Some readers were kind enough to point out in the comments that there are a couple of open source projects that integrate with Remote Desktop. I guess news analysis that appears within hours of a story breaking is never very good. The whole business of remote desktop access is an entire industry, and this is just one tiny fraction of the protocols that were published by Microsoft yesterday, so Charny’s story was the moral equivalent of trying to decide who is going to win the next American election by talking to a couple of truckers at a bar. The problem wasn’t the accuracy in reporting (although that was sorely lacking), the problem was that the story was too ambitious. When Charny called me I should have said, “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.”

PS here are the Microsoft Open Protocol Specifications.