colors.js VS faker.js

However, it's unlikely that the majority of users actually visit GitHub at https://github.com/Marak/colors.js to review the code, even at a high level. Most developers tend to rely on the assurance that open source software is generally safe to use.

> A new feature was added to the colors.js project for generating cool ASCII Art American Flags. Unfortunately, this feature was not bug-free and some test code slipped into the release causing issues downstream. Nobody is perfect. Everyone makes mistakes from time to time.

https://github.com/Marak/colors.js/commits/master shows 4 commits and 2 releases. Does not seem like a simple mistake

> As per our internal open-source development process, I opened an Issue in colors to track the bug as soon as it was confirmed. It happened to be a weekend [...] I tagged some other open-source developers I've worked with in the past to see if they had time to assist and closed the browser tab.

Early this month, the malicious attack on free-to-use libraries, namely color.js and faker.js, created a real uproar in the development community. These tools are used in thousands of projects and their downloading rate from npm is estimated in millions per week. To everyone’s surprise, it turned out to be an inside job. Marak Squires, the creator of these libraries, intentionally committed malicious code to his projects and published updated codebases on GitHub and npm. It is said that this sabotage was caused by unsuccessful attempts of Mr. Squires to monetize his projects. Fortunately, malicious packages were quickly removed and the attacker’s account was suspended. The story sparked a new wave of discussion in the development community on possible steps to make the development and maintenance of open-source projects more sustainable.

See: https://github.com/Marak/colors.js/issues/285

Ever used colors.js? How about the same in dart?

I think Faker is your friend here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker

✅ Use API / libraries to quickly generate test data - Instead of creating test data via the UI, it is significantly faster via API or libraries. Plug-ins such as faker or running API's can be included in the test scripts before any UI functionality is performed.

We also use the faker package (locked to version 5.5.3, since the latest version no longer works as expected). This library is often used for generating fake test data, but its API includes a set of calls for generating company buzz phrases. That’s what Buzz will use to generate the phrases we’re looking for.

They supposedly took over the npm packages[0,1], not the github.com repos. npm is a system where you push archives as package versions, it doesn't do its own pull from a github repo or otherwise.

0: https://www.npmjs.com/package/colors

1: https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker

This week, if you tried to install Faker.js (a very popular library for creating mocks) you've noticed version was set on "6.6.6" and all code was gone with the text "What really happened with Aaron Swartz?".

About Four (4) Days Ago, the Author of Fakerjs a popular JavaScript library with more than 2 million weekly Download from NPM Deleted the repository and replaced it with one that only has the modified ReadMe "What really happened with Aaron Swartz?" and no content, and pushed an empty package to npm as the latest version (6.6.6).

https://www.npmjs.com/package/faker