I love the narrative of a Chinese manufacturer selling electronics to the West only to one day shut everything off for no reason at all than to fuck with people and disappear and for people to find out the supposedly registered company never existed. It's like a trashy, second-rate William Gibson knock off novel but there's something awfully amusing about it.

> and for people to find out the supposedly registered company never existed

This already happened to me. Sort of.

Saw an advt for Air Jordans for $7. With a pic of actual Air Jordans. Thought to myself, "it's only $7, let's see what happens".

A very sorry looking pair of shoes arrived a couple weeks later. With "Air Jordan" printed on them. They weren't actual Air Jordans.

There was no way, absolutely no way, to get in touch with the Chinese company that did this.

.. y-you wouldn't happen to still have them or are by any chance selling them would you? Strictly asking for a friend.

(one year later: "Auction sells rare early Air Jordan prototype for $3 million")

This is why it's worth paying a few dollars more for certified superfakes instead of the regular fakes.

Frankly it doesn’t even require (special) maliciousness (per-se) - spinning up random ‘brands’ to sell to rubes on Amazon while obfuscating beneficial owners is essentially standard operating procedure.

The only surprising thing here is they took an action to brick something instead of just abandoning it.

>The only surprising thing here is they took an action to brick something instead of just abandoning it.

You're right, but I wouldn't say surprising. I do wonder what would happen if the units just stopped working outright one day and they're all intended to be gridded and nothing works properly anymore and the distributors are stumped and can't get ahold of anyone.

Fair point - it would be trivial frankly to embed a ‘bug’ which causes them to all brick at some arbitrary point in the future too. Considering the level the firmware works at, probably even catch on fire.

Probably wrong to classify the manufacturer as malicious rather than the importer. Sounds like these units were brought to the US in violation of contractual agreements and thus were disabled when the manufacturer decided to enforce it.

It's likely they had no contractual agreement with the current owners of the inverters, and yet they have elected to wilfully damage the property of the current owners because they can.

Wilfully damaging someone else's property without permission of the current owner seems pretty malicious, regardless of whether the importers (or maybe someone who supplied to the importer) were in breach of a contract.

But regardless, they're clearly not owned by Deye any longer. Causing damage to an unrelated party in retaliation for a contract dispute between two manufacturers is not OK.

Deciding to enforce something like this after your product has already been sold/installed seems extremely dubious.

Even just building in the capability (assuming this wasn't installed via a generic software update, in which case I'd have some follow-up questions on the security against malware of these things) shows significant malicious intent.

Manufacturer did something with intent to damage someone else's property. Seems to fit the definition to me.