While it likely would have shot their prices to hell(at least without larger economies of scale than Pystar was ever likely to have), I would have been very interested to see the legal showdown had Pystar simply made it utterly trivial for the end user to violate the EULA; but simply performed a legitimate resale themselves...
Image, for sake of hypothesis, that they had purchased a legitimate retail DVD, for each system, loaded it into the system's optical drive, and then slapped a skeletal little scripted automation partition on the HDD that loaded itself into RAM and did the install on first boot(or, if that wasn't possible, a microcontroller-driven USB dongle emulating a mouse and keyboard, and playing back all the inputs required for an install should be doable for ~$10-$20, possibly less in volume)...
Apple would still have been Deeply Unhappy; but Pystar would have simply been re-selling DVDs they purchased legitimately, which would seem to be entirely OK under the beleaguered-but-not-dead-yet terms of first sale...
Why would the password be stored, in any form recoverable by means that aren't computationally intractable brute forcing, anywhere in the device or storage expansion cards?
Isn't this the sort of thing that hashing is supposed to solve?
There has been some work(typically only supported on rather new server hardware) on giving VMs direct access to selected chunks of hardware. It is still controlled by the virtualization system, for security reasons; but if access is granted, that particular PCIe device effectively hangs directly off the virtualized OS, rather than the host one.
Probably Not going to be coming to joystick ports anytime soon; but is considered a feature of interest for things like high speed NICs, GPUs, and other such devices where the overhead of having the host juggle the data coming too and from the card in software before handing it to the virtualized OS is impractically large.
I would say that you are not doing open hardware unless you at least have a FPGA and distribute the HDL for your design.
Does the FPGA have to be a part for which the complete schematics and documentation are available under an open license(if such a beast exists), or are blackbox chips running their toolchain's output from an OSS HDL file just better than blackbox chips running their toolchain's output from an OSS C file?
I can only really think of two possibilities that might motivate something besides the 'just make it non-obvious and ignore the geeks' strategy:
1. If somebody were to produce a dead-easy piracy tool, like Napster in the good old days, Click->plug in kindle->select applications/books/etc you want->P2P download, root, install; that would probably make Amazon a sad panda. However, that seems comparatively unlikely in today's legal climate, and considering the 'rough-but-servicable, if you don't mind forum crawling and RTFMing' state of the 3rd-party scene for the utterly unlocked Nook Color.
2. If Amazon is actually losing money on these things, and some 3rd party starts buying them by the truckload, flashing cyanogenmod, and selling them as the best $250 tablet available in some other market. That one, though, seems unlikely because Amazon controls the distribution channel, and shouldn't have a hard time making it inconvenient enough to not be worth trying to obtain the things by the palletload.
Outside of those, though, the toothiest lockdown that would seem to make any economic sense would be some sort of "Well, the SoC vendor will throw in a bootloader that verifies the crypto signature of the firmware before loading at no additional charge, so why not?" more or less apathetic activation of a lockdown feature just because it is available.
What I don't understand about this plan(assuming it isn't mere rumor) is that the linux-based OS is supposed to be for cheap, low-spec phones that their new MS/Nokia BFF WP7 deal doesn't provide them with an OS suitable for...
Their MeeGo/QT work, now orphaned, was largely aimed at higher end smartphones, the same ones that are now going to be WP7 devices. None of the linux-with-custom-stuff-on-top phone OSes(MeeGo, Android, WebOS) work particularly well on sub-smartphone hardware. They are powerful, have some nice features, and don't suffer from some of the horrid, idiosyncratic development environments of the old dumbphone and featurephone OSes; but they don't actually scale down very far before you are looking at some seriously dire performance, RAM so limited that multitasking is largely a theoretical benefit, and a screen so lousy that your decent browser is nearly useless for anything that isn't a deeply spartan 'mobile' website that a 1997 WAP phone could have rendered....
That's what I don't understand: Linux-based systems definitely have their points on more powerful hardware, and Nokia has access to one of their own(in addition to doing an adroid hostile-fork, as Amazon did); but they aren't so hot on weaker hardware(Exercise: grab a copy of the debian m68k port and replicate the features of, say, a Palm III, in 2MB of ROM, 2MB of RAM, and a 16MHz processor....). Nokia also has a number of eccentric and crufty; but eminently suited to very-low-spec phones OSes available. Why would they possibly be spinning Yet Another Linux WIth Something Weird On Top Of It OS?
