[leggomylibro]

I'm with you up to the last paragraph.

It's not useless. FPGAs have plummeted in cost and there are now open-source toolchains for some of them. There's also a Free commercial-grade ISA that you can use in your personal designs (RISC-V). These days, it is not expensive to design your own well-understood computer which can run microcode generated by commercial-grade compilation toolchains such as GCC. Even hardware production is getting cheapER with shared wafer runs like MOSIS, although custom silicon is still out of reach for hobbyists.

Chin up, buddy. The US is not the entire world, and the pendulum of our generations' zeitgeist can still swing back towards the ideals of liberty and equality of access which the mavens of computing once stood for. You can already buy ARM application processors from vendors other than Intel/AMD, and I would be surprised if we lived in a world where every new computer comes with "management engine" spyware in its CPU for much longer.

[zadokshi]

I love your optimism, I’m not sure if I can see a path towards the public voting for a government that would make the necessary adjustments to reign in the ability of government powers to influence “management engine” code.