André id like to add that this is one of the most dangerous thing you can do as far as your friends machine is concerned. there is no security at all here and anyone that telnets to that port to find out whats running will find themselves with a command shell. if this is to be an on going thing and not just an experiment get and install realVNC on his machine. its free and gives you password encryption. the client is only 172k or you can use a browser to access his machine on port 5900. pcanywhere would be better but its not free. even telnet would be better than netcat. At least set the firewall to only allow connections from your ip address.