Remote Access is the wave of the future. And like most waves, it is generated by a combination of wind, tides, and currents. Or electromagnetic radiation. Or people in a stadium. Or people saying goodbye. Or bad haircuts from the '80s?
Okay, this is in my "technology" section because I'm talking about accessing your home computer from a remote location. (Get it? That's why it's called remote access.)
Gmail. Remote access to my mail. Used to pull everything down to Outlook and fight with pst files to syncronize everything. Gmail is much better. Mail on my upstairs computer? There. On the downstairs computer? There. On my cell phone? There. And not disappearing from any of those places when I access it somewhere else.
Media Service. The laptop connected to my stereo and TV. Wi-fi. Winamp server. From any computer in the house, I can start and stop and fast-forward and add or remove songs from the playlist. Step two is coming soon: play movies the same way.
Remote access to entire computers? A little scarier, and a little cooler when it works. Scarier because if you open remote access up to anyone, you open it up to potentially everyone. Hackers love looking for things like that.
So I've shied away from using the Windows built-in remote access stuff. (It's SSL! It's totally secure! Yeah. Next time I get a few days, I'm going to implement my man-in-the-middle SSL system that will read all the SSL sessions from my own computers. So ifyou come to visit, be sure you don't check your secure webmail. Because I'll be reading it!) (Except I won't really be reading it. But I'll have the power to!)
Today's sponsor, RemotePC, offers a commercial approach to remote PC access that promises to be more secure and convenient than the built-in Windows client. The other neat trick is having up to 10 people sharing one desktop. Could get messy, if you ask me. But if that great power were used responsibly (think Peter saving that train, not Peter dancing with Gwen in the nightclub) it could be pretty cool.
But I don't know that it's all such a good idea. I read a story once about a monkey whose brain was linked (remotely!) to a massive computer, so she became super-smart and escaped from the evil experimenters. But then she got too far away, so signal lag caused her brain to break down and she became a normal monkey again.
A normal monkey! And if we rely too heavily on remote access, we will surely suffer the same fate.
You have been warned.