There should be an external hard drive full of portable game installs in some drawer that fits the time period.

Should easily kill a week.

Wow, that sounds like a decent start for an architecture.

I’m tempted to spin up a few Jellyfin instances to see how it might work…

JellyFed(eration) would be awesome. It should use an anonymous overlay network so federation is not limited to people you trust in copyright-zealous jurisdictions.

Teenagers and a dog sound like Scooby Doo. No idea how specific the rest is.

It doesn’t. It carries you by having a module for absolutely everything even shooting yourself in the foot.

That’s the equivalent of leaving the door open and hanging a sign “Internet over there” pointing at a wall.

Programs don’t need to respect those registry keys. If you’re worried about internet access, set up a firewall.

Also, if you’re worried about malware, the damage is probably done before anything connects to the internet.

No, No, they don’t understand everything and nothing!

Funnily enough, wikipedia has the answer

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download

You’re asolutely right, IP addresses are kind of a grey area since the are needed for lot of troubleshooting and debugging.
Nevertheless, you can always strive to reduce the stored data.
For your application, you wouldn’t even need to store the historic IP adresses, just a rough geo-location and maybe a mobile/landline/whatever-flag and comparing the current login attempt to that. Even saves you some performance by not repeating the geo-lookups everytime.
Implement your failed-login counter separately by account and source IP and you’ve got decent security without linking an account to an IP.

Because collecting data that is not strictly necessary is almost always a bad move. IP addresses might be relatively harmless, but might link you to other activities.

You personally might be okay with reddit knowing your IP addresses, but some people might get into trouble.

Take the insane anti-abortion laws in some US states. If an IP address from those states accesses pro-choice subreddits, that might be enough for law enforcement to start harassing someone.

Mullvad stopped providing port forwards, so they’re not ideal for torrenting anymore. They were great before.