Note that this file hasn’t been updated in years and it’s not meant as a “stop every exploit” solution. It helps, though.

I routinely skip arstechnica articles. Too much sensationalism (for example the notorious ZFS article). It also collects way too much data about its visitors.

Pinchflat looks good indeed! Self-contained, no dependencies, unlike Tube Archivist which depends on Elastic which has a shitty licensing model (not in the spirit of OSI open source).

Verify the SHA-256 or SHA-512 hash after downloading. Most Linux distros publish such hashes.

If you say it quickly enough it may sound plausible to some but this is not how battery technology works, as explained by @skilltheamps@feddit.de

Perhaps CryptPad fits your needs. It’s an open-source privacy-aware collaborative office suite and storage solution. It’s end-to-end encrypted, so even if it gets hacked no usable information is leaked.

If you’re willing to learn, look up apktool and ghidra, as well as the Dalvik bytecode reference. Some apps can be relatively simple to crack using one-liner Dalvik modifications. Others may require analysis and patching of the binary libraries. Some Unity games include debug symbols, which can be inspected using Il2CppInspector which makes the binary code easier to understand and easier to find the proper point for a crack. Start by extracting apks, and try something simple like removing the INTERNET permission from the AndroidManifest, to see if the app still works if you rebuild the apk. That improves privacy. After that, try removing more permissions or making Dalvik patches or even binary patches. A great game to start with is Terraria, as it can be cracked purely by modifying Dalvik bytecode. I’m not in a position to help further but felt I wanted to share this for educational purposes. Learning these internals is fun. You can even learn to degoogle your current Android ROM by applying a signature spoofing patch and include microG instead as a replacement alternative to google apis. Hope this helps. 🙂

A bit of clarification about the quantum might help calm your nerves: to observe something means something such as light must interact with the particle you try to observe, and that very interaction changes the result of the observation. It collapses the wave function, and what you observe is just one of the possible outcomes. It’s not as crazy as you may think, but it’s very understandable that it may at first seem magical.