Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US | Hacker News Reader

Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US

solarboi.com

290 pointswalterbell307 comments

The root problem, as always, is that it has been normalized that devices in your house, accessed from your house, need cloud access to do this, or even to function all.

Metrics from an inverter, once upon a time, would have been a local web server in the device. Maybe with QR code printed on the device so the typical smartphone user could access it. Firmware updates ought to be physically "opt in" - like stick a USB stick or MicroSD card into the device and push a button.

Not some mysterious cloud that through legal issues, malice or sheer incompetence, can reach in and modify or delete functionality without warning.

My dishwasher has a little nag light to remind me I haven't connected it to my Wifi yet. I never will. It washes dishes just fine.

> Metrics from an inverter, once upon a time, would have been a local web server in the device.

Or just a regular serial port! For example, IEC 62056 [0] provides a fairly trivial standardized way to interact with an electricity meter using an IR reader head. Even easier, the DSMR standard outputs serial data via a 5V RJ12 connector [1]. You can connect that to a PC with a $5 USB-to-serial adapter, directly to a Raspberry Pi, or to one of a dozen $20 cloud dongle thingies.

Just mandate a serial interface, and the inverter itself doesn't need any kind of web interface whatsoever.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_62056

[1]: https://jensd.be/1183/linux/read-data-from-the-belgian-digit...

Opt in security updates is generally bad. It means 99% will never ever get one.

Opt in for major functionality, that is fine.

No security updates needed if the device isn't connected to the internet in the first place!

Yes and no. Depends on the exploit.

If the washing machine is already vulnerable than you'd want a security update.

If the washing machine isn't connected to a network through what mechanism do software vulns become relevant?

If the washing machine can connect to WiFi then that's already a vector point of transmitting a payload by connecting to it.

I don't think that makes a whole lot of sense unless you're proposing bad actors are going to break into my house to...connect my dishwasher to wifi.

If opting out of security updates for your dishwasher is bad, then your dishwasher is shit.

Yeah, but what if a “security update” breaks functionality?

None of the IoT devices we own have had an update that fixes a user facing bug, but most have had critical updates that break existing functionality.

These kind of things will stop when they start getting treated as malicious attacks (similar to ransomware), i.e. the perpetrators become wanted people and if caught, see significant jail time.

This goes both for the malicious bricking of normal consumer devices, and attacks on critical infrastructure like this, except of course the punishment for the latter should be correspondingly more severe.

Assuming that one of these inverters is in North Carolina, they’re facing a $250,000 fine (hopefully per inverter), and second degree murder/40 years if anyone died:

https://pemc.coop/bill-protecting-critical-infrastructure-si...

Only if this actually gets treated as an attack though, which I haven't seen happen in similar cases in the past.

Sony BMG with the hidden DRM rootkit malware on their music CDs got some civil penalties but no criminal prosecution. Sony with the Playstation OtherOS removal had to pay a ridiculously low class action, no criminal prosecution. Lenovo got a slap on the wrist for putting an adware firmware bootkit into the machines, again civil only.

A lot of companies are still getting away with exfiltrating memory dumps by default as part of their error reporting, selling your location data, etc.

The only criminal prosecution (as in "butt in jail") for similar behavior that I'm aware of is Volkswagen's Dieselgate, and that was only prosecuted because it was seen as screwing over the US government, not consumers.

This law is specifically for attacks against energy production infrastructure, and it’s state level. If there are other similar laws, they have to buy off multiple prosecutors to avoid charges.

Going by the article, it looks like the title is incorrect and it was Deye (the manufacturer) that did it and not Sol-Ark (the US distributor).

The biggest takeaway here should be that we need a domestic solar industry.

We can't hold Deye or Chinese companies culpable.

Moreover, this should serve as a warning shot for what could become a national security issue if we keep juggling international suppliers for critical infrastructure. They'll all have the capability of shutting down US electricity, which is unacceptable.

There's no reason we should be importing this stuff.

> The biggest takeaway here should be that we need a domestic solar industry. We can't hold Deye or Chinese companies culpable.

No, the takeaway is to not allow corps to have remote access to end-user owned devices in the first place.

This story of perfectly capable devices being bricked or having servers shut off has been told so many times with domestic (or friendly countries) companies it's laughable that the conclusion is 'do the same thing but onshore'.

We need both. Easier to hold a company liable when it's domestic.

While what you describe is absolutely a world I would like to live in the reality is more like domestic means they have an easier time with legislative capture. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes and all that jazz.

There are US manufacturers. I have a Tesla PW3 made in the U.S. and it includes solar charge controllers, batteries and inverter.

Pretty competitive too.

And is it connected to the internet? Do you think a future update will require you to login with your X account?

It is at the moment as it’s doing energy arbitrage and needs to know the current energy prices.I believe you also get more warranty if you have it connected to the internet as they can fix bugs etc remotely. But the PW isn’t mission critical.

I also have an off grid cabin with a Victron inverter that is not on the Internet and never will be.

That would require foresight, investment, subsidies, and good policy.

(looks at election results)

Ok, tariffs. I guess tariffs are the new invisible hand.

And really, what we're talking here isn't domestic manufacturing. It's probably Mexican manufacturing.

Sol-Ark likely complained about Deye selling within the US.

Deye said something to the effect of "we have contractual obligations".

I think they're both at fault.

To be clear, Sol-Ark isn't only the distributor but per their own claims also designed and engineered the units too.

Deye manufactured vs the units for OEM use different components - they build to spec.

I feel like stuff like this shouldn't be anywhere near the internet. Partly because of reasons like this where the manufacturer can just randomly decide to disable it, but also because its usually the software equivalent of Swiss cheese.

I feel the same way about cars, lightbulbs, and thermostats.

I’m not saying those things are safe but isn’t the attack surface pretty limited if you are behind NAT/a pretty basic firewall? The only connection to the internet should be the device reaching out to a server and asking for an update from time to time, it shouldn’t really be reachable from the outside. Unless the update server is compromised too, I don’t really see what can happen.

Only if that attack surface doesn't include employees, household members, contractors, shared spaces, etc. That is, a small business may be fairly safe if they're no cohabiting. A corporation probably isn't.

In this case the manufacturer was the one that triggered it. Even if it weren’t, how secure their servers are, or which foreign legislation they are subject to is a total unknown.

I have a solar edge inverter. I never connected it to the Internet out of concern that this was possible. While it is a different company, this vindicates my concern.

Do you have some other mechanism for getting telemetry?

Why do people insist on having remote telemetry from these kinds of appliances?

Because that's easiest for a very broad set of customers.

If you're comfortable with a datasheet, logic analyzer and know how modbus works, you're 60% of the way to a local telemetry solution... And you're also probably not representative of the typical customer.

But if your tec

Surely the easiest is to not get telemetry.

