What did you end up doing? Doing something with a bunch of like minded folks is the dream (as long as you can pay the bills!)

How are you sharing tailscale with your family and friends? do you run the server yourself?

Tailscale is free for home use and lets you invite people to your network by email

It's not clear to me: do we need to both apply the patch _and_ check if our themes are vulnerable, or just apply the patch?

Edit: looking at the patch itself it looks like it fixes the root cause and so it shouldn't matter what themes are doing themselves. But possibly I'm reading it incorrectly.

I'm sure this is a basic question I should already understand, but, what is actually in it for the bot farm? They spend your money (annoying), but, does Google actually pay them somehow? I don't get what they are "farming"

Yes AdSense pays 3rd party publishers locating your ads on their site. They fake their site click through rate with bots, and get paid as if they had real users clicking the ads