[gulfie]

We are increasingly finding out that even owning and having physical control over the hardware isn't enough to insure secure a physical device.

Google 'BIOS based Advanced persistent threat' and 'Hardware Trojan'.

Oh but wait, it gets worse. Even "well thought out" industry standards are horrible security problems waiting to happen. Cypher 0 , who thought this was a good idea?

http://fish2.com/ipmi/

The solution you are looking for may be known as homomorphic encryption, which is still rather far out in the theoretical place.

The horse has been out of the barn so long it has had a good life, grown old and has great grand children playing in the fields.

[avifreedman]

I wonder if there is a sufficient supply of MicroVaxes in the world to do hosting for the geeks who would want it. Paul Vixie has one we were going to put online in Ashburn. On the other hand, the idea there was that the value of the data inside would be low enough that no one would want to bother trying to break in. The larger Vaxes had a scary ability to do overridable microcode (maybe even the smaller ones) so maybe the Vax isn't the best 'classic' platform for this, hmm...