Why would you not want to see how your solar system runs? You can’t easily verify that it’s actually generating energy as you expect it to if you don’t look at the data

> Why would you not want to see how your solar system runs? You can’t easily verify that it’s actually generating energy as you expect it to if you don’t look at the data

You do see how it runs, you look in the sky and see the sun shining, maybe see a few LEDs on the side of a box, and see your electricity usage is lower / cheaper.

As to why people don't want to spend hours digging into "telemetry" and things of their appliances, that could be a difficult thing to explain to nerds who do like to.

I know people who wire up all sorts of monitors and ride their bike and calculate and graph how many watts they are producing and amount of oxygen their lungs are taking in blah blah. Other people just ride their bike to get to work.

I can give you a concrete example of why I have my inverters connected to a network. And I'm pretty damned hostile to network connected things in the first place...

I built my solar array myself - a big ground mount array, string inverters[0]. This went fine, and then a few years later, I started getting arc fault warnings. These were intermittent, but the inverter would respond by shutting down entirely, then gradually ramping power back up. In the heat of summer, it would often then arc fault again and shut down. However, it ran fine for the morning, and most of the afternoon. The power cuts were sometimes dramatic, sometimes less than noticeable. But it was faulting out.

Because I'd set up monitoring, I started getting emails about these events, and was able to run them down. Had I just been monitoring aggregate power use, I may very well have not noticed these. The inverters were somewhat less than helpful ("Arc Fault String A" means "Arc fault somewhere on the DC side"), and it took more than a bit of troubleshooting to run this down[1]. Eventually, thermal imaging made the problems clear - and, yes, there were real problems I was able to resolve[2]. Turns out, the panels I got cheap were a weird little niche of panels for a reason.

Without monitoring, I have no idea how long it would have taken for me to find this problem. I found another problem in my system (a bad connection in another panel leading to 1/3rd of the panel not producing any output) through thermal imaging, so that was useful.

But "Ensuring your solar inverters are doing what you want, without errors," is worth a good bit in a complicated system that may have 50 or 100 distinct connections, if not more, each one prone to potential problems.

[0]: https://www.sevarg.net/tag/solar2020/ [1]: https://www.sevarg.net/2022/07/16/sma-sunny-boy-arc-fault-tr... [2]: https://www.sevarg.net/2022/07/31/journey-to-the-center-of-t...

I think the distinction here is how the data are made available to the owner.

E.g., it could have an embedded web server accessible only on the owner's local network, a local display panel, some USB thingy, etc.

Not everyone is on the spectrum and think life should be lived as a big factorio game

It doesn't have to be remote. In fact, doing it locally would be preferable. I'm just wondering if there's a good solution to doing that with SolarEdge inverters.

I have inverter of different brand and also had concern to allow it internet connection, so i ended with pi zero connected to it’s internal wifi with socat port gateway, a route on router to simulate it’s internal network and it’s app works thinking it is connected locally to device, even over vpn back to home.

FWIW, the Sol-ark's (and presumably the Deye's) support getting telemetry via local RS-485.

I could use the device’s buttons and LCD to get some stuff, but I generally don’t bother. Maybe if I plugged it into the network and disallowed internet communication, I could poke around to see if there is a way, but I have not felt motivated to try.

Not sure why sol-ark is getting blamed.

People were buying Chinese inverters meant for the Chinese market off aliexpress on the gray market and shipping them to other countries. Deye decided to crack down on the behavior.

There’s nothing indicating this has anything to do with sol-Ark at this point other than them being the approved distributor of rebranded deye inverters in the US.

Sol-Ark’s markup is like 5x the list price just for the official rebadged version. Sol-Arks (“US veteran owned company”) still have the firmware made in China, and are susceptible to Chinese hackers, and had to be bought through a distributor. So naturally people went with off-listed Deye inverters because of the scheningans from Sol-Ark.

Now, people are without power and they have to go to Sol-Ark to get power restored, likely by paying through the nose.

That's one way to frame it. Another is Sol-ark incurs costs of developing, marketing and supporting their official devices and the contract manufacturer is able to sell their own version in the Chinese market. Greedy people who don't want to pay Sol-ark for all the costs they incurred bought grey market devices that Sol-ark has repeatedly warned are in contract violation in this market. The manufacturer, not Sol-ark, has now bricked those devices, and people are blaming Sol-ark anyway because they want to continue to justify their actions.

If the people are buying directly from manufacturer, why should any costs that Sol-ark has incurred be their concern? They aren't using the official devices, so they aren't enjoying any advantages of that, either.

Because the manufacturer doesn’t want to support people in the US market, which is why they bricked the devices.

Why should the manufacturer be concerned you tried to skirt the region restrictions they were very upfront exist?

But if they hadn’t broken the devices, the devices would have continued to work fine.

So, companies like the free market when it suits them, but want regional monopolies (without providing any value) when it benefits the consumer. Interesting.

It does make one wonder why these exclusivity agreements exist.

If Sol-Ark is adding value and competitive differentiation, wouldn't that justify the price premium over the basic Deye product? Especially if Deye is not willing to offer its own support/warranty to customers?

Why does Sol-Ark need to create a more monopolistic landscape? Not being judgemental, genuinely curious. (Well, I know why Sol-Ark wants it. I guess the question is why we allow it).

Because those costs were incurred with the plan to recoup the cost from sales in the US, and (presumably) those people are bypassing the licensed sale/use; which ruins that plan.

Your question is really no different than asking why it's not legal for me photocopy books and ignore copyright.

The problem is they already took the money and basically broke it after the fact. Typically there’s all sorts of legal protections protecting against something like that.

Why should we as a society enable plans and business models that hinge on taking away consumer freedom to get the product from the most competitive supplier instead of the one who wants to milk an artificial monopoly?

It was my understanding that the company they bought it from didn't have the rights to sell it in the US. As such, there's no real difference between buying from them and buying from someone that stole it and sold it to you.

Now, you can argue that country-specific licenses shouldn't be allowed; but they currently are.

If I can just break into your house can I just take your stuff? It's not my problem you worked to earn it.

I fail to see how the device purchased from Deye by someone can in any way, shape or form be considered Sol-Ark's house and stuff.

Grey market is a term that needs to be erased from the lexicon.

Unfortunately, it is an accurate and necessary term. Because while you might think that you are free to buy and resell anything you want without problem, the courts have made the issue much more grey than black and white. see the Omega v Costco lawsuit for an example.

I would expect a vigorous effort to reverse engineer Solark's firmware to spin up, assuming it hasn't already.

My experience with this class of Chinese manufactured inverters are that they all use TI TMS320F28xxx series DSPs and usually without any protection fuses burnt. If you look hard enough you should also be able to find unencrypted firmware and flash it with the standard TI tooling.

USA is a free market. Everyone is authorized all the time to sell every safe product. The terms "gray market" and "authorized reseller" are linguistic manipulations which benefit manufacturers at the expense of everyone else in society.

