At least there is an occasional employee commenting. Have you seen the Google support forums?
Google promotes normal users to moderators on their support forums if they just post enough, so instead of being brushed off by some underpaid employee you are being ignored and ridiculed by someone not even being paid to!
There is a significant difference between private companies collecting data and the state doing wholesale surveillance.
I don't particularly care for the first one, I do very much for the second. These are separate concerns. If we can't have data-driven gadgets because the state may get that data, we're solving the wrong problem: we need to get rid of the state.
If you understand "off the grid" to mean "off the electricity grid", I love this project of a guy who salvaged the battery out of a Tesla and uses it together with a 45kW solar panel system to live independently of the grid:
It seems that his major concern in all of this is money. This is a guy who will happily take ethyl bromoacetate out of Zyklon B if theres a buck to be made.
Reverse engineering is quite a different skill set from assembly. Unless you are reverse engineering malware, whatever you are analyzing is unlikely to have been written in assembly or to be heavily obfuscated. Then it's more about knowing how certain high-level programming constructs (think virtual function calls in C++) will be translated into assembly by a compiler, what residual information there might be left in the binary or what all that noise is you are seeing (think C++ templates, destructors called for stack-allocated variables..).
For many reverse engineering projects, assembly might be a wholly uselss skill, since whatever you are looking at is actually MSIL or running on Python with its own embedded interpreter. Here assembly only serves you to quickly tell you would be wasting your time :)
Google promotes normal users to moderators on their support forums if they just post enough, so instead of being brushed off by some underpaid employee you are being ignored and ridiculed by someone not even being paid to!