It's much more likely to be a methodology issue than that Firefox's install base suddenly grew 240% in such a short period of time. Maybe some AI scraper juicing the numbers? Mozilla's telemetry could confirm this, so if they don't start bragging about a huge MAU increase, I'd assume this is wrong.
DDG is just repackaged Bing. Always has been. I remember looking into them when I was ready to job-hop many years ago, and they asked for dedication to their search engine as their foremost requirement for employment. It's the "drop-shipping" equivalent of search engines.
I'm constantly DM'd at work about how I'm able to create the "cool drawings" in my blog/wiki posts, and I enthusiastically point to excalidraw.com.
I have a background in vector illustration, which is all about creating subpixel-perfect designs. I'm also a bit of a perfectionist, which I think a lot of people here can relate to. I mention this because the reason Excalidraw really works for me is that it frees me from worrying about design. When you literally can't create something that looks "perfect", you're freed up to just sketch your idea without worrying about the visual representation.
That post was fascinating. You are a model example of what progressive prison reform can accomplish and your story should be getting major press coverage if it hasn't already.
I don't think it's responsible to replace http/1.1 with either of these protocols. They both seem like complex beasts with poorly understood corner cases and little consideration for the abuse potential.
Many of them are unintentional: a device sitting on the open internet has some vulnerability and gets exploited. Bad guy sets up a proxy on the device and uses it to click a bunch of ads using bots, or crawl Google results, or launch attacks, etc. Or, as mentioned below, they could simply be the result of misconfiguration.
Unfortunately, this type of abuse is essentially only acted on if you either (a) cause some kind of problem for ops at the VPS company, or (b) the victim tells on you. Even then, the absolute worst thing that will happen to you is your account will be closed. There is just no way on the modern internet to investigate/prosecute these kinds of things. That's why one of our primary goals with the free Cloudflare plan is to invert the problem: make DDoS go away by making it it free to mitigate.
This is only if you have _no_ idea how to use very basic open-source tools to wreak havoc via some open proxies. The real cost of launching small-scale attacks like this is $5/month on your favorite VPS provider.
Gnome got Rothschild to agree to never sue another open-source project again. That's a huge concession and an outcome that's arguably better than a few invalidated patents.
My last two Amazon purchases ended up being counterfit, even after spending a ton of time trying to avoid counterfits. I'm still going to use my fake electric toothbrush heads and fake Apple 5W USB charger, but I'm not using Amazon anymore.
They likely need to be able to mount your filesystem for some of their features to work. That's how they can reset your root password, write out network configs, etc etc.