I haven't had any issues since April-ish. Try refreshing your blocklists: in your Settings Page > Filter Lists, click the little clock icons next to the list names to force-refresh
as long you are only forwarding Minecraft's 25565 port from your router to your server machine, it should be fine. Just make sure to keep Online mode on, use the whitelist, and get your plugins from trusted sources. Otherwise I wouldn't worry too much.
I see others recommending VPN solutions like zerotier for your friends to connect to; I don't personally feel like this is necessary, and (in my experience), making your friends do more technical setup than just connecting to the server is often a big turn-off.
Bonus: If you ever take a peek at your server logs while it's running (and exposed to the Internet, if you avoid said VPN solutions), you might notice a lot of weird connections from IPs and usernames you don't recognize. These are server scanners and threat scanners that look for vulnerable servers to connect to and exploit. This is normal and you'll be fine as long as you keep that whitelist and stay up-to-date on developments in the server admin space.
TLDR; No
It hasn't been necessary in a long time, unless you're a developer who frequently needs to type in filenames in everywhere (since the command line needs extra protection against spaces and other symbols)
The OS (Windows, Mac, Android, etc) handles thar all for you so you don't have to worry about it (unless you happen to use a badly-written program that doesn't understand spaces, but this is super rare to begin with, and more protected against as time goes on)
2013 is generous.
I would imagine 2° at 12 billion miles means it's almost certainly not pointing at anything man-made anymore, but I'm also not an astrophysicist so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Being that far out I don't even think we could go out and fix it anymore
Basically, the idea is that a server can refuse to serve you (or degrade your experience with captchas/heavier restrictions) unless you (your device) complete a "challenge". This could be something like the browser (through a system API) checking some device details like
etc. Basically making sure the "environment" is clean and not tampered with (trusted).
The problem is with what defines a "trusted" environment. It could start at just making sure the device isn't rooted (like Android's Safetynet/Play Integrity check; most people don't root their device & don't/won't care, also easily justifiable since it can be a security vulnerability because the device is "wide open").
Then, like the article mentions, the device makers (Google (phones, chromebooks), Microsoft (Windows, Xbox), Apple (macOS, iOS, visionOS, etc), Meta/Facebook (Oculus), etc) could change their terms for attestation and deny approval on stricter, potentially anti-consumer criteria such as device age (forcing you to buy more things).
Not to defend musk, but it's not from one specific font. The logo is just Unicode char 1D54F, a blackboard bold X/"MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X"
I think the reply by musk is paying-subscriber-only; when I saw someone post about it, it said something like "only the people who have subscribed to this person can view this tweet"
Can't say i didn't expect this.
"be mindful of wearing Reddit gear"??? this doesn't feel like this was said in good faith at ALL.
yes, it's mostly things like games or software
though, I have seen more & more reports of people finding malicious disguised LNK files in their downloads and torrents, which will run some arbitrary command if you open that: Windows does not ever show the LNK extension, so a file could be named ".mkv.lnk", and you would only know if you checked the "file type" column in Explorer (which would read "Shortcut" instead of something like "Matryoshka file"), or when you see the cmd.exe window flicker open and close.
bonus edit: LNK is the native file extension that Windows uses to link app shortcuts, such as the shortcuts on your desktop.