[throwaway91111]

Is there any way to avoid the patch and reverse engineer it to "root" ME and cripple it?

I'd guess this would be a lot of interest for "hacker" news; i want to sign my own damn firmware.

[milcron]

Yes, but we've only figured out how to do that for old hardware.

Check out https://libreboot.org/docs/hardware/gm45_remove_me.html