Imagine a VPN that does not know your name. Does not know your email. Does not know your IP address. Has no logs of when you connected, where you went, or how much data you used. Sweden has one. It has cost 5 euros a month since 2009. It is called Mullvad. Swedish for "mole." 7,215 stars on GitHub. GPL-3.0. Written in Rust. NordVPN wants your email. ExpressVPN wants your email. Surfshark wants your email. Mullvad asks for nothing. When you sign up, the website generates a random account number. No name. No email. No phone. No password. The number is the entire identity. Five euros a month. The price has not changed since March 2009. You can pay with a credit card. Or with crypto. Or you can write your account number on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope with a 5-euro bill, and mail it to a post office box in Gothenburg. They add credits to your account and shred the envelope. Then there is the part where the police came. In February 2023, German authorities asked Sweden to investigate a Mullvad user. On April 18, six officers from the National Operations Department drove to Mullvad's office in Gothenburg with a search warrant. Mullvad explained that there was no data. No connection logs. No DNS logs. No IP logs. No timestamps. The servers run from RAM. They forget everything on every reboot. The prosecutor told the police to leave. They left. It was the first time in the company's history that a government tried. Mullvad was founded in 2009 by Fredrik Strömberg and Daniel Berntsson. Founder-owned. No venture capital. Audited by Cure53, the German cybersecurity firm, multiple times since 2018. They also built the Mullvad Browser with the Tor Project. Free. Open source. A VPN that does not know who you are is the only kind that can keep a secret. (Link in the comments)

A lawyer in Manhattan gets a 500-page contract. Every clause needs to be searchable. By hand: one week. An accountant in Chicago gets 200 scanned invoices. Every number needs to land in a spreadsheet. By hand: four days. A researcher at Stanford has 50 academic papers. Tables, formulas, charts locked inside PDFs. By hand: two weeks. Every one of them is losing days of their life to copy-paste. Now meet MinerU. A free and open source tool that reads any PDF, Word doc, PowerPoint, Excel sheet, or scanned image. It pulls out the text in reading order. Tables become clean HTML. Equations become LaTeX. Handwriting handled. 109 languages. You give it a 200-page PDF. You get clean Markdown back in 90 seconds. What makes it different from every other PDF tool: - Multi-column layouts. It reads top to bottom within each column. Not left to right across the page. Like a human reads. - Scanned documents. OCR built in. Point it at a photo of a printed page from 1995. Get clean text back. - Math formulas. LaTeX-quality recognition. Every equation renders correctly. - Tables. Merged cells, multi-row headers, tables that span three pages. All preserved. - Ten-thousand-page documents. Sliding window processing. No manual splitting. - Batch mode. Point it at a folder of 500 documents. Walk away. Three ways to use it: - CLI. One command per document. - Python SDK. Five lines of code. - Web app at mineru.net. Upload, click, download. No install. Plugs into Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, LangChain, LlamaIndex, RAGFlow, Dify, and FastGPT. Feed extracted documents straight to your AI agent. The story: The OpenDataLab team at Shanghai AI Laboratory needed to extract clean text from millions of scientific documents to train a language model. Existing tools failed. They built their own. Then they open sourced it. 68,551 stars. MinerU Open Source License, built on Apache 2.0. Free for personal and commercial use. Three technical reports on arXiv. Adobe Acrobat Pro charges $239.88 a year. It still loses your tables. ABBYY FineReader Corporate charges $165 a year. It still cannot do equations. Mistral OCR charges $2 per 1,000 pages. Your bill never stops. MinerU costs $0. Runs on your laptop. Your documents never leave your machine. Here is the wild part. The lawyer got her contract back in 4 minutes. Every clause searchable. The accountant fed 200 invoices in. Every number landed in a spreadsheet in 12 minutes. The researcher fed his 50 papers in. He wrote his literature review on a Sunday afternoon. The document your company has been processing by hand for years takes MinerU minutes. Your documents become text. Your text becomes data. Your data becomes answers. The week you used to lose to paperwork is back in your hands.