corna

I simply think that a an explicit backdoor in Intel ME would be quite a risky move, but I do not have access to non-public information, so who knows? Also, the ME plays a fundamental part in the initialization of the Intel silicon (especially from Skylake/ME11 it appears), so it makes sense that it can not be disabled freely. It is close source because it is the way it works in the silicon world, as having an open firmware exposes information which may be bring advantage to the competition.

The F-Droid auto updating feature does not require signature spoofing, just the F-Droid Privileged Extension (which can be installed on every ROM with custom recovery).

The signature spoofing in this ROM can be granted only to system privileged apps (so, built in or installed through a ZIP in recovery): the user can't turn it off (why should he?), but no app other than microG can obtain it. In this way you can't even accidentally give this permission to a malicious app.

microG also reimplements the Google Maps APIs (using OpenStreetMaps) and the Location APIs (with different backends, like Mozilla Location Services or a local offline database). The main Google-based service is Google Cloud Messaging, which is disabled by default in microG.

As you can see, microG doesn't strictly depends on the Google cloud services.

See https://lineage.microg.org/#faq7

Also http://blogs.fsfe.org/larma/2016/microg-signature-spoofing-s... is an interesting read

OpenGApps != microG

OpenGApps are just the usual bloated proprietary Google Apps, just packaged in a nice and handy way.

See https://lineage.microg.org/#faq1

me_cleaner is Python script that operates on a dump, it can't modify the firmware without the help of other tools; this guide just explains in detail the complete process of using me_cleaner.

Any Intel CPU has Intel ME, independently from the MB vendor

Please report it here https://github.com/corna/me_cleaner/issues/3

Thanks

Check Federico's reply here https://www.coreboot.org/pipermail/coreboot/2016-November/08... tl;dr: power cycle (power off and then turn on, not just reboot) your PC after the ME neutralization.