My definition of refurb is anyone that actually has a store and only deals with this stuff. Examples are western digital themselves or Seagate, or shops like true base

For me hard drives could potentially be bought second hand. However, it is is not coming from someone who does this stuff at a professional level (refurbished in other words), I am not sure if I can trust it. Not because of the quality but because what was in it. Every time I get a refurb drive I have the bad habit to check what was the previous data if readable. One day I am sure I will get a nasty surprise…

I would be way more happy if they, anthropic and a few others got reduced out of existente

If you would like to go on a different route, a mini PC with opnsense is also a good choice. If you happen to have a small form factor PC somewhere that can be added a nic card to have at least 2 Ethernet ports, this would totally work

There was a piece a while ago of a guy that went to expired domains in Belgium, happened to buy an old domain from the police, and all of a sudden, started to have emails from the police with a mail server. Crazy how no one checked the domain.

Edit: found the URL here. And there was other institutions hit as well, not just police

That is not a good idea. Demanding ransom from the police never works out. Also, this gives quite a bad vibe to the dutch police as well (or this precinct in particular), since someone cannot verify where to send the files first.