$35 for 6 meals for two people at McDonalds? What?
Where I live, one meal at McDonalds is about $12. So 6 * 2 * 12 = $144. Not that much of a difference.
Also, if you aimed for 2200 calories per person per day with that $170, then it isn't really fair comparing to a single McDonald's meal, is it? It sounds like buying whole foods is cheaper.
If platforms tighten the noose, you'll see people gravitate back towards p2p.
People stopped torrenting because Netflix and company made it extremely easy and more affordable to consume a wide range of media. Affordable enough that the hassle of torrenting was no longer worth it. If that changes, you'll see a resurgance.
You are missing something about HTTPS: you can't produce a valid certificate for the site you're trying to impersonate, and therefore users would notice.
HTTPS operates on the assumption that DNS is insecure.
Though not relevant to the bulk of your comment, could you elaborate or provide some relevant links on why apache compares favorably to nginx when used properly?
You can find walkthroughs by googling a bit (I myself wrote walkthroughs for the last 4 levels), but I'd highly recommend doing it without cheating. The amount you learn from figuring it out yourself is exponentially more than what you learn from reading a walkthrough. Most important is how you learn to think, by carefully looking for vulnerabilities and examining what you have control over and how the program uses your input.
Spend enough time learning the instruction set and the concepts involved and the answers will become apparent.
Do you have any advice for breaking into the field? I'm nearing the completion of a CS master and want to get into security. I completed Microcorruption a half year ago and loved it. I'm also mostly through Cryptopals, but I don't know anything about what the field looks like in practice. What kind of job openings (or titles) should I be looking for?