It seems they shut the inverters down because a legal dispute. So the reason is the law.

That's like saying if I punch someone because of a legal dispute, the law is to blame.

Civil contract disputes don't obligate you to commit crimes in the process of trying to make things right.

The power inverters were *not their property*. Remotely accessing them, without authorization and with the intent of disabling them, is a textbook CFAA felony.

Their 'right' to do that was probably somewhere in unreadable ALL CAPS on a small piece of paper at the bottom of the shipping box that the end user never got.

Fuck 'em. Isolate your local net from the world and only let through devices you trust. Plenty of ways to do that, even at low expense. But you will have to make the effort or pay someone else to do it.

Not to mention the slight complication of the entity is not in your jurisdiction and subject to your laws.

You buy a device from an intermediary and it phones home to a foreign jurisdiction. That sucks but I'm not sure what recourse you can realistically expect.

The US is plenty capable of making any entity they want fall under their jurisdiction.

There probably are. But it appears to be coming out of China, so good luck enforcing it.

There is a US based company that is importing and selling these devices. Go after them.

For what? They didn't send the signal.

So? They’re responsible for importing the devices. They have an exclusive contract. Do your due diligence before offloading the risk to your customers.

It’s like if Ford outsourced faulty brake systems, had a bunch of cars crash because of it, and then say “it’s not our fault, we didn’t actually make the brake system”.

Right. You can close down the (smallish, veteran-owned) American company. But the manufacturer will almost certainly find a new importer, who either doesn't know or knows and doesn't care.

You can put a ban on the import but it's really hard to enforce. They'll just put on a different nameplate.

It would be great if American companies did more due diligence, but that increases costs. And we've just seen how grumpy Americans get when prices go up.

> You can close down the (smallish, veteran-owned) American company.

This is marketing fluff from the company. Who cares that they're vet-owned? They've been around for 10 years, they are not new to the solar game. They even claim to be an industry leader, if we're trusting their word.

> It would be great if American companies did more due diligence, but that increases costs.

How much is it going to cost to either replace all the inverters sold, or remedy whatever the gripe is with the manufacturer? How much is the outage going to cost across the (tens? hundreds?) of thousands of inverters sold?

Y'all realize that Sol-Ark devices are the ones that didn't shut down, right? Because they're the ones with the exclusive contract.

You're hypothesizing about the exact opposite of the real situation.

I don't think that analogy holds. The brake system wasn't faulty. Someone deliberately sabotaged it after it was sold.

I don’t think it’s the Sol-Ark branded inverters that shut down, but Deye inverters that people imported via eg aliexpress?

Could USA wrap it under the terrorism laws?

We have those laws. You return the faulty device to the entity you purchased it from.

I bet some small-time installers that were sourcing on the grey market will go bankrupt because of this.

You return a solar inverter you already have installed? Maybe purchased years ago? And in the meantime you might be without power. That's not recourse.

The law needs to be updated for things with high installation costs.

For example, we bought a built-in oven, and post-sale we discovered a sticker saying that by using the oven, we agreed to a EULA and binding arbitration, and to return it if we disagree.

I think that, had we decided to decline the previously-undisclosed EULA, the manufacturer should have had to either provide one that works as they advertised (no EULA) and with identical dimensions, or they should have had to replace our brand-new cabinets with ones that matched a competitor’s product (and incur a large multiple of the cost we paid for the oven).

Completely agree. Those things make even less since in the second hand market. What happens if the solar system was bought from a resaler? Or install by another company and you didn't choose it? What happens when you sell your house and you've removed the sticker?

Well, did you try to decline? How do you know what would or wouldn't happen?

Please engage in honest discourse. Both of us know that if you take a range back to best buy because you wouldn't agree to the EULA isn't going to cause best buy to send you all new cabinets

Please don't assume dishonest intent. Nothing in the parent says they bought from Best Buy. "Built in" is ambiguous. There could well be a home builder or contractor who should be responsible for correcting the situation.

I don't know which "this" was referred to, but I think we need laws to prevent a foreign company or hacker from shutting down our power.

There was an article on HN about a month ago, that two companies each have the ability to overload or shut down the entire grid in many parts of the states, just by their remote control of the solar panels and batterires.

They should be regulated like any other utility.

How would a law prevent this? Does it cause a lion to manifest, whenever someone is about to shut down power, to maul the guy to prevent the shutdown? I do not believe laws have such supernatural powers.

There is no such thing as "grey market". USA is a free market. Everyone is authorized to sell all safe items.

Ok well "safe" in this case includes "the manufacturer intended it to be used here and is not going to modify the software in a way that is detrimental to you the end user."

If you sell a complicated product dependent on other parties then you are taking on risks.