I think Daye broke US law when they destroyed law-fully purchased products inside USA. I hope the inverter owners bring a class-action lawsuit against Daye in the US. The court could block the sale of the company's products in USA until they restore the inverters and pay restitution.

That’s laughably wrong. Exclusive distribution rights are probably enforced more strictly in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. They are governed by contract law. In addition, many product categories need to be demonstrated as safe to the right licensing agencies before being sold, not after.

> That’s laughably wrong. Exclusive distribution rights are probably enforced more strictly in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world. They are governed by contract law.

But that’s an issue between the manufacturer and the distributors which can then sue each other for breach of contract, right? The “authorized reseller” thing shouldn’t matter to the end consumer, as soon as I have the product, it’s as legitimate as every other purchase.

I agree that it should be worked out between the manufacturer and distributor. But the idea that "it’s as legitimate as every other purchase" is flawed.

Let's say a guy in China buys the product from Deye, who stipulates under Chinese law that this is only for use in China and not authorized for export. The guy sells it on to you in the US anyway (so let's call him a "scammer" for violating law and misrepresenting the product to you, and innocent consumer looking for a good deal).

Why should Deye respect your rights at all and not brick the device? What rights should you have under Chinese law? If they don't brick the device, how can they disincentivize the scammers at scale? Sure you can say they should prosecute and rely on the deterrent aspect of the penal system, but that is not really going to be effective.

Basically it boils down to what rights the victims of scammers and criminals have. If you unknowingly bought stolen diamonds, what rights do you have when the original owner comes knocking?

The analogy to theft is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Let's say it was a textbook that also had a label saying it was only to be sold in India. Would the US publisher have a right to steal such a book from someone in the U.S. that had it?

The real scam was selling the devices at vastly different prices in China vs. the US in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

That first sale has to be legal for the subsequent resales to be legal. Plus we’re not talking about (domestic) resales here, the topic at hand is questionable imports of products never intended for sale in the U.S. off Aliexpress.

https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/articles/u-s-supreme-co...

> U.S. Supreme Court Holds that Books Printed and Sold Abroad May Be Freely Resold in the U.S. Because the Copyrights Are Exhausted Under the First-Sale Doctrine

Now do sale of region-free DVD players in the U.S.

In any case, it’s perfectly legal for me to make and sell a geo-locked device in another country, and it is the importer’s problem if fails to work elsewhere. That doesn’t tend to happen with physical books, obviously.

The sale was legal in that neither the seller nor the buyer committed any criminal actions.

It sounds like Sol-Ark would have preferred that Deye not sold the products, and may even be able to sue Deye, but nobody illegally acquired anything.

> Deye decided to crack down on the behavior.

Contempt of business model is legal, and vigilantism is not.

What harm was it to Deye that these were being sold elsewhere, that they couldn't fix by saying "sorry, we only support China"?

Two possibilities come to mind:

1. They're not properly licensed for other markets. Something equivalent to selling a radio transmitter in the US that's not registered with the FCC.

2. They price units outside of Asian markets much higher and don't want to allow/encourage arbitrage that they don't control.

This is definitely a case of "porqué no los dos" (or more).

From a link in the article:

> The contracts we sign with all dealers clearly stipulate that products that are not UL certified and listed by local power grid companies may not be sold or used in the United States, because the products do not meet US UL standards. If used in violation of this policy, the devices may pose significant-safety risks. To address this, Deye has built a verification mechanism into the devices. The pop-up alert is automatically triggered by the device’s authorization verification mechanism, rather than by any human intervention.

Yeah, which is garbage. UL is a certification body, not a legal requirement. Your insurance might want it, your utility might want it.

But there's plenty of ways to use solar inverters where neither of those factors applies.

And furthermore, you can buy tons of non-UL-certified junk at Harbor Freight and plug it in yourself. It's not like there's a magic forcefield at the border that these Deye units somehow slipped through. Using that as an explanation for disabling their hardware is so insubstantial as to be just this side of an outright lie.

And I'm astonished that the linked article isn't calling them out on it.

UL is a certification body, yes.

When the local building code requires that grid-connected devices are UL listed, then it becomes a legal requirement. I suspect this is probably the case in most jurisdictions across the US.

edit: NEC section 110.2 indicates all equipment must be "approved" and delegates this to the Authority Having Jurisdiction (AHJ) locally; and the majority of them are going to defer to a "NRTL" (Nominally Recognized Testing Laboratory, such as UL, CSA, ETL, etc) instead of doing all the expensive and tedious testing themselves. So when it comes to grid connections, some sort of approval is nearly always a de facto legal requirement.

Mobile installations (RV’s, construction trailers, etc.) and off grid are two very common types of installations for solar inverters. And do not have to meet those requirements.

There are _many_ ways that all of this doesn't apply. Nevermind the fact that people that but things have the expectation of using the device with out interference.

Different countries have different laws and requirements around grid-connected inverters, mostly so people working on the grid don't get electrocuted when a stray inverter keeps feeding in power.

Can someone who has a solar inverter explain why these are connected to the internet?

Usually you want some way of monitoring how much energy your panels are producing. This helps to realise you need to clean the panels or do some maintenance if panels start failing. Or it may be useful for scheduling home appliance usage.

But in practice this almost always means connecting to the internet, because the simplest interface is wifi and data collection/display at the producer's servers. So any extra features == internet connection.

Highly recommend using solarassistant for this, instead - local server software that install on a raspi, and you hook a usb on the raspi to the WiFi dongle port on your inverter with a serial cable. Don’t provide the inverter itself with any wifi credentials.

Solar assistant has the bonus of interfacing your inverter with homeassistant, and letting it control the inverter/get signals from it (so you can do things like, if grid voltage drops to zero, do xyz)

anything similar that works with solaredge ?

Sorry, haven’t looked, we have a sol-ark and this was the go to solution for people on diysolarforum (https://diysolarforum.com/). I’d recommend searching around on there, or making a post, it’s amazing for learning about this sort of stuff.

For others, here’s the solarassistant compatability check page: https://solar-assistant.io/help/general/is-my-inverter-suppo...

What would be a good method for keeping the IoT Thing from talking to a machine beyond my locally administered network?

VLANs. One for you, one for the Chinese shit.

Keep your [phone/PC/whatever] on one VLAN, with a NAT gateway, and they'll work just as they do now.

Keep the IoT Things inside of their own VLAN, without a gateway to the Internet.

And if a device like Home Assistant or whatever needs to exist on both VLANs in order to be useful, then: Make sure it isn't forwarding/routing/NATing packets.

---

The implementation details vary, but they needn't be particularly expensive.

What I do at home is run OpenWRT on a Pi 4 for my home routing purposes. It's fast enough for my needs and it's got simple GUI configuration options for VLAN. (Why OpenWRT? Because it's easy for me to puzzle out when I need to adjust something after a few months or a year -- I don't deal with routing every day, nor do I wish to. (Also SQM is a built-in, which always keeps WAN latency tolerable.))

