[falcolas]

This assumes an interest, willingness, and time to learn. For better or worse, not everyone can/wants to become an expert in managing these buggy and vulnerable messes we call general purpose computers.

It's a big investment, an investment many of us don't remember making since it was effectively part of our childhood. That same investment, in a world with special purpose computing devices, has a very low ROI for people who would rather be doing something else.

[ralphc]

It's also assuming you live close enough to your parents that you can go over and physically revive a bricked computer.

[i336_]

I just thought of a bizarre but interesting idea - an i3/i5-capable server motherboard with IPMI, and a rock-solid router running OpenVPN in front of the IPMI port.

Maybe fractionally higher power consumption, and perhaps you'd need a GPU for it, but if both ends have really decent internet, that could very legitimately work.

[pc86]

> a rock-solid router

Make one of these and you'll end up with a lot of money.

[i336_]

Where would be a good place to start? OpenBSD? http://www.skeptech.org/blog/2013/01/13/unscrewed-a-story-ab... Another platform?

It's tricky. You could for example pick seL4, but then you have no router. That could be interpreted as an amazing opportunity to make a new stack, or a feat significantly less interesting and more strenuous than climbing Mt. Everest.

Then on the hardware side, do you pick x86 (complete with firmware that lets you use fallthru to ring -2! \o/), ARM, MIPS, or what? This is a question I've no idea how to answer.

Also, heh, I'm reminded of this:

1. Search Shodan for JAWS/1.0

2. Take one of the results, go to the IP[:port], append "/shell?" and a command, eg "/shell?ls"

3. Try running "whoami"

4. Go back and look at the number of results

5. Visit the IPs normally, and learn that these are DVRs, for security cameras; alternate between dying inside and reattaching your jaw.

[Haegin]

There's got to be money in a service where a company provides your parents with a computer that's set up to be pretty user friendly and safe. If they brick it, the computer is replaced. The company manages the machine so backups are handled and the new machine will be pretty close to whatever they lost wherever possible (in terms of content on the machine). If the hardware gets damaged that'd have to be paid for I guess.

[rthille]

Yeah, Google provides that service and many manufacturers sell the products which make use of it. (chromebooks)