Beta Testing

From time to time, you’ll find here the latest changes and newest features for what will come in the next release. These ‘release candidates’ have a limited lifespan, an expiration date. Not to be confused with your 30-day demo period, release candidates expire on a specific date that it will announce to you each time you run it, something like this:

By that time, either a NEW release candidate will be announced (on this page) or the release candidate will become final and posted to the normal download section of the website.

Current Release Candidate: AbsoluteTelnet 13.16 RC16
Deployed Date: February 6, 2026
Expiration Date: March 6, 2026


Download links:

32/64 bit download

32 bit download


This release candidate for version 13.16 contains the following changes:

RC1

  • Added support for user certificates and host CA
  • Expanded support of smartcard authentication to include ECC (ECDSA) smartcard keys
  • Updated login/authentication semantics to support NFC smartcards and ‘tap’ to login
  • Recognize smartcards that are backed by the Certificates in windows and route auth through NCrypt and friends
  • Added support for paste bracketing, which makes multiline pastes behave correctly in BASH, VIM, and others.
  • Modified behavior of DECCOLM slightly so it’s less likely to change terminal screen width unexpectedly.
  • Added global option for ‘make this the default sftp client’ (yes, no, prompt)

RC2

  • Fixed shell extension crash

RC3

  • Relaxed shutdown/endsession semantics

RC4

  • Correct initialization sequence in shell extension

RC5

  • Tweak registration step during install

RC6

  • Fully rely on InstallHelper for all install steps
  • Better control of start and end of smartcard watcher thread

RC7

  • Internal testing

RC8

  • Internal testing

RC9

  • Internal testing

RC10

  • Internal testing

RC11

  • Internal testing

RC12

  • Fixed initialization of smartcard watcher in hostile environments

RC16

  • Fixed buffer overrun in install helper
  • Tweaked smartcard insert watcher so it works with any card insertion, not just first one
  • Fixed window focus and modality with smartcard signing PIN prompt