From there, I've got cheap managed switches that enforce/insert VLAN tags where that is useful to me, so I can decide which physical ports are capable of talking to whichever VLANs.

And from there, I've got relatively inexpensive Mikrotik access points that are configured to provide different SSIDs for different VLANs.

It all works OK, though more enterprisey folks will almost certainly choose a very different path.

VLANs are great. Unfortunately, I've got an unmanaged 12-port PoE+ switch that doesn't support them. My workaround is to put two subnets on the same physical LAN, and my DHCP server (pihole) has an IP address on each subnet.

My (openWRT) router also has IPs on both subnets, and routes both LANs to the WAN. Restricting/throttling WAN bandwidth is easily managed in OpenWRT. Preventing WAN access is easily done by not providing a gateway in the DHCP assignment (pihole).

Obviously the big difference between this and a VLAN is that an ill-behaved device could still access the other subnet, and could still discover the gateway and route to the WAN. So far, none of the IoT crap on my restricted subnet has misbehaved.

Just my opinion but don't you want to patch that hole with a better switch? Or put it downstream of a switch that does enforce vlans? Most likely your iot devices don't really need anything more than 10-100 megabit connections anyway?

The switch I'm using is behind a panel in my garage, which is not climate controlled. Temperatures range from freezing to over 100F throughout the year. It's a fanless POE+ switch and it's doing a great job otherwise. I've replaced the switch with a different model a few times over the past five years, but this one has held up well for over three years. I'm open to suggestions for a reliable (managed or unmanaged) fanless POE+ switch that can handle this environment. Ideally, I'd like one than can do 10Gbps. The present switch is 1Gbps. Money is a secondary consideration.

Our setup looks exactly like yours I think. One connection for humans, one for machines. The two shall never meet.

It takes a little bit of setup, and less than $200. Anyone techy should do this; it's essentially maintenance free once running.

Yeah that works great until the partitioned device decides it requires Internet access and ceases operation. I recently had a Bose soundbar refuse to play sound until it was connected to the internet.. it promptly downloaded some massive 2gb update, then bricked itself while updating.

If it's a brick without Internet access, and it is also a brick with Internet access, then: It is simply a brick, and no amount of segregation can help.

> One for you, one for the Chinese shit.

Can you give an example of tech devices that aren't manufactured in China?

There are many tech devices not made in china.

That all tech devices are made in china is a myth propagated by the ignorant (or malicious).

From the raspberry pi (UK) to Samsung Galaxy (South Korea) it is trivial to find a product not made in China once you leave the low end of the market.

And now even the low end has alternatives if you spend some time and effort.

Name any category of product whatsoever and I will personally find you a non-Chinese alternative.

Even many things “made” in China are only really assembled in China. A computer that’s “made” in China is often just slapped together like a lego kit from pieces made in Thailand, South Korea, Germany, the US, Singapore and Taiwan (which isn’t a part of China).

I'm pretty sure any Samsung Galaxy in the US was made in Vietnam in the Thai Binh factory, which I used to live close to.

The South Koreanan manufactured units are generally only sold in South Korea.

> "From the raspberry pi (UK)"

Without having put any specific thought into it, I always assumed that while designed in the UK they would be manufacturing them in Asia, so it's a pleasant surprise to find out that you're mostly right - the majority have been made in Wales (part of the UK)!

However some are made in Asia, including China. Quoting Wikipedia (plus the citation links):

> "Most Raspberry Pis are made in a Sony factory in Pencoed, Wales,[19] while others are made in China and Japan.[20][21]"

> [19] https://www.sonypencoed.co.uk/about/

> [20] https://www.zdnet.com/article/14-million-raspberry-pis-sold-...

The second link (20) is from 2017, with headline "Raspberry Pi: 14 million sold, 10 million made in the UK"

I thought that the Raspberry Pi was considered the low end of the market. What is the low end if not the Raspberry Pi?

Yeah… all ends of the market, from the $0.03 toy to the $1,400 iPhone have their physical hardware and assembly outside the West, mostly in China.

BUT. The software for the iPhone is made in the US. Which is why people buy it. All phones are black rectangles! The hardware does not matter that much. And the price to buy into the Apple software ecosystem is much higher than the sticker price of the iPhone, only some of which goes to China. So most of the reason someone buys a tech product, and most of the value, ie the software, is US made.

BUT #2: the solar inverter software is used as DRM. This should serve as EXTRA evidence for you that the SOFTWARE MATTERS and that the hardware is completely fungible.

Tbf, they meant stuff where the firmware updates and/or control-plane are controlled by Chinese servers. I'll go further: all Internet of shiT gadgets shouldn't be allowed to phone home: Chinese, Korean, American, doesn't matter. One day, the manufacturer/operator will use. That internet connection in ways contrary to customers best interests.

I agree, I use Zigbee and anything that uses wifi is on its own VLAN (wherever it's made, it's not like I trust Meta more, for example).

No, not specifically.

(To bring this to the logical conclusion: So much for Internet access.) ;)

So much for internet access even for you! Your router is also made in China.

Don't plug it in unless you have the expertise to already know the answer to that question. That should also be your advice to any friends/family. Plugging something like this into a network is a horrifically bad idea.

This is like asking people on the Internet how to safely mix random household cleaning chemicals. If you don't have the background to answer that yourself, you should not be doing household chemistry.

I found out after our solar system was installed that the enphase inverter came with a cell modem for monitoring and remote management. Our installers didn't know how or even if it was possible to configure the system without one.

After I bought out our panels, I found the Enphase modem and disconnected it. It was a USB box connected to the monitoring unit, the monitoring unit has other networking options, and it's mine anyway.

Now you know to advise people to look into that question before the install/find an installer that can guarantee it. If the thing can't easily have cell function disabled (e.g. by pulling a readily accessible card), then advise people to stay away from enphase.

Enphase required the cell connection when I checked a couple years ago. Sol-Ark makes a solid hybrid inverter and allows offline operation.

The issue is that a lot of IoT things won't even work unless they have Internet connection and a registered account.

The careful approach to IoT is to never connect a device to anything, dump the firmware, analyze it, reflash the EEPROM with patched TLS certificates (if necessary), write your own server implementation, let the IoT device join a dedicated IoT WiFi network, on that network run everything through a gateway pretending to be "the Internet", where the emulated server is running. Yep, it's this bad.

Of course, if the device or its malfunction cannot cause sufficient harm (e.g. it's a light, usually it's not worth to reverse engineer it) then just run it on a separate SSID and VLAN, with least access necessary to get it running (starting from blocking everything and allowing network by network until it works).

And, uh, if the device has a LTE or can use something like Amazon Sidewalk, it gets even trickier to keep it tame.

