and now none of the page will load.

pages that unload their content usually also load it with scripts. especially the parts further down

It does. The Signal app for Android does not support being a secondary device. It must be the primary device with a phone number.

do you mean that it does not have a prompt for the SMS code anymore, and it reads the code only from the received SMS?

In addition, whatever Play Store settings they use excluded all of our tablets, even the one that had a SIM

that's a weird choice, I thought a main goal of them was user freedom

Who's devices? This is not a manufacturer dependent thing.

Android is useful without any google built-in software, and unfortunately it's not affordable to avoid having a smartphone in today's world.
If you wanted to say to not buy Android devices, all I can say is you are very ignorant. And ignorance is a lot of things but novel.

the play store version isn't as trustworthy even if the original devs published it there, since google forced all developers a few years ago to hand over their signing keys. the signature is how you know the app wasn't modified by anyone, and that actually the developer released the apk

there isn't, but as others have replied you can hide it from yourself

and all the things you find on this list, too

I was hesitant to open this post because I already know about rustdesk, but eventually I did to see the community's opinion on it. I'm so glad that I did because this is terrible!

I think more people should hear about all of this

or neither, when cloosing open source tools worth their salt. in more and more fields such tools appear, fortunately

I had the impression that it has a Russian connection, but anyways, it's good to be in the lookout for such things

in my book they are more of a risk than the USA. The USA already has political influence, for china to do it they need to use more extreme methods, like infiltrating your computer and use it and perhaps you as their tools

for me it's been the same since 8. sure there are some good changes, but generally it's forced restrictions upon more forced restrictions, and I hate it

because I want to get rid of google, and not use or even have a google account anymore

it wasn't abandoned, they are developing an overhaul with a more efficient sync API that required them to rethink how it works internally

there are moderation abilities, but instead of all-seeing global moderators it must be done by the little poor room owner, and the mods they have granted permission.

if the existing owner/mods don't do that, and disgusting content starts appearing in the room, that means they probably aren't active anymore, and that it's time to make a new room with the still active members before something even more damaging happens, like an uncontrollable high volume spammer, at which point you won't be able to tell the others that you have made a new room.

honestly I use the man command whenever I can. It gives distro-specific info, that documents the right version and any distro-specific patches

to be quite honest I don't want to see any large business around my project unless they are paying. They are not my target audience, and I'm not writing to funnel money into their pockets

you can have third party apps as system apps. you can even write your own, but the API docs are somewhat harder to find. nowadays you install them with magisk modules (not all of them contains an app), so that it is easier to revert and also to hide from those looking for it with a bad intent

maybe the card is just faulty. while you're doing that, you could also make a backup and reformat it. but, it'll lose the factory formatting that was possibly done with a few optimized params that make it wear out somewhat slower

Official Signal app. It asks Google to check Signal servers for notifications and to send them to you if there are any.

I don't think that's how push notifications work. It would not be instant, and very frequent polls are very resource intensive, even more if you had to do it for the servers of a million different apps.
UnifiedPush has a diagram here, and the popular proprietary push providers should work the same way too.

Also, Linux does not auto-update itself, and that's bad mostly when looking at the programs (like the web browser) that did that automatically, and here it can't anymore.

I understand that most users don't update their system and the utils they downloaded, but that's essential for a web browser.

I was considering that I should just install Firefox as the fatpak for everyone, instead of the core package manager, for this and other reasons, but my users have so little memory in their old machines that it's already barely necessary.