Do you really disagree that it’s advancing science? Surely actually testing hardware, building knowledge on how to run this type of mission, learning to use lunar resources, figuring out how to keep people alive, etc. will teach us things we couldn’t learn any other way.

Fwiw do share your concerns about the methods (sending humans on this specific mission is questionable, SLS is questionable compared to SpaceX approach).

Except it is just another piece of corporate silliness.

Why don’t you purchase your own developer account and sign it yourself if you trust it? Like you presumably do for open source apps you build yourself?

Afaik this isn’t quite correct either. From what I could gather from the CCC talk and forum posts:

The Apple specific instructions to talk to the SPTM are only usable in the GL2 privilege level, not EL2 where you end up after booting non-Apple code.

The problem is the macOS kernel uses these custom instructions to manage its own page table mappings, and when being virtualized in EL2 it just crashes since these instructions are now invalid.

The solution is indeed to emulate the SPTM interface and instructions just enough for macOS to not crash, that way it can be virtualized for reverse engineering. The emulated SPTM could just pass through the mappings, ignoring all of the security checks the real one would normally do.

I was able to find quite a bit of existing SPTM analysis online (I believe from iOS security research) so this issue isn’t insurmountable by any means.