I don't have any solar power stuff, but I did this with my old cat feeder machine. In the process I discovered a service/backdoor SSH account, a system that does not encrypt p-frames at all before uploading data to the cloud, and a bunch of other things that made me happy I did not connect it to any public networks. Short conclusion: consider against with a camera or a microphone that runs on Tuya-developed firmware. Generalized conclusion: consider against IoT from any manufacturers you don't trust to fully respect your best interests, or aren't willing to audit first.

The downside is obvious, of course. And with every year more and more manufacturers tighten up their hardware, but I'm certain the crappy programming and service backdoors are all there, only ways to mess with the network traffic or firmware are clamped down.

> The issue is that a lot of IoT things won't even work unless they have Internet connection and a registered account.

To a significant extent I see this as a "buyer beware" situation. Now, a lot of people aren't even really aware of the problem nor knowledgeable enough to know what to look for, but I'd expect the majority of the HN audience is both aware of and able to understand the problem enough to be capable of looking out for and avoiding it.

I personally don't mind if a device uses internet connectivity to provide a useful service, but I refuse to buy anything that requires internet connectivity arbitrarily for functionality that could easily be performed locally. The first thing I do when I think a new IoT device might be neat is google "<product> Home Assistant" and see what comes up. If there's no integration or the integration is cloud based instead of local I probably won't buy it.

IoT devices are not necessities, most of them are either luxury items or disposable novelties. You can always just not buy them. There are certainly some categories, particularly in the residential market, where it may be harder to find an option you find agreeable but its far from impossible. If every major offering in a category is bad in this way, you almost certainly don't actually need that thing.

> IoT devices are not necessities

I wouldn’t go that far.

To best of my awareness, there are no good automatic cat feeders on the market - just crappy ones and tolerable ones.

This doesn’t mean they’re a some novelty gimmick I don’t really need. I’ve got two cats, one had developed a health condition that requires special diet - and I’d say that a feeders that track consumption and can recognize between two furry assholes and unlock only for the appropriate one, are basically a necessity for me here. Without those I would have to force unnatural feeding schedules on my cats, so I can watch them eating from their own bowls.

Even basic stuff like smart lights isn’t totally a gimmick. It’s not just a light with phone for a remote control, after all. Being smart enough to e.g. not blast at full brightness in my eyes if I need something at nighttime is not just a fancy thing, but good for sleeping hygiene.

I have a sunsynk inverter which is the same hardware as deye but apparently different software. I have it hooked up to a Pi4b running home assistant using this https://github.com/kellerza/sunsynk and it has no direct internet access. I can connect to my home network using tailscale to monitor power usage and generation through the HA app if I'm not at home

I stuck IOT stuff on a cheap linksys WRT router with ExpressVPN firmware. It forces all clients out over that so Nest, Amazon et al can’t snitch or sell my demographics or billing address to people. Not tying it to my home IP anyway.

but this require a DMZ or a second external IP address (I have both with centurylink) because if it’s double nat on your home network. Thee devices can access your home network.

Never connect it to the WiFi/Ethernet? Or if you do, filter the traffic. Unfortunately that's often not possible on consumer class modems.

Often the equipment won’t actually work either if you try to filter it meaningfully. I’ve had IoT cameras (in particular) that would brick themselves if you didn’t allow 443 to all Amazon IP blocks. :s

A separate VLAN, if your router is capable

A firewall.

(If you don’t want IOT talking to the internet at all, set up an internal dhcp server and give the devices a bunk router address .

If my gateway were 192.168.1.1 , I just set that clients gateway as 192.168.1.254)

Misread your question. Sorry. Most of my devices I do want talking to the internet. Just not on my home IP.

It's just a bad idea. I got caught up in a situation where one company sold me a solar installation, then a subcontractor installed and configured it. Apparently they got into a spat about money, because the subcontractor told me to pay the bill straight to them.

Otherwise they'd shut down the newly installed solar installation. I said, can you do that? Of course while talking, I changed the WiFi password.

Solar installations are expensive enough that some manufacturers can probably afford to integrate a cellular modem into the product (similar to how all new cars do it today). Good luck changing the Wi-Fi password on that!

I'm not sure any company does that though. They're operating on pretty slim margins from what I understand, unless I'm wrong.

Adding completely unused features just for fun isn't really a common business practice?

Enphase does, as noted elsewhere in the dicussion on this post!

That's a very good point, and I don't like it.

Nothing a quick antenna desolder job or trace cut to shut that little vector down.

They can just program the device to shut down automatically if it can't ping home for some time. Marketing will call it a safety feature.

Nothing an aftermarket control board or MCU swap won't fix.

That's why you get lien releases from subcontractors before you pay the main contractor.

I have a Axpert MAX E. It has a WiFi AP constantly advertised. The only way to configure/disable that is via a .cn app! The app also allows remote control and monitoring of the inverter, via some unknown cloud server. I run everything local-only, so that is never going to happen.

> The only way to configure/disable that is via a .cn app!

What does it even mean for an app to be ".cn"? Apps typically aren't identified by DNS names. Did you have to download it from a .cn domain? Is it just a roundabout way of saying the app was Chinese?

> Apps typically aren't identified by DNS names.

Aren't they, at least on Android?

The gmail app is com.google.android.gm [1], and so on. The app ids are Java style reverse ordered dns names.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

According to this definition, is there any meaningful difference between a ".cn app" and a ".com app" like com.zhiliaoapp.musically?

Its not roundabout at all

It's not the solar inverters themselves that are usually internet connected, but rather the controller box (some kind of embedded system) that is internet connected to allow monitoring and control. Perhaps this manufacturer decided to economize and make both of them part of the same "box", with the result that an error condition in the controller would result in the non-operation of the inverter part.

Some systems like mine (Enphase) do a good job of letting the inverters operate independently of the monitoring/control software. But to do this, I believe they need to add data storage to the inverters themselves in order to log data during a controller "outage".

Mainly data collection (previous lead dev at solar forecasting startup). All the web UIs to view usage are also collecting useful information that can be used in forecasting models. One of the researches I worked with wrote some papers on using distributed home solar output measurements to assist with generating higher resolution irradiance forecasts and estimated actuals/observations. You have to do a lot of data cleaning to get this reliable though. Anyway, this data from memory was bought/sold for various research/commercial weather modeling.

Besides the reasons others have already mentioned, load management comes to mind:

Getting rid of excess energy in the grid can be just as hard a problem to solve as to deal with excess load, and being able to simply and very quickly remove some supply from the grid is very useful for that.

nice dashboards for information about generation. but most importantly remote troubleshooting/diagnostics. as example i have system made from multiple inverters, batteries, car charger and backup interface. after installation some stuff slightly misbehaved. manufacturer support were able to look at system logs and configuration and identify that system is slightly incorrectly wired/configured, after what installer was able to fix it. same thing goes for malfunctioning parts of system. support can take a glance at it and issue rma on spot

because they have remote configuration and reporting on solar production, consumption, battery state of charge, grid export, import vs time.

It's really nice to be able to check whether the state of your power is at home before you go there if there's a question.

