Depends a lot on who you’re talking to, and your, and their threat models. For many, signal provides pretty good protection, which brings us to a salient point, anything that actually provides good security will attract plenty of negativity, often from state level actors who feel (are) threatened. If you’re playing at that level, adam_y is right, dead drops and one time pads. Presuming lesser threat, signal beats telegram and FB etc. Email is plaintext unless proton to proton, encrypted email is fine (look at PGP) and indeed if you encrypt at home before sending it’s pretty much a dead drop anyway, as long as the other party has a key, and I’m wandering off the beaten path.

Seems you want a secure messenger that works and are scared by random crap because you don’t have the relevant knowledge to decide (spoiler, very few do, and it’s insider knowledge, the world is imperfect), fair enough, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. As long as you’re willing to give up your phone number, Signal is well regarded (exchange privacy for security, you decide). But yeah, no perfects, world imperfect, trust hard, deal ;)

And a few people will get extremely rich by siphoning off a percent or two, circle of life baby /s

This looks promising. Not sure if fully baked yet, was going to circle back to it in a month or two. If you try, let me know…

Pass it on…

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. - Ursula K Le Guin

governments and surveillance, name a more iconic pair

Umm, if I understand you, it should be fine, you’d have the app and also proxies available on 8388 and 8888 or whatever you prefer on a different tunnel… It’s pretty much the VPN swiss army knife. Use wireguard if you can, it’s a lot faster (but more CPU intensive).

rclone supports lots of services

including Proton Drive …

Spin up a gluetun instance, which will give you your proxy. I use two to have a local exit node and an international one.

Thanks for that, worth knowing.

True, but OP refers to ‘some cherished items’

I assumed the context here was torrenting rather than streaming, download blu-ray remuxes and encode to your liking.

A 16Tb manufacturer recertified drive is USD160 which should sort storage (and later get a second for offline backup). I’m actually holding out until I get GPU encode (apparently CPU is somewhat better, but power considerations, maybe next gen). Do wish the scene would get on with switching, though, are we dinosaurs?

No idea, I was just using it to illustrate the existence of compromised exit nodes, which to my mind are a pretty fatal flaw in TOR, perhaps someone knowledgeable can chime in.

Compromised ? Maybe, but this guy doesn’t provide any evidence one way or the other. He’s using at least 7 other possible vectors (apparently Calculator Photo Vault just hides the gallery, no encryption, so it’s over right there) which is way too many for good opsec.

With Tor the question has always been compromised exit nodes as I understand it.

Absitively, use case here IMO is set and forget autoupdate to stay current and SELinux (which actually reduces surface)

For a media server speed matters little (5400rpm is plenty), if you’ve only got one drive, warranty is king. Thing is you shouldn’t only have one drive, drives will fail, and warranty doesn’t get your data back, so you plan for it. At the very least, you should look at getting an offline backup as soon as possible, now you don’t care if your drive fails and can get the cheapest ones. Ideally, you also set up a RAID5 (or Unraid, or mergerfs+SnapRAID) on your server, now you just get a replacement drive and rebuild. Remember RAID is not a backup, it doesn’t protect against accidental deletions for example, so you still want the offline backup.

Also, don’t sleep on manufacturer recertified drives, as long as you have a backup they’re significantly more cost-effective.

TLDR: set yourself up so that a drive failing is not a problem.

Nah, I’m suggesting you actually use some human agency. I’ve found it pleasing, a couple of hours can often net thousands of hours of listening time. You’ve got a list to start from, why not give it a go ?

While I love the *arrs for video, I found Lidarr pretty damn awful, perhaps it’s OK with usenet but not torrent without specialised private trackers. Anywho, I found the Soulseek network, spiritual successor to Napster, which has most of everything, usually at high bitrate, and take pleasure hand curating a personal library. I like the Nicotine client. There’s so much more music than video that it makes sense to be choosy, I’m my own personal DJ…

I was here to say the same as pezhore, separating storage and compute is almost as important as separating church and state. Muck around, break things, have fun, all the while your data is safe (don’t forget offline backups though). The MS-01 is a fine looking box, but any old NUC / SFF will do for your purposes (modern AMD cpu or a graphics card if you need / want plex transcode).

Edit to add, old laptops are great compute nodes (maybe moreso from my ex corporate thinkpad laptop bias, but still)…