Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jauntywundrkind | Hacker News Reader

jauntywundrkind

I genuinely wish them well. There has been scant but minor consumer flourishes in OSes for a long long time. Harmony's basis as a distributed multikernel (Linux, LiteOS, other?) OS, with DSoftBus connecting services is an aggressive leap forwards that looks so promising & neat; apps and devices working together (it reminds me of Webinos a bit). Their Ark development experience looks like a decent distillation/extension of JS/typescript, which could become a stable path in a still chaotic Js world.

The plan here sounds very open source oriented, which is promising & IMHO what it will take for Harmony to have staying power. But it feels like a kind of tumltous time for Harmony. Open Harmony and others feels like they're more than somewhat being left behind as Huawei advances a seemingly re-proprietarized HarmonyOS NEXT. Right when Harmony seemed to be coming into it's own, it feels torn. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT

There's very few guides or experience out there on using Open Harmony. Huawei really seemed to have capture the Harmony market, and their recent sudden shift to proprietary is a huge barrier to this early OS keeping traction forwards. It's unclear how Open Harmony or other open source Harmony's are going to proceed. I hope they can create some good

> I hope they can create some good

You mean backdoors? Don't forget these are not optional in China

This is such a common view, but are software backdoors really that much less common in the US or EU?

Data is often the real value when it comes to governments, and at that point the only protection is either using services that collect very little (few exist) or end to end encryption. On the E2E front, it seems only a matter of time until one of the many attempts to require encryption backdoors passes in the west.

I've personally analysed various Chinese CCTV firmware vendors and backdoors planted there were obvious, here's an example: https://github.com/zb3/tiandy-research, but a better example was XiongMai which actively tried to disguise the backdoor ("Ret" was normally used for replies in that protocol, but the backdoor op requires it set in the request, you can't explain this by incompetence)

Are vendors in the US or EU required to do crap like that while also being prohibited to admit it? Of course services that collect the data "in the cloud" share that data with the government, but this is official and predictable.

I expect it depends quite a bit on how specific of a definitions of "backdoors" we're talking about.

Our main OSes, desktop and mobile, have quite a few backdoors though I couldn't speak to whether the government forced them to do it. Mobile phones, mobile networks, and most (if not all) of the internet trunk lines include backdoors for the government to use. Data collection isn't technically a backdoor, though functionally it is as it allows the government to do what they want to while dodging regulations for search warrants and similar.

The Twitter files point to another backdoor, even if again not technically quite a software "backdoor".

If we stick to the strict definition of a backdoor, the CCP very likely has more control over companies and does require software backdoors for the government to access. In a more general sense though, I at least wouldn't consider the US or the EU to be meaningfully better about the government having access to and control of tech in much the same way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XKeyscore

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010s_global_surveillance_disc...

Its certainly not like we don't try.

Maybe the shoddy backdoors are an example of malicious compliance with the law? Probably not, they'd lose less sales if the backdoors were well hidden.

These are white-label though, you don't buy a "XiongMai" product, you buy a product that you think is made by your local manufacturer, except it has Chinese firmware inside..

> This is such a common view, but are software backdoors really that much less common in the US or EU?

Yes.

I always thought HarmonyOS was a fork of Android. TIL.

There are two of them. HarmonyOS is a fork of Android, another (I think it's officially called OpenHarmony) is a custom microkernel OS for IoT devices.

> their recent sudden shift to proprietary is...

...the reason i do not wish them well :)

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