Too many idiots have bought internet-connected devices so now the inertia is in favor of the corporations to continue selling that.

Hi, idiot here. I badly wanted a US-made robot vacuum that uses LiDAR for mapping and a camera for object classification. This does not exist. Your only options are Chinese-owned-and-operated.

I could flash them with Valetudo and wire them up to Home Assistant, but doing so requires me to solder shit to the JTAG circuit and buy some niche hardware, which requires me to open up the vac and potentially brick it. I'm not risking that on a $1200 device.

I understand you're offended but this is exactly what I mean. The US-made robot that uses LiDAR for mapping and a camera for object detection will never exist because people will pay $1,200 and still allow a random company to map and photograph their home.

Not offended. You're not wrong. I'm upset that my options here were a potential security risk with a difficult/risky workaround vs vastly inferior products. I would have gladly paid more for an American alternative if it existed.

Practical Engineering had a video on the subject not too long ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G4ipM2qjfw

The short answer is: it's for load balancing, it can't be avoided.

That part is independent of internet connection. Especially since you can't rely on the internet connection in case of power delivery issues. It's a completely different network.

The trouble is that there needs to be some way for the grid operator to take x % of generating capability off-line or bring y % more on-line, and the panels themselves can't decide autonomously, so there must be an external data connection. Maybe not through internet but cellphone data connection, but the grid operator has to have control about how much power goes into the grid.

They don't need that kind of control, as evidenced by the fact that this kind of control is largely absent today for residential-scale grid-tied solar installations.

The way it works today for common residential grid-ties is this:

1. Is grid up? Y/N

2. If Y, then supply excess locally-generated power to grid. (Someone will implicitly use it.)

3. If N, then turn off connection to grid. (Nobody's home and we don't want to hurt anybody.)

It’s a bit more sophisticated than that. On a mild sunny day your local network will be saturated with PV power and the supply voltage will creep up. It’s an enforced regulation here (Aus) that the inverters will curtail/shut down based on grid over voltage. No networking required.

I think we're describing aspects of the same thing.

> but the grid operator has to have control about how much power goes into the grid

Here in Germany this works by specialised devices called "Funkrundsteuerempfänger" (rough translation: radio controlled receiver, according to Wikipedia[0] it's "radio teleswitch")

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_teleswitch

That's true when there's a sufficient density of home solar panels.

If they add up to a percent or two of the local grid, then control is not necessary.

Also you could design a solar system to not backfeed.

10 years ago, https://www.finnegan.com/en/insights/articles/u-s-supreme-co...

> U.S. Supreme Court Holds that Books Printed and Sold Abroad May Be Freely Resold in the U.S. Because the Copyrights Are Exhausted Under the First-Sale Doctrine.. The Kirtsaeng decision is significant to copyright owners, and it may also have important ramifications for patent owners who make and sell goods abroad that practice a U.S. patent.

https://www.iveticlaw.com/owning-vs-controlling-understandin...

> The first sale doctrine is a legal principle that limits the copyright owner's control over a particular copy of their work after it's been lawfully sold. This doctrine, in essence, acts to cut off the copyright owner's rights in the created work after the product is first sold (ie. when the copyright owner releases their work into the marketplace). Another way to describe it is that the copyright holder's right to control the distribution of their work goes away after the “first sale” of the work,(hence the name). In more straightforward and more practical terms, once you buy a book, CD, DVD, artwork or any other authorized copy of a copyrighted work, the copyright owner generally loses the right to control what you do with that specific copy. You can resell it, lend it, give it away, or even destroy it, without their permission.

Remote bricking requires software, which is sold under copyright law.

And yet some software licenses do dictate what the user can/must do with regards to further modifying or distributing the code.

This also has nothing to do with exclusivity agreements arranged between companies, as seems to be the case here.

> nothing to do with exclusivity agreements arranged between companies

The 2013 U.S. Supreme Court case depended on a plaintiff that was making enough money on textbook arbitrage to fund a legal case all the way to the Supreme Court. It provided new clarity on book distribution and geographical "exclusivity".

If software enforcement of device distribution agreements affects a large enough flow of capital, then corner cases will accrue enough economic impact to be tested in courts. Manufacturers do not have carte blanche to manipulate hardware remotely, e.g. they cannot take actions that could injure humans. Where are the limits? For now, we have many opinions and few laws.

I've been using Deye since 2019. I was using those blue grid-tie inverters with limiters to do zero-export and they had the Deye manufacturers sticker on it. So I googled them, found them on Alibaba, and purchased some directly from them. I had no idea that they were related to Sol-Ark until later. Fortunately, I never trusted their dongle/cloud solution and so only ever plugged it in when I requested firmware updates from them.

I learned at some point that they were designed with Sol-Ark, and that Sol-Ark put pressure on them to stop selling to the U.S. market, and indeed they stopped selling to anyone directly in the U.S. I get Sol-Ark's position, but there are numerous people that bought them not even knowing the relation nor that they would be considered grey-market (since buying products direct from China is really common). Also, like pretty much everybody I know that screws around with this stuff, none of use would have paid for the Sol-Ark nor were we really aware of them because they so expensive anyways.

Even if this decision came purely from Deye, it's a direct result of Sol-Ark putting pressure on them to stop the sell of inverters into the U.S. market, and enough middle-men were getting around that, that they felt the need to do this.

Again, I get Sol-Ark's position, but it's just a really bad look for them. I think it's similar to certain media piracy: The people wouldn't have paid for it how you are offering it anyways, and all you're doing is making potential future customers hate you; It would certainly be more profitable to focus those resources on something else.

Sol-Ark certainly seems to embody 'never let a crisis go to waste '.

Sol-Ark may not have pulled the trigger on bricking the inverters, but it certainly sounds like their legal actions pressed Deye's hand.

And then to shake down all the individuals who's inverters broke with a limited time opportunity to buy a brand new one from them....

Why are you blaming Sol-Ark when Deye is the one in breach of contract taking illegal actions the entire time? Seems very disingenuous. They also did not force Deye's hand in this action and seem surprised by it.

> in breach of contract

I can't really figure out what they did that was in breach of contract. As far as I understand it, they don't do business inside the areas affected, so there is no contract to speak of. Instead, their authorized resellers seem to be the ones installing for their hardware; I don't even think it's legal to sell their hardware if it doesn't comply with FCC/etc guidelines.

Is geo-blocking illegal? Am I entitled to a refund if I import American hardware that refuses to operate in my country?

I think people were risking a broken setup for a big discount, and now it's come back to bite them in the ass. If the units affected were official installations done by their American reseller, their reseller wouldn't be so ready to offer up free replacements.

> Am I entitled to a refund if I import American hardware that refuses to operate in my country?

If the product doesn't obviously communicate that it won't work in your country: yes.

Wait, what? So defending your rights under an exclusivity agreement through the courts is somehow now "forcing" their hand? The evil Sol-Ark by suing for compliance to their contract pushed the hapless Deye into bricking consumers hardware?

