebody managed to install zdoom on this thing, but it doesn't run though. Another person wrote a text document on the desktop asking for help to get stuff on the desktop.

TartCoronet5340

I gave it a try just to see what it's like and when I got in I tried to download Firefox but they said that it wouldn't.
I was able to get into explorer and with that I looked for command prompt and it was surprisingly not disabled so using that I tried to kill explorer.exe and restart it to have a usable desktop but it was disabled. I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record. I got into task manager and got to see what tasks were being used as well as I got into msinfo32 and found out some of the hardware but I'm sure someone else has went into detail on this form so I won't.
I'm personally surprised that it wasn't running windows server 2012 let alone that it was using internet explorer 9.
Also, I'm not so sure how internet explorer was more usable there then on my windows 10 machine.
Fun fact, if you can get the same account I had "(if it's even possible I think it was account 41)", look in the documents folder to see if my word document is still there,
it's named "so i got into explorer LOL". I hope it's still there.
PS, to get into the actual explorer window you have to get internet explorer to show the downloads folder and go to C:\Windows\system32\cmd.exe and once it opens, type explorer.exe.

[Deleted User]

Sorry about bumping this thread.

It looks like they've updated the system with Windows Server 2012 and the latest version of Internet Explorer. As of now (June 8, 2017) their site is currently down so I can't post screenshots.

However, the same tricks described in past posts may still work.

EDIT: Their site is back up. I've been able to open explorer.exe, but browsing to C: or opening cmd has been restricted. Looks like one of their employees has read this thread!

whistler2250

It appears whoever ran the site found this thread, because they have blocked access to the C drive. Either that, or too many people started messing with their server, and they decided to take action.

calvinb

There's still ways to poke around, it's just locked down much further.

whistler2250

The user session I had was Userdemo,44, and I saved a document called twer.txt into my home folder. Can anybody see it?

windows10user2k17

It looks like a Remote Desktop Connection to a Windows Terminal Server (2012/R2?) Auto running Internet Explorer 11 when you connect.