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As you probably know, Ubuntu has discontinued its native .deb package for Firefox, replacing it with the Snap packaged version of Firefox.
The Snap setup is not well-liked, and a lot of people have no interest in it, including lead Mint dev Clem Lefebvre (and myself as well). Most importantly to me, Snaps update themselves whenever they feel like it, and, well, if I wanted that kind of experience, I would have stuck with Windows.
It makes sense that Mint would not want to use the Snap version of Firefox, and would choose to distribute it in native .deb form. What I do not know is why Mint did not simply use one of the other repos that make Firefox available as a .deb! Why reinvent the wheel?
The Mozilla Team repo is operated and managed by Ubuntu, and it contains Firefox in its native .deb form, just as it used to be in the Ubuntu repo until recently.
Here is a link to the Mozilla Team PPA page on Ubuntu’s Launchpad, including simple instructions for installing he Mozilla Team PPA.
In addition, Mozilla now has a .deb repo as well. Here are some instructions on how to add the Mozilla repo to Mint (don’t worry that it says Ubuntu, they are the same thing beneath the surface). It is more complicated than installing the Mozillateam PPA, but the directions here walk you through it. You can skip the stuff about first removing the Snap stuff with Mint, as it does not have that installed by default.
Either of these should get you the newest version quickly.
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My first and current smartphone was purchased in 2021, for $130 US, and it was paid off at the end of the month. It is a carrier unlocked model I bought from Best Buy, not the carrier (on a prepaid plan). I just swapped the SIM card over from my other phone (a flip phone that I would still be using if it had a wifi hotspot that I can use with my laptops) and that was it, as far as the service was concerned. Removing Android from the phone and getting it set up with an AOSP ROM took a bit longer, of course, but that was the only way I would even have a smartphone.
It still works fine, and I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon. It’s not something I use every day, and I don’t want to spend a lot of money on something that mostly just sits there.
I would like something smaller, as it is a 5.2 inch model that takes up more room in my pocket than I would prefer, but things have gone the other way now, with the average phone being what used to be called a “phablet.” I wish they still had four inch models!
The most important feature a phone has to have is an unlockable bootloader and the availability of an aftermarket OS with none of the Google stuff. It is developed by Google, but the AOSP, unbranded base is kept pretty clean by design.
The model Google uses to develop Android is quite similar to the one it uses to develop Chrome. Both are based on an open source base product that is developed by Google and made available with a permissive license, with additional proprietary stuff added on that turns it from the generic product into the branded (and proprietary) Android or Chrome. All of the “bad stuff” is tucked into the proprietary binary blobs so that no one can have a look at their source code and really see what they’re up to.
AT&T has a small phone the size of what I have that sells for, or at least to sell for, $39, over the counter (no activation required to get that price). It is carrier locked, but that’s all. Unfortunately, it does not have an unlockable boot loader, so it’s no good as a daily driver. I did pick one up because it is cheap and runs the latest Android in case I have some need for that, but that phone just sits there, turned off and SIMless. I have all of the Google branded stuff (Play services especially) frozen, which hypothetically should stop the spying, but it’s a Google product, and I don’t trust it.
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I would never accept a car that has any connectivity to the internet. Internet-enabled cars are much like other IoT devices, in that they have very little (if any) attention paid to security… and the privacy threat is even worse, as the carmaker itself is quite likely to be the offender, having engineered the spying right in from the start.
If the car has the technical ability to spy on me, I consider that it will do so. The temptation to join the dark side and slurp up all of that valuable data is too great.
The only answer is to have a car that has no internet connection. Its like my doorbell, my thermostat, my lights, my refrigerator, and so on… it does not have nor require WAN connectivity to do the thing I need it to do.
My brother recently bought a car that had the capability of sending all of this data somewhere. One of the first things he did was to go in to disconnect the cellular radio… and he found the previous owner already had. It wasn’t even there anymore. Had he tried to use OnStar, it would obviously never have worked.
If I ever bought a car that new, I would have to do the same, but those models that have internet capability also have other features that are deal-breakers, so I wouldn’t be buying one anyway. No touchscreens, no LCDs, no smart-fob pushbutton start. That’s where I draw the line.
I so far have begrudgingly accepted the ridiculous over-computerization of things in the car that need no computerization (like the dome light), but that’s as far as I will go, and even then I sometimes question if that’s too far. There is nothing wrong with simplicity!
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It’s not the fear of what Chinese businesspeople will do with the data, nor what American businesspeople will do with the data, that is the main concern. It’s what the Chinese and American governments will do with the data the businesspeople slurp up… and in either case, the governments in question will have that data.
As an American, I am not all that concerned about what China will do with any data about me. I’m not in China, nor do I ever plan to be. Their ability to “reach out and touch” me is limited, given my geographic isolation from their shores.
