I have seen this happen so often. People who evidently don't use or haven't used a Windows based machine in the last 20 years complaining more than anybody else.
There are plenty of reasons to hate on Windows(-based machines) but what would they know.
The problem with this 'it is relative' line of logic is that everything can be relative. We need terms that describe stuff regardless of how people perceive it.
Otherwise, as you said, 'bricked' can mean almost anything. So what's the point of using a word without any particular meaning?
4 hours? You are insane (in a good way), mate. Any less than 7 hours and I literally can't even wake up. If I force myself, my body will literally not respond to my commands and getting up and straight becomes as hard as deadlifting 100kg...
Not really. A skilled reverse engineer does not find/replace any certificates, or anything like that. They just debug the app, stepping over all the code, instruction by instruction. There's no way you can beat that. I'm a malware reverse engineer - I work with this kind of stuff every day. And I'm pretty sure there's no 'game': once the binary is in my disassembler, it's over.
This method would be a waste of time and energy. Just reverse the app and find it out. No need to play it like a binary is a magic black box that's impossible to inspect.
You're talking about AMT (which runs on the Intel ME - Management Engine). The ME itself, however, is on every CPU (running Minix on Skylake and later CPUs, ThreadX on earlier models), because one of the responsibilities of the ME, apart from being a backdoor, is to manage the CPU: power it on, handle power signals, etc. The CPU wouldn't run without the ME, so it's necessary that it's on all CPUs.
That security bug you're talking about can be patched the same way it's exploited. No source code doesn't mean "all is lost". Instead of writing a payload that steals your private keys you just write one that patches out the vulnerability.
Not really. The amount of samples that check for debuggers is surprisingly high, and thus makes such red flag unusable. It'd just spam false positives.
There are plenty of reasons to hate on Windows(-based machines) but what would they know.