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Hippy: React Native Alternative by Tencent

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Re: Hippy: React Native Alternative by Tencent

#51

Post by dmix »

athaca wrote: post #46
StreamBright wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you such a thing for React?

The Chinese government is evil. Of course we suspect something is going on with this sketchy looking fork.

They might be evil but I highly doubt they would be dumb enough to be putting backdoory security vulns directly in immature open source projects.

That’s not how intelligence agencies work. They hire smart hackers who will hit it further down the pipeline where you would less expect it.

But of course anything from a Chinese state connected company should be viewed skeptically. Let’s just be realistic about how that tends to work.

Re: Hippy: React Native Alternative by Tencent

#53

Post by GeoffIsTheBest »

dnate wrote: post #19
Jarred wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dug around a little and installed their demo app in the iOS simulator: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hl3nk8jrcjleurj/hippy.mov?dl=0 . Visually, the only interesting part of the demo app is the RefreshWrapper example Code-wise, the most interesting things I've seen: - They expose wrappers for native recycling list views[0]. React Native does this in JavaScript through VirtualizedList, however some have experienced perfo…

> - It uses a closed-source fork of libv8 on Android called X5[6]. this makes my spidey senses tingle. What might be hidden there?

I agree. If Facebook had a closed source lib in RN it would be DOA.

I would be very curious to know why and if there are plans to replace with open source.

Re: Hippy: React Native Alternative by Tencent

#55

Post by Vesuvium »

chvid wrote: post #45
verttii wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or a weapon.

How is that?

Corporations have been using open source to exert technological dominance and push standards that favour their agenda for some time. It's proving so effective to have direct control on software and standards that more and more companies are engaging into this activity.

Certain tools come with telemetry that is used to track the users. On top of this, by making open source these corporations are seen as good for the community by naive engineers.

You can find here on HN articles that talk about how Google is using Chrome to bend the web to its will, how Visual Studio Code tracks its users and how Facebook uses its Android SDK to track smartphones. JetBrains declared they made Kotlin with the intent of gaining an edge on competition for Java IDEs (no spying intent declared or reported, but I want to highlight that even for a $300 million company technological domain is proving effective).

Tencent is merely doing what other corporations have been doing for decades.

Re: Hippy: React Native Alternative by Tencent

#58

Post by Vesuvium »

tirpen wrote: post #18
shrimpx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any state could spy on users but china is known to blatantly do so.

To be fair, so is the US (NSA) , but people rarely suggest that packages from the US should be monitored extra closely for some reason. Of course every package used in any code that contains sensitive data should be audited along with its dependant, but I see no reason to be more afraid of this particular package than anything people happily install from npm.

There's a good reason for that: US does not really need to put backdoors in software to spy. They have the largest tech companies under their legislation and can already force them to disclose information on users. Most companies won't argue and hand over things silently.

They have international agreements with a number of countries for surveillance.

This means that unless an app is completely hosted, in all parts from source code to production, in a privacy-friendly country, on servers provided by a privacy-friendly company and the app is made by a company in similar conditions, the US and EU have all they need.

Re: Hippy: React Native Alternative by Tencent

#59

Post by natch »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #30
d0100 wrote: post #27

I won't use this probable spyware, however I do hope that some RN competition can make RN grow, and be, a bit faster.

Why speculate on whether it is spyware? Read the source and verify it for yourself. If there is spyware I would appreciate a link to the relevant lines.

How do you read the source of a closed source library? I mean sure reverse engineering is possible but it’s a bit flippant to suggest that everyone has time to do this. Even if it did not have closed source libraries, it’s a bit much to assume everyone affected can understand the source.

We already know that tencent engages in bad stuff on behalf of the Chinese government (Sesame Credit as a concrete example) so they shouldn’t be presumed innocent right out of the box.

What’s wrong with existing cross platform frameworks? You have to wonder what their agenda is for creating this.

Re: Hippy: React Native Alternative by Tencent

#60

Post by yorwba »

natch wrote: post #57
chvid wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that?

Tencent is one of the companies responsible for China’s dystopian sesame credit scheme, for one. I would not want to contribute to any of their projects.

Sesame Credit is operated by Ant Financial, a subsidiary of Alibaba. They're a competitor to whatever credit scoring Tencent does for their forays into micro-lending.
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