Thanks for the valuable input! :)

I always encrypt all my drives - external or internal - because at the very least, I have nothing to loose with today’s computing power. The overhead isn’t noticeable for me once the drives are decrypted, which takes two seconds with my Ryzen 5800 x3d.

Regarding what you said specifically about the peace of mind that it gives me if and when I were to sell the drives: YES. encryption can even be used as a method of securely wiping scrambling content.

Nope, they are hooked up to my retired gaming rig xD retired because my physical health makes it hard to sit in front of the PC and game 😭 poor RTX 3080 just sitting there…

Anyway, here you go! There is room for five more 2.5 inch SSDs in the back. I’ve even seen somebody mod this chassi to hold 22 HDDs he he.

Oh, and the software part: 4 x 4TB drives made into one 16TB logical volume with LVM, on top off which there is a LUKS container for whenever my home is raided (not that encryption helps legally speaking, unless you have plausible deniability…). I figured I don’t need redundancy with SSDs and none of the data is really anything that I couldn’t just torrent again. Maybe I’ll do an offline backup of them down the road.

Wow! Thanks for all the great advice! :D

Now I just need to figure out:

1. shall I drill a hole in the bottom of the closet for the Ethernet and power cables?
2. can I power the HDDs with a “detached” PSU that was originally meant to have inside a chassi? But then, the Pi doesn’t have SATA connectors… But maybe I can find some extension card than goes on top of the GPIO pins? 🤔

That’s also a good idea, but I want to seed 24/7 🙃

Thanks, I know, I’m not new to the game. I just had prioritize absolute silence over cost/performance, since I live in 30 m2 and I can’t stand the otherwise sweet buzzing of HDDs. I need absolute silence to be able to sleep, so I bought four 4TB Samsung 870 EVOs.

I am however planning to build an HDD rack with a RPi, which I then intend to keep in one of my closets in order to isolate the sound. For now, I have cages for eight. :)

You first👏

Not that I can help out much with my already full measly 16TB of SSDs…

Anyway, noice!

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

https://adaway.org/

Great summary! Thanks for this! If I were to make the switch to GOS - which I am considering, Samsung user ATM, I’d never travel abroad - especially to and from the US - with my daily GOS driver. I’d travel with a backup phone that contains nothing. A new SIM card and some random chat app for communication with my loved ones. This is for plausible deniability (if I indeed were involved in anti government activism etc) and to avoid all the fuss. Not unlocking my phone gets me into trouble. Wiping my phone gets me into trouble. In that case, I just leave my daily driver at home.

Would be great if it was possible to protectively encrypt the phone from an on-state, as it were in BFU. Through a shell command or an app or something…

Definitely! But speaking of pen-testing, there are some “funny” stories about pen-testers getting temporarily apprehended and questioned by security or the authorities when communication between their employer and their client wasn’t done properly. I wonder if the IT Crowd at my agency would notice if I did an unsanctioned, unauthorized port scan from my office desktop…

https://nmap.org/book/legal-issues.html

Yep, true story. Besides from the particulars in the GDPR that affects EU citizens, I think there is a more generalized disclaimer in the nmap manual about doing certain scans.

It’s late and I need to sleep so I’ll just paste some links for now, but you are talking about such a wide variety of issues that’s it kind of hard to give a short, succinct answer.

Some privacy tips that I follow, by Naomi Brockwell: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt3zZ-N423gXV-0pdxnRn-nw0WzVKh4NY

Same, but by Rob Braxman: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKqVMfkpsufHUWAwU9nnkHnhSRH1TBgF3

In my country, simply scanning for hosts/IP addresses could get you implicated, since IP addresses are under certain circumstances regarded as PII according to the GDPR. So… stay safe xD

I would recommend formulating your threat model before doing anything else. There is a lot of materials on the topic on the world wide web, but for starters, ask yourself and answer the question, what information about yourself would you like to keep secret and why.

Again, before anything else, subscribe to an email alias service - maybe there are free ones out there too, I don’t know. This way, you don’t have to share your real email address and you can turn off or even delete that attack vector at anytime.*

Finally, regarding Bandcamp, I have never uses it myself so my understanding of your situation is poor to say the least, but are not able to simply save the links in a text file? Again, I’m not trying to play down the situation, I just don’t understand it.

*This is basically what I do with almost all my services that need registration: I give them an email alias, a randomly generated cyberpunk name and create a 30 characters long password with a password manager. The only services where this doesn’t anonymize you are those that require your payment information, which is often tied to your real identity. Had I been living in the US, I would have used those anonymous prepaid debit cards that work like email aliases, but for your debit or credit cards.

LOL AdAway blocked liberux.net wtf😂 but thanks! The specs are surprisingly good too! :O

Right, then I’ll just stay on my current build, being careful not to flash an OS update 😈

But in all seriousness, couldn’t one manage without OS updates - relying on only proper cyber hygiene and opsec - until a more viable solution comes up? 🤔