It will be interesting, once these units get into hacker hands, to see whether that strong incentive (which definitely exists, for the reasons you state), is pursued by technological means, or whether they'll skip the cat-and-mouse with the hypothetical 'fire dev team' and work on the assumption that the pool of users who want intuitive point-and-poke access to Amazon sold stuff is much larger than the pool of tablet hackers and ignore the problem...
Given that a fair number of nook colors have already been sold to the tablet tinkering crowd, and the HP touches during the blowout, and some of the Viewsonic and other cheap-but-not-bottom-of-barrel stuff, have all been out for a while, it won't necessarily be the case that the techie crowd will be all that dangerous in terms of numbers(especially if they do want to sideload some stuff; but also end up buying Amazon MP3s, kindle books, etc.)
It would certainly be no surprise to see some sort of lockdown; but it also might prove to not be worth the effort.
In addition to the hash of dubious computer buzzwords(the City OS will, of course, run "apps"), there seems to be a giant morass of dubiously tractable problems regarding a distributed system running across hardware controlled by who-knows-how-many different parties.
The pure engineering/architectural problems of unexpected consequences in complex systems(ie. whatever it was were Amazon accidentally took down EC2 last time, or debugging a cluster application whose failures depend on some wacky race condition between your nodes) aren't trivial; but that is just stuff happening in your own racks, on your own switches, with your own data, etc.
Now let's throw in the mixture of social and architectural problems brought up by the fact that this "city OS" will both need to manage 'resources' in the more-or-less-familiar-if-difficult way that operating systems have always had to manage hardware and somehow coherently manage access to data that has things like privacy implications attached to it, hardware that may be owned by somebody else who wishes to place some restrictions on management conditions, all sorts of parties with various levels of need-to-know querying data that they may or may not be supposed to get access to(oh, and be sure to devise a programmatic automatic check to ensure that if I check the "deny" box on the ACL for given piece of data for a given user, the system automatically sets permissions to keep that user from inferring the denied data from other sources that they may have access to, that shouldn't be a problem, right?)...
Plus, we've all seen how well SCADA systems exposed to the public internet work, so I predict no issues in the CITY OF THE FUTURE, where everything from the SWAT teams to Granny's pill bottle have IP addresses and management interfaces!
Arguably, much of the interest in centralization seems to be a mixture of telcom, database, and analytics outfits looking for a problem to which they have a solution in stock, along with an e-penis competition among municipal and emergency services types about who can have the coolest "Command Center" with the biggest vector-art map of the city at the front, and the most uniformed people Looking Serious at banks of monitors.
This sort of problem is one where a distributed systems approach is overwhelmingly more sensible(unless your primary interests are selling system integration and/or conducting surveillance), and often already in effect.
For instance, in many cities, you will see a small sensor unit mounted somewhere on the traffic-light structures(distinguishable by a little tubular sun-shade thing). That device is there to pick up coded IR pulses emitted by emergency vehicles with their emergency lighting activated and deviate from the usual traffic light pattern in favor of giving them priority at the intersection.
There you go. A few cheap sensors, interacting with local stimuli and control systems, produces the broad-level effect you want. Works great in biological systems as well.
Having done some support for people using them, I don't deny that they suck, that just doesn't seem to have stopped them from continuing to sell at slightly alarming price points and in fair numbers. Their competitors seem to keep running into the problem that(in addition to some patents) a lot of Adobe's core software is the sort of thing where producing a new product, on an architecturally sound foundation, that reproduces the first 90% of the functionality is comparatively easy; but trying to reproduce the next 90% reminds you of why Adobe has been shovelling cruft on top of cruft for two decades or so...
So long as the expert witness tells the jury that the error rate is zero, conviction statistics will prove... And I'm talking prove here, the fancy kind with numbers and and computers and shit, that the error rate is zero.
By the standards of some of the dodgier corners of forensics, this stuff will be downright impressive...
As always, the completely innocent, not socially related to anybody not completely innocent, totally conformant with local and regional cultural and lifestyle standards, possessing enough money to not be of interest to debt collectors; but not so much as to be of interest to marketers, not being followed by any stalkers/vindictive exes/etc., people have Absolutely Nothing To Fear!
There has been interesting work done on insects attempting to combine the advantages of the two...
Remote control cyborg beetles have electrode implants in strategic parts of their nervous system, allowing you to steer them around at your command, while taking advantage of the fact that bugs beat the hell out of microbots at flight performance.
