BombOmOm

How do they pay for the service?

Free VPNs are simply a bad idea.

What are they getting from you that allows them to pay for the ‘free’ service? It certainly isn’t a monthly sub, and there is only one other thing you are sending them…your data.

Yeah, my experience with it is that its…fine. Though I only use it on my work computer. I’m wondering if part of the issue is the home version ‘offering’ to hoover everything.

Davinci Resolve has download for linux button on their website. I have not used the software, but wanted to point that out.

I second your idea of going with Pi-Hole. It is purpose-made for this and easy to setup.

You could hit the page via Tor to anonymize your access, then use the Save Page As context menu item to save the page.

Yeah, your suggestion is the only thing I could think that would even work, but honestly, it’s probably more trouble than it is worth.

An alternative which doesn’t quite meet the requirements, but will be much lower effort would be to format the drive(s) as exFat, which both Windows and Linux can read without issue. Then put them up as a network share in both OSes.

If you are wanting RAID 1 with those two drives…this won’t work unless you are either using hardware raid (maybe you can set it in your bios?) or if you can find a software raid that both windows and linux use. For RAID, maybe just pick one OS and that will be the one that has the share.

I would also recommend against the SSD caching idea with all this other stuff in the mix, wait till you have a dedicated NAS PC. You are going to pull your hair out otherwise.

OP, do you have an old computer, even an old laptop? A NAS doesn’t require much computing power. You can plug your drives in via a SATA to USB adapter. Then you will have a dedicated NAS box and all these problems get 500x easier.

One Time Pads are nice, as they are the only mathematically proven way to encrypt something in a way that it cannot be decrypted without owning the key.

a 3rd partition formatted to FAT32

exFAT is also pretty solid for this purpose and doesn’t have the file size limitations that FAT32 has.

The biggest thing is you have changed a random write to a linear write, something HDDs are significantly better at. The torrent is downloading little pieces from all over the place, requiring the HDD to move it’s head all over the place to write them. But when simply copying off the ssd, it keeps the head in roughly one place and just writes lineally, utilizing it’s maximum write speed.

I would say try it out, see if it helps.

Also, if the HDD is having to do other tasks at the same time, that will slow it down as the head can only ever be in one place.

But it’s getting so hard nowadays

It’s a sliding scale; it isn’t just ‘full privacy’ or ‘no privacy’. Everyone makes compromises somewhere based on their personal preferences. Most people would agree posting their credit card number on a public forum is too far into the ‘no privacy’ band, for example.

how does privacy improve the world

It’s up to you, but I don’t like trusting my personal info with untrustworthy companies.

Best description of this I have seen is: the 5th Amendment protects compelled production what you know. It does not protect what you are (fingerprints, hair, etc).