On the other hand, I am very much within the range of the American government if it should decide to target me. We’ve seen things happen already, like people being arrested based solely on location data from their phones by Google, and promptly handed over to the US government whenever they ask. Simply being in the proximity of where something happened has been enough for people to be targeted.
If people who insist they have nothing to hide and therefore nothing to fear… well, here you go. If that data is never collected by Google, it cannot be handed over to the government, and you can’t be targeted for inadvertently being in the vicinity when something bad happened.
The US government itself could never implement that kind of warrantless, broad-scale spying, as it would be against the Fourth Amendment, but Google can do it with impunity, then hand the data over to the government, which can use (or misuse) it how they see fit.
For me, the risk of what any given American big tech company slurping up as much data as they can about me, then handing that over to the government, is a much bigger concern than China doing the same. I don’t want to be spied upon by anyone, but if I have to be spied on by someone, I would rather it be China or Russia or some other autocratic state thousands of miles away.
This law, though, is not about protecting me, or you, or any other individual from China. It is about protecting the US government against China. It’s just that I fail to see how collecting scads of mundane data about millions of ordinary Americans is going to harm the US government’s interests, or benefit the Chinese government’s interests. I have no problem with the Tik Tok app being banned on phones owned by the US government and used for official purposes, or on the phones of anyone conducting business for the government under any level of security clearance. The danger there is easy to imagine.
What, though, is the government’s risk when American teens share the latest questionable Tik Tok challenge? The large majority of Americans are of no interest to rival nations. We don’t do anything interesting or notable to them, so having China know when I went to the grocery store or other similar things is not going to harm the US government’s interests.
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I have been trying to figure out what this ban covers exactly, but the media have been utterly hopeless in conveying this info.
The media keep calling Tik Tok “an app,” but that is not accurate. Tik Tok is a web site, like Youtube, that has an available (and optional) front-end on the two major mobile platforms. When I first started reading that “the app” would be banned, I interpreted that to mean just what it said– the app itself will be removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play store (but the site itself, not having been mentioned at all, would be unaffected). I still have yet to figure out whether or not that is the case, and I have read a bunch of articles that all leave the same gaping holes in the story.
For example, Christine Mui and Josh Gerstein wrote a Politico article that states (referring to what happens after the ban goes into effect):
The way the ban works, TikTok will no longer be able to be downloaded legally from app stores. Google and Apple haven’t revealed their plans for Jan. 19, but are expected to comply with taking TikTok down given the enormous fines at stake.
Even so, users with TikTok already downloaded can still access the app. But other service providers will be barred from supporting it, the app will stop updating and gradually become unusable.
“Other service providers” will be barred from “supporting” it. What does that even mean? What other service providers “support” the app other than the Apple App Store and Google Play, and what do they mean by “support?”
The large majority of people have no idea that getting apps from other sources (known as sideloading) is possible within Android, and Apple forbids the practice completely, going to great lengths to ensure people don’t have the ability to procure apps anywhere else.
The Politico article in question makes no mention of the web site that actually contains all of the content seen by users of the app.
The article from The Hill is not much better:
Though the app would not automatically disappear for users who already downloaded it, TikTok is expected to eventually become unworkable, as the law blocks app stores from distributing the app or providing updates.
However, the platform is reportedly also considering shutting down the app entirely if the ban goes into effect Sunday.
Again, zero mention of anything outside of “the app.” The site that forms the backend for the app knows whether it is being accessed via the app or a browser, so having the app “go dark” does not suggest that the site itself will do so. After having read so many articles, I am still completely in the dark about that.
It’s annoying that supposed journalists do not do the research necessary to get the complete information out to the public. Despite writing on a tech topic, they show little understanding of that tech… which, I suppose, mirrors that of the congresscritters who wrote the law and the man who signed it.
I question how much damage to national security a silly video app can really do when used by regular people (not on devices used to conduct sensitive operations, like those owned by the US government). Most of us have no information that is of any use to China, no matter how hostile its intent (and I fully support the notion that they be treated as a geopolitical rival by the US government).
It is possible for an app on a phone to collect and transmit more data than one would normally expect a web site to have access to, if the user has allowed the privacy privileges on the app that are necessary to collect that data. I have no doubt that many users of the app would simply hit ‘allow’ for everything, but having permissions not nominally necessary for a video sharing/viewing app would be a big red flag. Having never used said app, I don’t know if those red flags are present or not.
As for the notion that Tik Tok be banned because it is a conduit for Chinese propaganda, that is a non-starter for me (as it appears to have been for Justice Gorsuch). Propaganda is protected speech. For a Democrat, what a Republican says is propaganda. For a Republican, what a Democrat says is propaganda. We can’t go banning any kind of speech on the basis that it is propaganda, because everything is propaganda to someone, and it does not matter whether it is truthful, half-truthful, or a complete lie. It’s still propaganda.
