I use Firefox as my second (reserve) browser, and the primary is not Chrome based either.
Rewards Points are pretty useless to me anyway, I use Windows 10 (made the mistake of "upgrading" from Windows 7) maybe once a month on average, and not for browsing or email.

And just why should I trust this?

With the US becoming increasingly unfriendly towards academia, a few countries are trying to attract the disaffected. France went that way months ago, I'm a bit (ok, a lot) surprised that China is also trying that. A relative of mine worked in Beijing for a few years, returning home a year or two before Covid hit. If I was interested in this program I'd speak to him about his experiences and how much they fit popular beliefs.

The original Huawei ban in the US was because the company could have backdoors in their devices. Something like seven years later, there has simply been absolutely no proof that this is really the case - we are still in the "unsubstantiated allegations" phase. There have also been allegations - here and elsewhere - that comparable devices from the US have backdoors, has there been any confirmation of that? When the NSA were tapping Angela Merkel's phone, I know Denmark was involved but I don't know how it was done, although it did lead to Germany kicking an operative from the CIA out of the country.
Why is Huawei still being blacklisted?

Reading TFA would have shown you that Penchukov is Ukrainian and lived there most of the time. He lived in Donetsk until Russian missiles hit his apartment, if TFA then says when he moved to Switzerland then I missed that part. His problem - living in Ukraine - was that he was rich and had to bribe local officials more or less on a daily basis, eventually he had to start hacking again to pay the bribes, before he moved out of the country to escape that problem.
Some of his associates were Russian, and some (or all?) of these had FSB "handlers".

Or if it's even still readable. Intel when retrieving the 486 tape-in for the Edison project had to bake the tapes in an oven to remove moisture, and then had ONE CHANCE at imaging the tape as it crumbled to dust going through the reader.

The job I had when Covid hit, it took me 20-25 mins to get to and from work, call it 45-50 minutes a day. For that, I had a work environment far more convenient than the one at home, in particular when it came to breakfast and the midday meal, I could also wander across the corridor and talk to some of the specialists I frequently interfaced with.
I did work from home occasionally - especially when it was evenings or nights, or the roads were icy - but it was not my first choice.

The summary implies that remote deactivation is not that difficult, that does not appear to be the case.
I'm not really familiar with Tesla vehicles, do they have remote deactivation? Does any other car manufacturer have that?

I'm not familiar with the iPhone setup, but that is simply not realistic with Android systems. Android devices come with a number of apps providing core functionality, Samsung Android devices come with an additional set of apps providing alternatives to the ones Google supply (and some of them are actually better).
I find it annoying that I can't delete apps from either set, apps which I don't need, don't want, and only notice when Play Store updates them every few days. At least crap like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok are not in that list - they were on a previous phone and all I could do was "Force Stop".

Think of Spain.
Their dictator - General Franco - adopted the same time zone as Germany in order to express his love of Adolf Hitler, that was effectively permanent summer time. I don't know if Germany had DST during WW2 (I think they did) but they did not reintroduce DST until around 1980, Spain followed suit.
Bottom line, Spain is effectively on Summer Time in winter, and two hours ahead in summer. The Spanish have adapted in that they do everything an hour later than the other countries in their time zone.
Franco died in 1975 but the country has remained on CET, Portugal uses the same time zone as the UK.

I'm not sure I agree there, these browsers are doing stoopid shit while Aardvark is just supposed to make sure they are doing that safely.
Should Aardvark be exerting that level of control over the actual functionality of the browser? (probably Yes). Do Aardvark's developers know that?

[I'm having difficulty posting at present, Cloudflare errors]

Then dude goes stalking, suing and attempting to be insulting by calling people "liberal" (apparently he thinks MAGAts can't pick locks and wants to reduce his potential customer base by over half, or something, I dunno).

Behaviour inspired by Elon?

Why? It would have cut into his billable hours.
Proven Industries could claim his advice advanced his own interests rather than theirs, but they'd need another lawyer for that and it would probably be throwing good money after bad.

A few months ago all the apps I wanted could be found in their Play Store, and it was good.
Then Google banned an app called Öffi from the play store. For the second time.
The first time was a few years back, one of the sub-menus asked for donations if you had downloaded the app from the developer's website rather than Play Store. A few weeks later they accepted that they had messed up and reintroduced the app, something which is yet to happen this time - they have not even said why they removed it. I use public transport in Germany quite frequently - I don't have a car there - and Öffi is pretty much essential there.
Now I have (I think) 3 more apps from F-Droid.

the fact that large parts of the US that are geographically in the Central Time Zone are on Eastern Time

Moving to permanent Summer Time would fix that for those areas.