In exchange, FF uses Google search by default. So they're also getting direct value from the deal.
JuxtaposedJaguar
The classic gonewild is a bit sexist, though. They say it's for porn of all sexes, but male posts get buried. It's fine to be female-only, but then just say that.
I vaguely remember the advice actually being to leave it running but disconnect it from the internet. Although maybe hard disconnect the backups if you can.
The real problem is the government not protecting consumers from such predatory business practices. It's almost certainly not legal, and if it is then it shouldn't be. After 3-4 companies are absolutely destroyed, companies will stop doing it.
...Because no one else wants to write my documentation.
There was a thread about that on c/selfhosted a few weeks ago. Created by a particular wild-cat-inspired sysadmin, I might add.
But on a more serious note, the interactions between a sysadmin and their servers (that they have enough responsibility for to be able to name) are much more intimate than the interactions between a dev and their variables. The server names also exist in a much larger namespace, so they need to be more unique.
Ever since we found out that Grindr has been tracking their users' locations at all times and then selling that data to private companies, Grindr has been dead to me.
Pi-hole works by giving clients non-routable addresses in response to DNS queries of known ad-serving domains. If the client (web browser, phone, smart device, etc) doesn't let you set its DNS server (as many no longer do) and doesn't obey DHCP, then you can't feed them those addresses. You could block outbound DNS traffic from all clients except your Pi-hole, but in response some clients will just refuse to work entirely. And if they require DNSSEC (or DoT/DoH with a pinned certificate), there's nothing you can do.
Business decisions are almost always influenced by the personal preferences of people in charge. While OP probably can't change the existing infrastructure right now, when the infrastructure is eventually changed, OP's pro-Linux input could make a big difference.
I'm not a cryptographer (so maybe this is wrong), but my understanding is that although it's possible to modify the cipher text, how those changes modify the plaintext are very difficult (or impossible) to predict. That can still be an attack vector if the attacker knows the structure of the plaintext (or just want to break something), but since the checksum is also encrypted, the chances that both the original file and checksum could be kept consistent after cipher text modification is basically zero.