The only way to arrive at the truth is to have everyone state their piece, have the debate, and let the better ideas rise to the top (which, in a free and open debate, they will, since they have the advantage of truth on their side, even if that process can sometimes take longer than one would hope). Having “fact-checkers” decide what the truth is for everyone has not worked, as Zuckerberg has recently mentioned. The “fact-checkers” of the era once declared it to be misinformation to state that Earth goes around the Sun rather than the other way around!
Personally, I fail to see the merit of a video site that caters to short-form, portrait-oriented content. Vines came and went, and that same niche is occupied by Tik Tok, Youtube Shorts, and whatever it is that Facebook has. Attention spans are getting so short that we will have the apocryphal goldfish laughing at us. My disdain for the format, though, does not mean it should be banned.
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You can also use this pref in about:config:
layout.css.devPixelsPerPx
The default is -1, which is the same as 1 (100%).
Positive numbers smaller than 1 will shrink the UI. Numbers larger than 1 will enlarge it.
set it to 0.85, for example, if you want the UI scaled to be 85% of the default size.
This should work fine in Windows and Linux if you are using X11. It has not worked in Linux under Wayland in Waterfox! I have no idea if it works on Macs.
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The kernel support in Mint comes from upstream, which is to say from Ubuntu itself. They are Ubuntu kernels, not Mint kernels, so to really understand the support cycle, one needs to know what the Ubuntu devs are doing. Mint just passes them through to you, with the version that is used by default depending on what version of Ubuntu the Mint release is based upon.
When they say that a given kernel is “in support,” it means that the Ubuntu devs are continuing to issue new releases of that kernel as needed (for security and bug fixes). As long as that is the case, you can continue to use that version without it becoming a major security hole.
This is another example of the word “supported” being stretched by various software developers to mean several different things that have nothing to do with actual support. I wish they would stop doing that!
You can use any Ubuntu kernel you want with any given version of Mint (or Ubuntu,or other Ubuntu derivatives). With newer versions of Ubuntu, kernels older than the nominal one that version shipped with won’t be in the repo, but you can get them from the repos for the previous release(s) and install them from there. It’s an extra step that people who just want to use things as they are won’t usually be interested in, but it is a possibility if the given Mint version using that kernel by default is no longer being updated and you don’t want to move to a newer kernel.
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CMOS stands for Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor; BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System. You can take your pick of what you want to use since both require the battery to work. I use both depending on what comes to mind.
That’s what I was sort of getting at. Any PC newer than about 2011 or thereabouts doesn’t use BIOS anymore, but the term still persists. These PCs use UEFI, but if I use that term exclusively, some people may not realize we are talking about the same thing.
In those terms, CMOS never did refer to the technology of a battery. It’s a broader term that refers to the way that semiconductors are manufactured, which has nothing to do with the way “CMOS battery” is used colloquially (much in the same way that “BIOS” is used today to refer to UEFI).
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You already know my answer, heh… I use Veeam. I use it on demand only, not scheduled. I just do a backup when it strikes me as a good time, after there have been significant changes. It is bare-metal capable, of course.
I use Veeam for full system backups and Timeshift for periodic “roll back in case the system gets messed up” purposes, like Windows System Restore (but more robust; it can work even with different Linux versions. You can restore OpenSUSE right over the top of Kubuntu, or you can restore an older or newer version of the same OS over the current one. Windows System Restore can’t do that!
I have been thinking about cloud backups. While I am not a fanatic of “the cloud” in general (the real term is “someone else’s computer”), and while I remain a fan of always keeping data local and under my own control, “the cloud” can provide some extra data security if done properly. If the data is securely encrypted before it leaves my control, it’s only of benefit to me to have a third copy of it out there in the event that something catastrophic happens (a house fire destroys all my computers, for example). A provider like Backblaze could allow me to retain this even if all my computers themselves are destroyed. Hardware can be replaced with an insurance check, but not my data!
For years this was a pipe dream, as my home internet was waaaaaay too slow to even think of that, but recently two fiber providers moved into my area (at the exact same time, within a week or so of one another in availability), and now I have one of those at a lower price than what I was paying for 50 (mbit) down/2 up DSL. I am at 500 up and down now!
The downside is that my IP address no longer changes… it is one static IP for the whole area (from the ISP to the consumer is NAT, so it’s 192.168.xx.xx), but it does geolocate me a lot more easily than I would prefer. I could go with a VPN, but that’s added cost, potential slowdown, and annoyance… first world problems for sure. Maybe that other provider has regular dynamic IP address pools…
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