If you ever need to remotely access your PC or someone else's PC, here's a handy and inexpensive tool. For an attended PC, say when you're on the phone with someone and you need to access their desktop, there's no charge. For an unattended PC, say when you have a home or office computer that you'd like to access remotely, the cost is $10 per month with no contract.For attended PCs, there's nothing to pre-install. The person at the PC you want to view simply goes to http://www.showmypc.com/ and clicks on the option "Show My PC to a Remote User". The program runs on demand so you don't need to have anything installed. Then, you go to the same site and click on the option "View Remote User's PC". Once you enter the one-time password you should be able to view and control the remote PC.
The technology seems pretty sound from a security standpoint. One-time only passwords are used; SSL is used; VNC is tunneled over SSH; and all connections go over an 128bit encrypted ssh tunnel.
To access your own PC remotely, you'll want to install and use the service version (http://showmypc.com/service/). When you install it on the PC, intended to be accessed later, you specifiy a hostname, email address and password. It then installs it as a windows service. Whenever you want to connect to it, simply use the same hostname/email/password in the client, and you'll then be able to view and control the PC remotely. The Windows Services options does not have an "always on" connection, but only connects when you enter the remote password from the viewer side. A new SSH connection is made on host and viewer side and then VNC is started. If you're unable to authenticate the connection is dropped on both host and the viewer side.
This tool is currently hosted in data centers and on servers that are constantly being monitored, so reliabilty seems sound.
