Running legacy IE/ActiveX clients without local admin rights?
We are currently maintaining a very old client-server architecture. The server collects real-time data from a large number of sensors and controllers, transmitting it to a legacy database under continuous, massive load (writes every few seconds).The problem is the client side. It’s ancient, strictly requires Internet Explorer, and heavily relies on ActiveX. If a standard domain user launches the browser, the data fails to load and the browser completely hangs. It only functions correctly if run with local administrator privileges.Giving users local admin rights is a massive security risk we can't take. Currently, I have a workaround running in production using Task Scheduler to elevate just this specific application without giving the user the actual admin password. I documented the specific approach we are using here: https://www.hiddenobelisk.com/how-to-let-a-standard-domain-user-run-one-program-as-administrator-without-giving-admin-rights/#:~:text=least%20privilege.-,Approach%202%20%E2%80%94%20Running%20Applications%20with%20Administrative%20Privileges%20Using%20Task%20Scheduler,users%20can%20simply%20double%2Dclick%20the%20shortcut%20to%20launch%20the%20application.,-Changing%20the%20ShortcutI recently started a thread over on r/sysadmin trying to find a cleaner solution: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1rm6uv4/how_do_you_let_a_standard_domain_user_run_one/The general consensus there was to either buy an expensive enterprise PAM (Privileged Access Management) solution, or deep-dive with Procmon. I am currently analyzing the software with Procmon based on that advice, but so far, I haven't been able to make the client work without the Task Scheduler workaround.My questions for the HN community:1) Are there any reliable open-source PAM alternatives or privilege elevation tools for Windows that handle this "per-app" scenario effectively?2) When dealing with hostile Activ
FL score
out of 100
Verdict
medium confidence
Competition
5
competitors found, emerging market, funded players
Trend
No signal yet
A simple, secure 'per-application' privilege elevation tool for Windows to run legacy IE/ActiveX clients without local admin rights.
The pain
The gap
Build angle
Strengths
- Extremely clear and specific pain point for a known audience (sysadmins).
- User is the ideal customer, having already developed a working workaround.
- High willingness to pay due to significant security risks and operational costs of alternatives.
- Opportunity for an elegant, simpler solution compared to expensive enterprise PAM or VDI.
- The problem is persistent as legacy systems will remain for years.
- Strong demand reality with clear, desperate users.
Risks
- Technical complexity of building a robust, secure, and universally compatible Windows privilege elevation tool.
- Niche market size, which limits overall scale but offers focused targeting.
- Potential for compatibility issues with various ActiveX controls and IE versions.
- The 'bootstrapped' competitors (RunAsSpc/Rob) show that some solutions exist, requiring strong differentiation.
- Go-to-market primarily relies on reaching specific IT professional communities.
Next steps
- Refine the current Task Scheduler workaround into a simple, deployable MVP with a basic UI.
- Conduct in-depth interviews with other sysadmins facing this exact problem to validate desired features and pricing.
- Focus on supporting the most common problematic ActiveX scenarios first.
- Build a landing page and start collecting emails from interested IT professionals in communities like r/sysadmin.
Fly Labs Method
Is the pain real, is there a gap, is it the right time, can one person build it.
- Problem clarity
- 27
- Solution gap
- 20
- Willingness to pay
- 20
- Buildability
- 11
This idea addresses a clear and painful problem for IT professionals dealing with legacy systems. There's a gap for a focused, affordable solution between complex VDI/PAM and risky local admin rights. The build difficulty for a truly robust solution is higher than average for a solo builder, but an initial MVP targeting the specific workaround is feasible.
Value Equation
Dream outcome and how likely it feels, against the time and effort it costs.
This idea has strong market viability and a clear value proposition, targeting a persistent pain point with good pricing potential, but faces moderate build complexity.
One-Person Business
Curiosity pull, identity fit, and a path from free value to paid for a solo creator.
A highly specific problem with strong creator fit and clear monetization, targeting a reachable niche, though the technical solution requires deep expertise.
Viral Frameworks
Hook strength, shareability, and how cheaply it can be tested.
This micro-SaaS has a specific, reachable audience and a compelling, measurable value proposition for a critical business need, with good validation signals.