I like how you quoted forcing, but I very specifically did not use that term.

Had there been no exclusivity agreement, I think we can agree that the inverters would not of been bricked for being located in the wrong regions.

I think the malice from Sol-Ark here is that they are only offering a limited time deal, which may pressure people to pay up before the courts clear this up.

Regardless of who shares the majority of the blame, Sol-Ark, Deye or 3rd party vendors, this could of been handled better by all parties involved, and should not have harmed end consumers in this way.

It’s unclear who caused it exactly, but sol-ark does not seem to be at fault unless one thinks exclusivity contracts are illegal or wrong.

It seems deye either willfully or negligently ignore their contract they made with sol ark. Or their middle men in other countries did. Deye then punished the end users for deye’s lapses.

Where does solark get blame unless the exclusivity contract is what one objects to.

When the purpose of the exclusivity contract is to sell something at 5x the price it is sold for in other markets, I think most people would reasonably describe this as price gouging.

So you're just agreeing with a possible viewpoint the parent admitted as valid several times?

> I like how you quoted forcing, but I very specifically did not use that term.

I like that you substituted a similar word while paraphrasing a common phrase and then used the opportunity to say “I didn’t mean what you thought I did. I meant something else but will not describe what that is exactly”

Blaming Sol-Ark for that is just absurd.

Any idea what the impact is for the state grids? I wonder if they got a sudden drop in feed-ins and whether it affects pricing.

Any idea how common this manufacturer is across the place?

I'm not from the states, but I do know that if my solar would be bricked, it would take me weeks to find out. I don't exactly check up on it and it's out of sight.

Most of the users of these products were off grid.

A number of the products used in off grid installs have invasive IOT remote access/administration.

It's only a matter of time until it leads to loss of life-- e.g. from people who freeze to death because they can't reconfigure or turn up a system without internet access which is out or doesn't work without power--, if it hasn't already.

Yeah, off grid (as in actually off grid) is a great example of ‘simple is better’ and ‘physical redundancy is essential’.

It’s also the place where money ($$) is often the most constraining factor, so cheap amazon shit tends to be the norm.

Can the firmware still be flashed? I found cloud-free custom firmware exists for these inverters with a quick search, so if the units can still be flashed many may be salvageable.

We need laws to prevent this

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.

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.

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.

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

Civil contract disputes don't empower or 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.

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

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.

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

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”.

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

Could USA wrap it under the terrorism laws?

Im sure there is some US law, that considers this an act of terror against the national power grid ;)

Actions like this should forever ban an organisation and its executives from operating in anyway in the countries affected.

Here's what I want: by law, any device that is connected to the internet needs to have a warning on the box, similar to the one that's on cigarettes packaging, stating the risks of that device being online (bricking/loss of service, data might be compromised in a cyberattack, etc.)

Here's what I want: by law, any device that i own should work perpetually until broken by me. If it requires 3rd party servers, let me configure alternatives. and if you sunset the servers completely you are mandated to release either: complete documentation how to create your own service to keep device working, or a full binary that supports ALL the features that were available throughout device's lifecycle. If you go bankrupt you are mandated to just open source your software in that case.

and that's a minimum I'll settle on.

We need straight anti-trust unbundling. You should not be allowed to abuse your market position as a hardware manufacturer to push your network-connected software by tying them together as one product. At a minimum, the software should have to be developed by a separate business unit, using only documentation that's been published for everyone. (and yes, having been an embedded hardware/software designer, including for things like power electronics, I'm quite aware of the implications)

Hardware and software needs a hard separation honestly.

I think that firmware shouldn't ever be bound by license, meanwhile software should be bound by it but mandated to be updatable/replacable by user - even with custom one.

Then let manufacturers pick where they set the boundary - do they add extra complexity of updating and replacing software to the component? or do they go for licenseless firmware?

> If you go bankrupt you are mandated to just open source your software in that case.

Or insurance that covers the complete refund cost of all assets sold. There are cases where you may be using 3rd party software that you license that you cannot open source. And, in that case, you're on the hook for refunding the cost of the item.

Refunding the purchase price is rarely enough to make you whole. At there very least it would need to be inflation adjusted and also compensate you for any additional costs incurred (installation, any loss of income due to unavailable until a replacement can be found, time required to select a suitable replacement, emotional damage).

I guess the other option would be to require that any licensed binaries for the software needed to include a transfer of license (for the purpose of rebuilding the software to a runnable state) to any parties that purchased the product using that blob licensed library.

No, because in case of insolvency some parties can get priority, and the assets will be auctioned off to just cover the priority ones.

That's why I said insurance to cover it. And the insurance would be dedicated to covering that; it wouldn't be accessible to pay off other creditors.

What about mechanical devices that simply wear out? Even electronic devices can fail due to circumstances controlled neither by you nor by the manufacturer, like lightning strikes introducing violent transients in the grid supply.

Also, cool beans that that is the minimum you'll settle on but how on earth would anyone enforce that? Open sourced software is not enough by far to make something work perpetually: the software will need to be run somewhere and most likely (since you are talking about some sort of net-connected software if this is relevant in the first place) will need security patching to keep up with CVEs. Who is going to pay for that? I don't think it will be the bankrupt entity that stopped existing 10 years ago.

> What about mechanical devices that simply wear out?

I think wear-and-tear from usage falls under "until broken by me", which I see as intended to cover ordinary breakage that would exist even in absence of copyright and trade secrets.

> Also, cool beans that that is the minimum you'll settle on but how on earth would anyone enforce that?

A large part of the solution would be to stop enforcing copyright, patents, DMCA anti-circumvention clause, etc. in these cases. Companies can be legally compelled to release the server software with fines or restrictions on future sales for non-compliance. In case of bankruptcy, it can be obtained as part of the bankruptcy process going through the company's assets.

> Open sourced software is not enough by far to make something work perpetually: the software will need to be run somewhere and most likely (since you are talking about some sort of net-connected software if this is relevant in the first place) will need security patching to keep up with CVEs.

Some of these devices may legitimately need to be network-connected, but very few legitimately need to be Internet-connected. A local network with a Raspberry Pi running the server is likely fine in most cases.

> Who is going to pay for that? I don't think it will be the bankrupt entity that stopped existing 10 years ago.

I don't think the idea is to force someone to pay to keep servers up or actively maintain the software - but rather to remove artificial barriers in the way of owners/enthusiasts/repair-shops/etc. that already want to do so.

Unless we're applying this retroactively, it'd be an entity currently going through bankruptcy, and their obligation is just the hand-over the source code in its current state.

That will end up being as effective as California prop 65, better known as "that cancer warning everyone ignores."

For it to be effective, all it needs is its complement: An easily recognizable green label saying "Doesn't connect to the internet", which is only allowed on the boxes of devices for which this is the case.