A large mammal would presumably be more complicated; but(in principle), one could graft computerized guidance into something like a mule, allowing it to be steered through preset waypoints or command signals; but preserving its biological advantages....
"Given the rich supply of free, open source developer tools available today, vendors like that are few and far between. Remember Borland? Or Watcom?'"
This part of the argument seems a little questionable. Yes, the OSS tools scene has grown and improved by considerable measure, which probably did help to murder some of the more indie and niche players(OSS has a somewhat mixed record in toppling incumbents; but it tends to sharply reduce the demand for '2nd best; but cheaper' and 'scrappy underdog with rough edges but only $99!' players...); but it seems to both ignore the elephant in the room and miss the point:
Those vendors who make their money on selling their platforms generally decided(for some mixture of direct profit, the desire to increase the value of their platform by making targeting it easier, or desire to increase their control of the platform by being able to change it radically and get away with it by changing the dev tools to compensate) to get into the market for dev tools for their platform. That really didn't do the 3rd parties any favors.
As for missing the point, Adobe is actually a powerhouse in the world of designers-of-tools-for-platforms-they-don't-also-sell: it's just in the area of even being a competent deliverer-of-platform that they've pretty consistently sucked. Their design tools continue to move pretty briskly; but everybody loathes the issues of flash player(especially once you get beyond win32 with a beefy processor), acrobat reader, etc.
All bets are off if you happen to have a pet MRI apparatus, or go finger-painting all over the platters with a nice rare-earth; but a crummy little degausser made for nuking VHS tapes won't necessarily do the job.
The magnetic field patterns are on the surface of the platters. Sand the surface off(recommendation: do not breathe result.) and there is nothing to recover.
Unless you have pretty cool secrets, though, nearly anything that prevents them from Just Working when plugged in is probably enough.
I could perhaps, see the logic behind having a 'standard' contract(where software buyers share the cost of writing an airtight and toothy contract), which could then be used by anybody in a critical situation,but the idea of making that the default is insane. Goodbye OSS, goodbye any software that isn't mission-critical and priced to match. Worse, depending on the level of vendor influence, you might see the worst of both worlds. Some sort of perverse situation where having a clueless support drone close your ticket with "asdesigned" within 30 minutes will be legally acceptable, but having to wait a weekend until the software's primary author sends a patch isn't...
I'm pretty sure that dissecting a model organism is even more engaging, and quite possibly less expensive, than this "3D"nonsense... I for one would certainly want my hypothetical surgeon to be elbow deep in a variety of actual dissections before getting to me...
Flash is generally rated for a decade of data retention; there doesn't seem to be much firm data(given what a reasonable chunk of flash cost a decade ago, and the nontrivial differences between today's flash and that of yesteryear) as to whether that is the pessimistic, 'underpromise, overdeliver' number, or whether that is the bullshit optimist's number.
The problem is that the BOM was something like 3x the sale price. A lot of ideas start looking real, real, good at ~30% of cost... That said, WebOS is an excellent tablet shell, I like mine(and would really hope to see some sort of ability to embed android apps into cards; but it makes android as a shell look like a toy in the 10' size.
You can get something resembling a tablet for $99, actual price, but those tend to be pretty dire: low resolution screen with lousy viewing angles, resistive touch film, lousy SoC specs... the Touchpad had a bit over $99 worth of touchscreen alone, and that is sort of an important feature for a device with no other interface options.
A clear triumph for America's powers of cultural assimilation! While our barbaric foreign enemies carry out suicide attacks, our beneficent influence induces the local ones to attempt a weaponized UAV program! Heck, one more generation and they'll probably be saving the bombs for use against Planned Parenthood, and exercising their second amendment rights against other targets, just like the good, god-fearing folks at home who are sensible enough to fear the right god...
Assuming you are serious about "simple", no problem.
Even stock routers come with web servers(the config webpage being the interface of choice) and OpenWRT or DDWRT offer webservers that are a touch more customizable.
The only downsides are that running a webserver can be an excellent way of discovering how little RAM most routers have, and you either have to get one with USB host support, or scrounge enough GPIO lines to bodge in an SD card interface, if you actually want to serve any nontrivially sized stuff.
It is also, of course, Not Recommended to let the box that handles minor functions like all your internet traffic, DNS, etc. get 0wn3d. So don't do that.
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While it likely would have shot their prices to hell(at least without larger economies of scale than Pystar was ever likely to have), I would have been very interested to see the legal showdown had Pystar simply made it utterly trivial for the end user to violate the EULA; but simply performed a legitimate resale themselves...
