Speaking of browsers, for the last week or so, about a fifth of internet sites are refusing to load if a VPN is turned on. It's snowballing and getting worse each day.
Seems to be IP specific. Switching access points will fix it once in a while but not usually. Luckily Blues worked after switching.
If this keeps up, I wonder if it will lead more VPN providers to install anti-abuse measures. Lots of trolls, spammers, scammers, DDOSers, search result ranking flooders, and others use them. Seems like there might be possible tools to try and scan for at least the flooding and DDOS attacks without violating user privacy.
I'm glad the Mint issue turns out not to be as bad as it looked at first. I already had Ubuntu go to the dark side while I was a user. I'd rather not have to find yet another Linux distro.