Re: Chinese version?
There's actually an explanation of sorts in the Reddit link AC posted above... Remembering firstly that Alibaba in China runa cloud service much like Amazon'a AWS in the Western world, one would assume these requests are being sent over https to an Alibaba instance owned by Oneplus.
From what I can see it's a cloud-based API which monitors the phone clipboard and obfuscates Taobao links by recognising and replacing them via a URL shortening service, bypassing the censorship used in the popular Wechat app.
Original explanation:
lambdaq 238 points 2 hours ago*
Chinese here.
Maybe I can provide some insight and background story
Here are the API request OP captured
http://bigdata.taobao.com/docs/api.htm?apiId=31578
https://open.alitrip.com/docs/api.htm?apiId=26657
So there are two Internet giants in China, Alibaba and Tencent
Tencent has this crap mega app pretending to be IM chat app, Wechat.
People share ebay links, oops, I am sorry, taobao links in Wechat
Wechat got jealous, the blocked all *.taobao.com *tmall.com links to "protect the customer from fraud"
But of course people love taobao & tmall because it's full of cheap shit and ppl think they can out smart scammers.
But anyway, two Internet giants, one blocking link to another.
The taobao guys invented some thing clever, they invented some kind of hash code, which is called 淘口令, which is some kind of token that uniquely link to a taobao/tmall SKU, so Wechat can not block arbitrary alphanumberic tokens, thus ppl can share the crap they bought on taobao, via Wechat
But after all, tere's the catch, how does Oneplus ROM has anything to do with this?
Well, the clever-ass part is they will match certain strings from your clipboard, send the token to taobao API, and restore the original SKU links.
That's it, that's why you will see strange URL requests going to Chinar IPs.
TL:DR Smart Clipboard trying to analyse your clipboard content by sending request to alibaba matching againt Taobao links.