Image, for sake of hypothesis, that they had purchased a legitimate retail DVD, for each system, loaded it into the system's optical drive, and then slapped a skeletal little scripted automation partition on the HDD that loaded itself into RAM and did the install on first boot(or, if that wasn't possible, a microcontroller-driven USB dongle emulating a mouse and keyboard, and playing back all the inputs required for an install should be doable for ~$10-$20, possibly less in volume)...
Apple would still have been Deeply Unhappy; but Pystar would have simply been re-selling DVDs they purchased legitimately, which would seem to be entirely OK under the beleaguered-but-not-dead-yet terms of first sale...
I'm told that they are currently hunting for a third, because they think that a Mismanage à trois would be totally hot...
Why would the password be stored, in any form recoverable by means that aren't computationally intractable brute forcing, anywhere in the device or storage expansion cards?
Isn't this the sort of thing that hashing is supposed to solve?
There has been some work(typically only supported on rather new server hardware) on giving VMs direct access to selected chunks of hardware. It is still controlled by the virtualization system, for security reasons; but if access is granted, that particular PCIe device effectively hangs directly off the virtualized OS, rather than the host one.
Probably Not going to be coming to joystick ports anytime soon; but is considered a feature of interest for things like high speed NICs, GPUs, and other such devices where the overhead of having the host juggle the data coming too and from the card in software before handing it to the virtualized OS is impractically large.
I would say that you are not doing open hardware unless you at least have a FPGA and distribute the HDL for your design.
Does the FPGA have to be a part for which the complete schematics and documentation are available under an open license(if such a beast exists), or are blackbox chips running their toolchain's output from an OSS HDL file just better than blackbox chips running their toolchain's output from an OSS C file?
I can only really think of two possibilities that might motivate something besides the 'just make it non-obvious and ignore the geeks' strategy:
1. If somebody were to produce a dead-easy piracy tool, like Napster in the good old days, Click->plug in kindle->select applications/books/etc you want->P2P download, root, install; that would probably make Amazon a sad panda. However, that seems comparatively unlikely in today's legal climate, and considering the 'rough-but-servicable, if you don't mind forum crawling and RTFMing' state of the 3rd-party scene for the utterly unlocked Nook Color.
2. If Amazon is actually losing money on these things, and some 3rd party starts buying them by the truckload, flashing cyanogenmod, and selling them as the best $250 tablet available in some other market. That one, though, seems unlikely because Amazon controls the distribution channel, and shouldn't have a hard time making it inconvenient enough to not be worth trying to obtain the things by the palletload.
Outside of those, though, the toothiest lockdown that would seem to make any economic sense would be some sort of "Well, the SoC vendor will throw in a bootloader that verifies the crypto signature of the firmware before loading at no additional charge, so why not?" more or less apathetic activation of a lockdown feature just because it is available.
What I don't understand about this plan(assuming it isn't mere rumor) is that the linux-based OS is supposed to be for cheap, low-spec phones that their new MS/Nokia BFF WP7 deal doesn't provide them with an OS suitable for...
Their MeeGo/QT work, now orphaned, was largely aimed at higher end smartphones, the same ones that are now going to be WP7 devices. None of the linux-with-custom-stuff-on-top phone OSes(MeeGo, Android, WebOS) work particularly well on sub-smartphone hardware. They are powerful, have some nice features, and don't suffer from some of the horrid, idiosyncratic development environments of the old dumbphone and featurephone OSes; but they don't actually scale down very far before you are looking at some seriously dire performance, RAM so limited that multitasking is largely a theoretical benefit, and a screen so lousy that your decent browser is nearly useless for anything that isn't a deeply spartan 'mobile' website that a 1997 WAP phone could have rendered....
That's what I don't understand: Linux-based systems definitely have their points on more powerful hardware, and Nokia has access to one of their own(in addition to doing an adroid hostile-fork, as Amazon did); but they aren't so hot on weaker hardware(Exercise: grab a copy of the debian m68k port and replicate the features of, say, a Palm III, in 2MB of ROM, 2MB of RAM, and a 16MHz processor....). Nokia also has a number of eccentric and crufty; but eminently suited to very-low-spec phones OSes available. Why would they possibly be spinning Yet Another Linux WIth Something Weird On Top Of It OS?