Builder Lens
Evidence the problem exists, timing, defensibility, and a model that fits on a napkin.
This idea addresses a critical, desperate need for specific users with clear, expensive, or risky existing solutions, and a viable narrow wedge to start building.
Why this verdict
Five lenses, one composite. How scoring works
The angle
This weekend
- Refine the current Task Scheduler workaround into a simple, deployable MVP with a basic UI.
- Conduct in-depth interviews with other sysadmins facing this exact problem to validate desired features and pricing.
- Focus on supporting the most common problematic ActiveX scenarios first.
- Build a landing page and start collecting emails from interested IT professionals in communities like r/sysadmin.
Who is already there, emerging market
Cameyo is a secure and cost-effective virtual app delivery service that delivers Windows applications to any device from the browser without the complexity of VDI or DaaS.
Pricing: Starting from $12.00/month (older information, contact for current pricing).
- GO-GlobalVisit
GO-Global provides an intuitive and lightweight platform for delivering Windows applications without the need for complex client installations.
Pricing: 25 - 99 concurrent users: $4.20/month ($41.40 paid annually per user); 100 - 499 concurrent users: $3.85/month ($38.40 annually per user).
- RunAsSpcVisit
RunAsSpc allows standard users to run programs with administrator rights by reading application and account login information from an encrypted file.
Pricing: Free for personal use; companies and organizations need a licensed version, with prices ranging between 20 and 200 Euros depending on the number of computers.
- RunAsRobVisit
RunAsRob provides multiple options to run specific applications with elevated administrator permissions, including temporarily elevating a user's account to an administrator.
Pricing: Price for each additional license is 1.50 EUR / 1.65 USD, including RunAsSpc; licenses are valid for 5 years within one organization.
- Spoon.net (now Turbo.net)Visit
Spoon.net (now Turbo.net) allows you to run applications, including old browsers, without installing them, by creating virtualized application layers.
Pricing: Individual access was free with up to 1GB storage and synchronization between two machines; a $12/month upgrade offered 100GB and synchronization between 12 machines (older information).
What they charge
Recent news
- Running legacy IE/ActiveX clients without local admin rights?
Hacker News, March 26 2026
- 5 Cameyo Alternatives and Replacements for 2026 | GO-Global - Graphon
GO-Global - Graphon, February 18 2026
- Microsoft restrains exploited legacy IE mode in Edge browser - iTnews
iTnews, October 14 2025
- Legacy IE Mode in Edge Opens Door to Hackers | eSecurity Planet
eSecurity Planet, October 14 2025
Market signals
The market for running legacy IE/ActiveX clients without local admin rights is a niche but persistent one, driven by the continued existence of older business applications and industrial systems. While Microsoft has officially disabled standalone Internet Explorer, IE mode in Edge provides a compatibility solution, though it introduces security concerns. The acquisition of Cameyo by Google suggests growing interest in virtual application delivery solutions for legacy applications.
What frustrates people
- Complexity and cost of traditional VDI solutions like Citrix and VMware for delivering virtual applications.
- Steeper learning curve and deeper IT involvement required for robust solutions like Citrix.
- Difficulty in making legacy websites and ActiveX controls compatible with modern browsers and operating systems.
- Security risks associated with granting local administrator rights to users for legacy applications.
- Lack of transparent pricing and negotiation challenges, especially during renewals, with some enterprise solutions.
Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep
Hey HN! We (Stephan and Thomas) recently open-sourced Semble. We kept running into the same problem while using Claude Code on large codebases: when the agent can't find something directly, it falls back to grep, reading full files or launching subagents. This uses a lot of tokens, and often still misses the relevant code. There are existing tools for this, but they were either too slow to index on demand, needed API keys, or had poor retrieval quality.Semble is our solution for this. It combines static Model2Vec embeddings (using our latest static model: potion-code-16M) with BM25, fused via RRF and reranked with code-aware signals. Everything runs on CPU since there's no transformers involved. On our benchmark of ~1250 query/document pairs across 63 repos and 19 languages, it uses 98% fewer tokens than grep+read and reaches 99% of the retrieval quality of a 137M-parameter code-trained transformer, while being ~200x faster.Main features:- Token-efficient: 98% fewer tokens than grep+read- Fast: ~250ms to index a typical repo on our benchmark, ~1.5ms per query on CPU (very large repos may take longer)- Accurate: 0.854 NDCG@10, 99% of the best transformer setup we tested- MCP server: drop-in for Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, OpenCode- Zero config: no API keys, no GPU, no external servicesInstall in Claude Code with: claude mcp add semble -s user -- uvx --from "semble[mcp]" sembleOr check our README for other installation instructions, benchmarks, and methodology:Semble: https://github.com/MinishLab/sembleBenchmarks: https://github.com/MinishLab/semble/tree/main/benchmarksModel: https://huggingface.co/minishlab/potion-code-16MLet us know if you have any feedback or questions!
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Postgres extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search
Last summer we faced a conundrum at my company, Tiger Data, a Postgres cloud vendor whose main business is in timeseries data. We were trying to grow our business towards emerging AI-centric workloads and wanted to provide a state-of-the-art hybrid search stack in Postgres. We'd already built pgvectorscale in house with the goal of scaling semantic search beyond pgvector's main memory limitations. We just needed a scalable ranked keyword search solution too.The problem: core Postgres doesn't provide this; the leading Postgres BM25 extension, ParadeDB, is guarded behind AGPL; developing our own extension appeared daunting. We'd need a small team of sharp engineers and 6-12 months, I figured. And we'd probably still fall short of the performance of a mature system like Parade/Tantivy.Or would we? I'd be experimenting long enough with AI-boosted development at that point to realize that with the latest tools (Claude Code + Opus) and an experienced hand (I've been working in database systems internals for 25 years now), the old time estimates pretty much go out the window.I told our CTO I thought I could solo the project in one quarter. This raised some eyebrows.It did take a little more time than that (two quarters), and we got some real help from the community (amazing!) after open-sourcing the pre-release. But I'm thrilled/exhausted today to share that pg_textsearch v1.0 is freely available via open source (Postgres license), on Tiger Data cloud, and hopefully soon, a hyperscalar near you:https://github.com/timescale/pg_textsearchIn the blog post accompanying the release, I overview the architecture and present benchmark results using MS-MARCO. To my surprise, we were not only able to meet Parade/Tantivy's query performance, but exceed it substantially, measuring a 4.7x advantage on query throughput at scale:https://www.tigerdata.com/blog/pg-textsearch-bm25-fu
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Consus (YC F24) – LLM gateway for companies handling sensitive data
Hey Hacker News! I'm Eric, the founder of Consus. We route all AI requests to ITAR restricted and controlled unclassified information (CUI) compliant infrastructure. Consus itself satisfies ITAR restrictions, and we recently completed our FedRAMP equivalency audit against the 410 FedRAMP High controls. FedRAMP High is the U.S. government’s strictest security baseline for cloud services handling sensitive unclassified data. A breach of this data could cause severe or catastrophic harm. Achieving FedRAMP equivalency, or authorization, is required before processing CUI information.Demo: https://youtu.be/6MYxJe6P4oYAerospace and defense is experiencing rapid growth. Unfortunately, most companies are struggling to use AI because of necessary data protections & compliance risk. These companies can move even faster if they could use the AI tools that most other industries take for granted.I spent most of my career prior to Consus in aerospace & defense. I launched national security payloads at SpaceX, and was an early employee at Castelion. I’ve watched first hand how compliance red-tape makes it difficult for companies to adopt new technologies and trust vendors that touch their sensitive data. For example, I worked with a satellite manufacturer that doesn’t allow any AI tools, even for non-sensitive work.Even as AI has become extremely useful over the past 9-12 months, I was surprised by how many aerospace & defense companies refused to touch it. They could see how it could be helpful, but they were scared about model providers training on their data, violating an ITAR rule, or risk losing new business because of a failed cyber assessment. These are all rational fears.There were a lot of ways to solve some/all of these problems, but we focused on building a compliant AI inference layer that can "plug" into any AI tool or workflow. Just as OpenRouter integrates with most tools, Consus can connect to tools like ChatGPT or Clau
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