It’s literally just the company saying they have (will have?) this product soon™️, and someone reporting that. What exactly are you looking for beyond that?

For an individual yes. But for an institution? No.

Also wouldn’t this be directing a ton of money to google? (or I guess any other ad provider)

Cloudflare isn’t the best at blocking things. As long as your crawler isn’t horribly misconfigured you shouldn’t have much issues.

No, the police will show up at your door on October 11th and arrest you on the spot.

If you’re in the US you’ll be sent to El Salvador. If you’re anywhere else you’ll be sent to the US, receive a few tattoos, then El Salvador.

Or look at it the other way: they hate Linux so much they’d rather deal with that than deal with Linux.

They’re absolutely not crawling it every time they nee to access the data. That’s an incredible waste of processing power on their end as well.

In the case of code though that does change somewhat often. They’d still need to check if the code has been updated at the bare minimum.

Not necessarily. Tailscale uses their own servers in order to do the negotiation, but once the connections are opened on both ends you should be directly connected to each other. All without port forwarding or any config on your end.

https://tailscale.com/blog/how-tailscale-works

Secure boot has been a requirement for like 10+ years now. I think windows 8 was when they required it on all new computers. You could turn it off if you really wanted and I think it would still work, but why would you? Linux has played well with it for almost as long.

The worst laptop you can find could probably be better than even a reasonably specced VPS. Low end VPS are dire, and you can get some pretty decent laptops for almost nothing. If it’s pre 8th Gen. Intel they’re basically worthless on the used market. But they’ll still easily get the job done.