Not sure how to get the Russian chips here in NA, please advise.
You don't need Russian chips, really. I think you could buy something based on Baikal processors with MIPS architecture, but you had to hunt for them on Ebay or find a way to buy it from Russia which could be problematic today.
You could just buy something like Mango Pi or Leeche Pi from Aliexpress/Banggood. They are RISC-V machines, pretty cheap but they could even browse modern Internet. At least they are definitely enough to use conspiracies.win. :)
Thing with that RISC-V and many ARM processors of same class is that they are too simple and cheap to have some kind of Intel ME/AMD PSP/ARM TrustZone thing.
Don't use Raspberry Pi, they didn't have special processor for ME thing, but use GPU for that stuff. There was attempts to reverse engineer boot process and GPU supervisor, but AFAIK even for old RPis which are obsolete now, it is still work in progress.
F.e. cheap Allwinner ARM or RISC-V SoCs that often used in cheap SBC are well studied and no malicious activity in background was noticed. SoC internal bootloader is a small 32kb piece of code and it is easy to reverse engineer it even by yourself.
Also RockChip SoCs was found pretty straight things.
If you need some power - take a look at VisionFive 2, this $50 RISC-V computer have performance similar to latest RPi4, however, it is relatively new thing and it is not clear yet, if it have some kind of ME things or not.
Or go to FPGA boards, where you could make any processor you want, even with your own architecture. But that would be more expensive, because FPGA boards with DIMM memory interface are not cheap.
In any case - look for cheap, not very powerful ARM/RISC-V/MIPS boards with lot of memory on board, install Linux distribution of your choice, and you will get pretty protected pocket computer for web browsing. RISC-V is preferrable, since it is not a widespread architecture yet, so even targeted hacker will have to work hard to break into unknown architecture. Code injection exploits designed for x86/ARM just will not work on RISC-V.
You don't need Russian chips, really. I think you could buy something based on Baikal processors with MIPS architecture, but you had to hunt for them on Ebay or find a way to buy it from Russia which could be problematic today.
You could just buy something like Mango Pi or Leeche Pi from Aliexpress/Banggood. They are RISC-V machines, pretty cheap but they could even browse modern Internet. At least they are definitely enough to use conspiracies.win. :) Thing with that RISC-V and many ARM processors of same class is that they are too simple and cheap to have some kind of Intel ME/AMD PSP/ARM TrustZone thing.
Don't use Raspberry Pi, they didn't have special processor for ME thing, but use GPU for that stuff. There was attempts to reverse engineer boot process and GPU supervisor, but AFAIK even for old RPis which are obsolete now, it is still work in progress.
F.e. cheap Allwinner ARM or RISC-V SoCs that often used in cheap SBC are well studied and no malicious activity in background was noticed. SoC internal bootloader is a small 32kb piece of code and it is easy to reverse engineer it even by yourself.
Also RockChip SoCs was found pretty straight things.
If you need some power - take a look at VisionFive 2, this $50 RISC-V computer have performance similar to latest RPi4, however, it is relatively new thing and it is not clear yet, if it have some kind of ME things or not.
Or go to FPGA boards, where you could make any processor you want, even with your own architecture. But that would be more expensive, because FPGA boards with DIMM memory interface are not cheap.
In any case - look for cheap, not very powerful ARM/RISC-V/MIPS boards with lot of memory on board, install Linux distribution of your choice, and you will get pretty protected pocket computer for web browsing. RISC-V is preferrable, since it is not a widespread architecture yet, so even targeted hacker will have to work hard to break into unknown architecture. Code injection exploits designed for x86/ARM just will not work on RISC-V.
Amazing work once again, some great inputs here much appreciated.
I should get off my ass and build something.