The Issue: When I send my coworkers to https://anubis.techaro.lol/docs/admin/botstopper they find the mascot and URL weird.

You’ve decided without listening to the responses

https://botstopper.net/

Botstopper doesn’t have the .lol domain, and doesn’t use the anime cat girl splash

It’s not even expensive

You don’t have to tell your peers it is just a rebadged version of the same website, just say “look I’ve found another one that does the same thing but without the domain and splashscreen probs you complained about”

Yes of course it’s ethical

Analogy is flawed.

The meal uses food that is gone after being eaten and thus can’t be resold.

A digital copy doesnt change the ability of a vendor to sell copies.

A better analogy to what OP has suggested is where a cart/restaurant offers a single bite “taster” for free to try to lure you to buy.

EDIT

“Food that is gone after being cooked” should be “Food that can’t be resold after being cooked even if not eaten”

Point being a costly physical thing has been used up. Unlike a digital copy.

Yeah. Fair. Security through obscurity isnt a great protection, but it isnt nothing.

I doubt I’m more knowledgeable but the argument made is reasonable. I’m not totally convinced that trusting 2 providers is an improvement on trusting one. The point not canvassed in the article is that if Mullvad is the encrypted end point with keys then it doesn’t really matter if they don’t know who you are from account info, it’s not very hard for them to have an unencrypted data flow split off for inspection which sooner or later will provide sufficient info to identify you.

Tl;dr if you trust mullvad deal with them directly. If you don’t trust mullvad this doesn’t actually fix that although it makes it harder and more effort to identify you it can still be done.

I wouldnt pay a premium over mullvad’s price for this. No real value added.

M$ have specialised in anti competive malicious actions for over three decades. It’s baked into their culture

LOL, yeah fair. I have it for a family member whose taste is a little iffy.

The current seeder / leecher ratio on Big Bang Theory, this is one of the worst I’ve seen - I’ve dropped my seed limit from 10 to 7.5 because this is just poor form

Permanently on. Anything I can’t access without it I generally find an alternate with very few exceptions. I have a quarantine virtual machine I use for the couple of websites that are worth making an exception for.

LOL, someone in the BMW marketing dept just got wood reading that

If they’re fairly mainstream there’s a very high probability there’s a torrent of it still live. I’m betting there won’t be too many gaps once you’ve queued that list up.

Ripping is not a big deal any more if you have a reasonable drive and a reasonably current PC - stuff that would take many hours a decade ago now takes 15 or 20 mins (and that’s at bluray 1080p quality).

The cost of getting an interface for recording the output of VHS, and the messing around you have to do to get it to work properly (macrovision and all that) far exceeds the cost of buying the DVDs from your local charity shop that you can’t find a torrent of (shouldnt be many), and the quality will be massively better from the DVDs than the crappy quality you will get from the VHS tapes (particularly if they are worn).

You digitise VHS when you have no other choice - there is only one copy of it. For the stuff mentioned as examples - the vast majority of which should be easily torrented - there is no reason to go digitising the vhs.

So you want someone to have already conveniently collated your unique esoteric collection of old movies for you ?

You do understand how unrealistic that is right ?

Most movies that were “relatively popular in the 90s” are still available to download via torrent.

Alternatively pretty much everything that made even a few pennies for the studios was re-released on DVD & then bluray and can therefore be found in second hand stores and ebay inexpensively.

So, the actual solution to your problem is

Step 1 write up a list of your VHS movies, if you do it in an app (text editor/excel whatever) you can then copy paste for the next step.

Step 2 use a torrent index/search page such as ext.to to find each movie. Download them. If you’re in a country with aggressive laws use a vpn

Step 3 any that aren’t available (no seeds) check your local charity shops and ebay or equivalent in your country (LeBonCoin forexample)for DVDs, you may have to get an optical drive to attach to your PC.

Step 4 optional, I would suggest ripping to file any DVDs you buy so you have a permanent copy.

Edit yts.gg is pretty good for the old stuff (although theoretically anything on yts should be the same on ext it often isnt)

What could possibly go wrong ?

/s

I use non EU european for preference. Albania Serbia etc.