Teppic

How long until US bans code from developers with ties to CN/RU?

That won’t happen because it would effectively mean banning all FOS which isn’t remotely practical.

A good summary here: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/03/backdoor-found-in-widely-used-linux-utility-breaks-encrypted-ssh-connections/

Some people use apps which hide posts they have interacted with. A downvote counts as interaction so people in turn then liberally downvote nearly everything. Yes it’s unhelpful and dumb. Solution, use kbin and at least you can see who downvoted you! (Except I don’t think downvotes are federated).

No Mint pretty much just works.
Great thing about Mint (or most Linux distros) is that you can try it by booting from a usb stick - see if you like it that way.

Posts and comments are federated (synchronised). Upvotes are actually a bit of a fudge, they are actually ‘Favourites’ if considered from an activity pub (e.g. Mastodon) perspective, and yes favourites are also federated.
Downvotes don’t exist in activity pub and, as a result, they do not federate between instances.
At least that is my understanding.

Logical next step, hacker sues the developer for copyright infringement?

As a European I’ll never cease to find it mind blowing that it is normal for a Americans that the cost to them of damn near everything is more than the cost initially shown to them.