If you are even remotely involved in any activist type of things, you certainly don’t want this US government honeypot have your phone-number and device id.

AFAIK the “wear” does not mainly come from the spinning, but from temperature changes that make parts slightly expand and contract in size. An always on HDD has pretty constant temperature.

Be careful with powering HDDs on and off. That is actually the operation that puts the most strain on them AFAIK. Sadly there is no good rule of thumb when it does more harm than good, but I would guess if you turn it on more than once a week, you are probably doing more harm than good compared to just letting in run. Many people even intentionally turn off sleep-mode in “green” drives so that they don’t shut down automatically.

This isn’t about a laptop, but a full desktop case with 5.25" slots. 3.5" fit fine into these with a different kind of adapter.

An IRC server would work, but I think having to deal with 32bit ARM will be too annoying.

Apparently this is using face recognition technology from Russia 🤷