“How Many Computers Are In Your Computer?”, 2010-01-18 (; backlinks; similar):
Any ‘computer’ is made up of hundreds of separate computers plugged together, any of which can be hacked. I list some of these parts.
Why are there so many places for backdoors and weird machines in your “computer”?
Because big things are made of small things: your computer is in fact scores or hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of computer chips, many of which host weird machines and are explicitly or implicitly capable of Turing-complete computations (many more powerful than desktops of bygone eras), working together to create the illusion of a single ‘computer’.
Backdoors, bugs, weird machines, and security do not care about what you think—only where resources can be found and orchestrated into a computation.