TweetMyPc is a free app that allows you to send commands that get understood by a program on the remote machine and are acted upon. Cool.
There is a long list of commands that can be issues, found at this link, but here is a short summary:
- Shutdown
- Lock
- Hibernate
- OS
- Standby
- IP
You can even have the PC send results as tweets with the Reply command.
So how does it all work? You install this program and create a new private Twitter account. Make sure this account is quite secure. You then have the private account ready to start watching tweets. The code is freely available to download and start enjoying.
But remember, as in every new toy that comes pre-packaged in Open Source…
Use At Your Own Risk
August 7th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
What an incredibly bad idea. Last month was the Month of Twitter bugs- 30+ security bugs published, most of which could be used to hijack any account, and many of which still have not been fixed.
And you want to let twitter run your computer?
August 7th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
ok, I guess I did say I thought it was, “cool”…
But in the spirit of providing a quick-and-dirty recap of what has the potential to be “very cool,” I agree with you that handing over control of your computer to …anything is well, dumb. (Unless of course the person on the other end of the remote session is a work colleague and they deserve a good non-malicious scare once in a while, but that’s another story ;).
I tend to wrongfully assume that people who use these kinds of apps know what they’re doing, and make the effort to protect themselves when trying anything new. I should know better – not everyone lives in a live sandbox test environment. That would be …work.
I’ll added a caveat to “Use at your own risk” to appease the purists and the unsuspecting. Thanks for the reality check!