I agree on all points; well-made. Thanks.
> I just wish ... I could completely disable ME
You might find this useful:
Re:Escalation of Privilege Advisory
by theossuary on Tuesday May 02, 2017 @07:22PM
(#14251610)
I stumbled upon puri.sm in an old reddit thread talking about this, I'm very intrigued by the systems they make. Also it seems disabling ME might be possible, though risky: https://hardenedlinux.github.io/firmware/2016/11/17/neutrali...
I agree completely, many many companies are totally fine with accepting that risk due to the trade-off for ease of manageability. But I'm really not, in no small part because the overhead to managing a few computers is totally different than a large corporation with thousands of machines. I just wish my vote counted to Intel (or AMD for that matter), and I could completely disable ME because I'd rather the more difficult management of machines over the much larger attack surface.
Of course it all seems to lead back to monopolies/duopolies being bad for the average consumer. Who knew?