It will be interesting, once these units get into hacker hands, to see whether that strong incentive (which definitely exists, for the reasons you state), is pursued by technological means, or whether they'll skip the cat-and-mouse with the hypothetical 'fire dev team' and work on the assumption that the pool of users who want intuitive point-and-poke access to Amazon sold stuff is much larger than the pool of tablet hackers and ignore the problem...
Given that a fair number of nook colors have already been sold to the tablet tinkering crowd, and the HP touches during the blowout, and some of the Viewsonic and other cheap-but-not-bottom-of-barrel stuff, have all been out for a while, it won't necessarily be the case that the techie crowd will be all that dangerous in terms of numbers(especially if they do want to sideload some stuff; but also end up buying Amazon MP3s, kindle books, etc.)
It would certainly be no surprise to see some sort of lockdown; but it also might prove to not be worth the effort.
No Problem.
(The poster takes no responsibility for you constructing the above circuit and getting Rodney-King'ed by angry cops or sent to FPMITAP).
In addition to the hash of dubious computer buzzwords(the City OS will, of course, run "apps"), there seems to be a giant morass of dubiously tractable problems regarding a distributed system running across hardware controlled by who-knows-how-many different parties.
The pure engineering/architectural problems of unexpected consequences in complex systems(ie. whatever it was were Amazon accidentally took down EC2 last time, or debugging a cluster application whose failures depend on some wacky race condition between your nodes) aren't trivial; but that is just stuff happening in your own racks, on your own switches, with your own data, etc.
Now let's throw in the mixture of social and architectural problems brought up by the fact that this "city OS" will both need to manage 'resources' in the more-or-less-familiar-if-difficult way that operating systems have always had to manage hardware and somehow coherently manage access to data that has things like privacy implications attached to it, hardware that may be owned by somebody else who wishes to place some restrictions on management conditions, all sorts of parties with various levels of need-to-know querying data that they may or may not be supposed to get access to(oh, and be sure to devise a programmatic automatic check to ensure that if I check the "deny" box on the ACL for given piece of data for a given user, the system automatically sets permissions to keep that user from inferring the denied data from other sources that they may have access to, that shouldn't be a problem, right?)...
Plus, we've all seen how well SCADA systems exposed to the public internet work, so I predict no issues in the CITY OF THE FUTURE, where everything from the SWAT teams to Granny's pill bottle have IP addresses and management interfaces!
Arguably, much of the interest in centralization seems to be a mixture of telcom, database, and analytics outfits looking for a problem to which they have a solution in stock, along with an e-penis competition among municipal and emergency services types about who can have the coolest "Command Center" with the biggest vector-art map of the city at the front, and the most uniformed people Looking Serious at banks of monitors.
This sort of problem is one where a distributed systems approach is overwhelmingly more sensible(unless your primary interests are selling system integration and/or conducting surveillance), and often already in effect.
For instance, in many cities, you will see a small sensor unit mounted somewhere on the traffic-light structures(distinguishable by a little tubular sun-shade thing). That device is there to pick up coded IR pulses emitted by emergency vehicles with their emergency lighting activated and deviate from the usual traffic light pattern in favor of giving them priority at the intersection.
There you go. A few cheap sensors, interacting with local stimuli and control systems, produces the broad-level effect you want. Works great in biological systems as well.
Having done some support for people using them, I don't deny that they suck, that just doesn't seem to have stopped them from continuing to sell at slightly alarming price points and in fair numbers. Their competitors seem to keep running into the problem that(in addition to some patents) a lot of Adobe's core software is the sort of thing where producing a new product, on an architecturally sound foundation, that reproduces the first 90% of the functionality is comparatively easy; but trying to reproduce the next 90% reminds you of why Adobe has been shovelling cruft on top of cruft for two decades or so...
So long as the expert witness tells the jury that the error rate is zero, conviction statistics will prove... And I'm talking prove here, the fancy kind with numbers and and computers and shit, that the error rate is zero.
By the standards of some of the dodgier corners of forensics, this stuff will be downright impressive...
As always, the completely innocent, not socially related to anybody not completely innocent, totally conformant with local and regional cultural and lifestyle standards, possessing enough money to not be of interest to debt collectors; but not so much as to be of interest to marketers, not being followed by any stalkers/vindictive exes/etc., people have Absolutely Nothing To Fear!
Fucking luddites. Go tighten your tinfoil hats.
There has been interesting work done on insects attempting to combine the advantages of the two...
Remote control cyborg beetles have electrode implants in strategic parts of their nervous system, allowing you to steer them around at your command, while taking advantage of the fact that bugs beat the hell out of microbots at flight performance.
A large mammal would presumably be more complicated; but(in principle), one could graft computerized guidance into something like a mule, allowing it to be steered through preset waypoints or command signals; but preserving its biological advantages....
"Given the rich supply of free, open source developer tools available today, vendors like that are few and far between. Remember Borland? Or Watcom?'"
This part of the argument seems a little questionable. Yes, the OSS tools scene has grown and improved by considerable measure, which probably did help to murder some of the more indie and niche players(OSS has a somewhat mixed record in toppling incumbents; but it tends to sharply reduce the demand for '2nd best; but cheaper' and 'scrappy underdog with rough edges but only $99!' players...); but it seems to both ignore the elephant in the room and miss the point:
Those vendors who make their money on selling their platforms generally decided(for some mixture of direct profit, the desire to increase the value of their platform by making targeting it easier, or desire to increase their control of the platform by being able to change it radically and get away with it by changing the dev tools to compensate) to get into the market for dev tools for their platform. That really didn't do the 3rd parties any favors.
As for missing the point, Adobe is actually a powerhouse in the world of designers-of-tools-for-platforms-they-don't-also-sell: it's just in the area of even being a competent deliverer-of-platform that they've pretty consistently sucked. Their design tools continue to move pretty briskly; but everybody loathes the issues of flash player(especially once you get beyond win32 with a beefy processor), acrobat reader, etc.
HDD platter coercivity is usually pretty high.
All bets are off if you happen to have a pet MRI apparatus, or go finger-painting all over the platters with a nice rare-earth; but a crummy little degausser made for nuking VHS tapes won't necessarily do the job.
The magnetic field patterns are on the surface of the platters. Sand the surface off(recommendation: do not breathe result.) and there is nothing to recover.
Unless you have pretty cool secrets, though, nearly anything that prevents them from Just Working when plugged in is probably enough.
I could perhaps, see the logic behind having a 'standard' contract(where software buyers share the cost of writing an airtight and toothy contract), which could then be used by anybody in a critical situation,but the idea of making that the default is insane. Goodbye OSS, goodbye any software that isn't mission-critical and priced to match. Worse, depending on the level of vendor influence, you might see the worst of both worlds. Some sort of perverse situation where having a clueless support drone close your ticket with "asdesigned" within 30 minutes will be legally acceptable, but having to wait a weekend until the software's primary author sends a patch isn't...
I'm pretty sure that dissecting a model organism is even more engaging, and quite possibly less expensive, than this "3D"nonsense... I for one would certainly want my hypothetical surgeon to be elbow deep in a variety of actual dissections before getting to me...
Flash is generally rated for a decade of data retention; there doesn't seem to be much firm data(given what a reasonable chunk of flash cost a decade ago, and the nontrivial differences between today's flash and that of yesteryear) as to whether that is the pessimistic, 'underpromise, overdeliver' number, or whether that is the bullshit optimist's number.
The problem is that the BOM was something like 3x the sale price. A lot of ideas start looking real, real, good at ~30% of cost... That said, WebOS is an excellent tablet shell, I like mine(and would really hope to see some sort of ability to embed android apps into cards; but it makes android as a shell look like a toy in the 10' size.
You can get something resembling a tablet for $99, actual price, but those tend to be pretty dire: low resolution screen with lousy viewing angles, resistive touch film, lousy SoC specs... the Touchpad had a bit over $99 worth of touchscreen alone, and that is sort of an important feature for a device with no other interface options.
You, er, missed pretty much everything written by game theorists during the cold war, along with fun concepts like "saturation bombing" I take it?
A clear triumph for America's powers of cultural assimilation! While our barbaric foreign enemies carry out suicide attacks, our beneficent influence induces the local ones to attempt a weaponized UAV program! Heck, one more generation and they'll probably be saving the bombs for use against Planned Parenthood, and exercising their second amendment rights against other targets, just like the good, god-fearing folks at home who are sensible enough to fear the right god...
Assuming you are serious about "simple", no problem.
Even stock routers come with web servers(the config webpage being the interface of choice) and OpenWRT or DDWRT offer webservers that are a touch more customizable.
The only downsides are that running a webserver can be an excellent way of discovering how little RAM most routers have, and you either have to get one with USB host support, or scrounge enough GPIO lines to bodge in an SD card interface, if you actually want to serve any nontrivially sized stuff.
It is also, of course, Not Recommended to let the box that handles minor functions like all your internet traffic, DNS, etc. get 0wn3d. So don't do that.