Maybe some more levels in the middle like "only connects to the internet for firmware updates" (yellow) and "doesn't require internet access for core functionality" (orange). Basically Nutri-Score [1] for hardware.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutri-Score

That law won't mean much when people are importing products from other jurisdictions that don't have that law... Which is essentially what happened here. (The broken "law" being the exclusivity agreement).

And if we assume that complying with the law somehow increases costs in the US market, people will still go buy the cheaper thing anyway. Which means you need to enforce the regulations on importing these things just as strictly as we regulate the import of cigarettes...

Hard to enforce those laws across international borders. Especially if there's an escalation of geopolitical tensions.

Imagine if a country could turn off power to US homes during a conflict. This is critical infrastructure we should be making at home.

If it depends on the cloud to operate it's not yours.

These devices do not depend on the cloud. If I want to take my Sol-Ark inverter offline I can just take the wifi dongle off it. Dunno about the bootleg Deye one.

If you sold equipment which wasn't certified for connection to another economies electricity grid, and discovered resellers were selling it into that economy, what would you do?

Calling this trade war invokes issues which may exist, but ignores more present dangers. Selling unlicensed radio equipment (--for example) into different economies has massive financial risks.

Your position is that "selling unlicensed equipment" is a liability risk for Deye but... deliberately disabling equipment you don't even own is not?!

All they need to do is the same thing any manufacturer whose stuff ends up on a gray market does: "We're very sorry and we don't know how this happened. We'll work with regulators to better audit our export shipments in the future." This kind of thing happens all the time.

It’s not clear how the device was bricked. Could it be reset to not be bricked by disconnecting it from the Internet and rebooting or reflashing?

off grid here,off and on since the early 90's current iteration uses US made charge controller and inverter, midn9ght and magnum both capable of firmware updates, but continue to function after 10 years without coms.The midnight controller did pop up a cheeky message of "got coms?" for years, but for some reason , gave up. The thing with both of these pieces of equpiment is that they are designed by bad ass electrical engineers to survive and continue to function under the worst conditions..... and then some, which I have personaly tested. I believe that a firware update could be done with any old laptop, and that while as a new owner I did go all ocd watching all of the data(did learn a lot), now I sometimes forget that the system exists, ......its that reliable

What products would you recommend today?

Not GP, but Victron makes some serious beasts. Their whole system is modular, so easy to expand, and it’s local-only by default.

Second this recommendation. They also publish a bunch of their software on GitHub: https://github.com/victronenergy - makes it much, much easier to figure out what the hardware is capable of even if you never venture beyond cabling various boxes together.

I helped a neighbor replace his Magnum system with Victron a couple years back; sadly, the former company has abandoned its roots and produces hardware that is neither well-designed nor robust. The documentation still smells like it was written based on some EE's napkin notes though.

You can also get root access to the Cerbo unit, if you want it. It's not a super-powerful device, but it's an industrial linux box with three relays built-in; more than capable enough to drive some automation, and it has plenty of CANbus and other ports.

That's assuming you can't just make do with node-red, which is a weird system, but is also available without touching ssh access, and comes preconfigured with everything you need to read (and write) to all connected Victron devices.

And other devices. I've got mine using the Pylontech battery protocol to read off the battery charge and start the generator on demand. Had to do that (instead of using the built-in generator start option) because the generator in question doesn't have an electronic starter.

Thank you for the excellent Saturday investigation topic!

Regarding solark statement about using their own backend. I am pretty sure they transitioned to it around May 2024. Before that it was different site, which I am pretty sure was shared by all deye customers. I wonder if this event was planned well in advance...

It is possible that Deye waited to pursue this blunt remedy until Sol-Ark customers would no longer be caught up in it. Doesn't mean Sol-Ark knew what they intended.

People responsible for this kind of evil need to pay with personal property seizure.

So like, the people who bought devices from unauthorized distributors should have their devices stop working? Seems you got your exact wish!

I own a Guangzhou Sanjing R5-8K-S2 inverter that had issues shortly after installation where it was generating far less power than expected.

The web telemetry panel had multiple gaps throughout the day where energy generation dropped to 0, but having datapoints logged every 10 minutes didn't give out enough information to determine why that was happening.

It also had a current status endpoint which updated every 10 seconds. I wrote a python script to log those updates into a file, and eventually discovered the inverter was shutting down itself and waiting 5 minutes every time it found its grid voltage to be greater than 241V.

Installer wanted utility to lower the house's grid transformer tap, but needed authorization from Utility, who declined claiming it was already on the lowest tap possible. Cynically, i think they declined because lowering further would lower grid voltage at night below minimums they're contractually required to maintain.

Tried going into the manufacturer's website to see if a firmware update could solve this. Couldn't find firmware updates, but i did find a manual for their local monitoring app, including a password for installer-only settings, set to "123456".

The app doesn't include any functionality to change said password to something else, so i assume it's hardcoded. There was one change i could still legally do without violating anything - raising the grid shutdown threshold voltage from 241 to 242V. This change did get reflected in subsequent logs, so the settings panel is functional. I could technically increase that further (to a maximum of 275V), but that would expose me to liability.

Parents suggest contacting the inverter's distributor for support, and they asked for a password i was never given. Apparently the manufacturer is suppopsed to create accounts for installers/distributors buying directly from them, and i somehow bypassed that process when creating an account for myself, without even realizing it.

Some more clarification later, it turns out they can still remotely access the inverter with its serial number. After doing so, they "fixed" the issue without explaining how. Checking the installer settings interface, it turns out they just increased the grid overvoltage shutdown threshold to 275V right off the bat.

At least i got them on record saying they did that, so i'm technically in the clear. Still, having that kind of access was scary enough to want to make me disconnect the inverter from the internet.

Turns out its warranty (which only expires in 2036) has terms requiring it to stay connected to the internet. That's enough time to trigger WW3 and a resulting horus scenario (https://horusscenario.com/).

Until then, the best i can do is to throttle the inverter's internet connection to something like 10kbps, which isn't enough to prevent someone persistent enough from uploading new firmware.

Stories like this make me reconsider keeping it connected. I'm surprised we haven't seen inverter ransomware yet.

> Turns out its warranty (which only expires in 2036) has terms requiring it to stay connected to the internet.

Does it define any requirements for the internet connection? What if the connection latency was, let's say, 1 week?

I presume they locked out the solar recharging of the battery and home supply but do not stop mains grid power to the home ???.

the word "bricked" was used. are these units actually bricked, as in permanently? or do they perform the same checks every time they start and will simply keep failing till they are in a designated geolocation?

Trade wars have casualties. This is the first in a long line to come.

To most of us HN denizens it's obvious that OTA updates and internet connectivity generally leads to the things we rely on being worse. It sucks to have something that works when you go bed and is broken the next morning because of some idiotic update.

What can we do to modify capitalism so that this externality is correctly captured? I think most people, especially those who rely on these systems to do their jobs would tell you "I would gladly pay a premium to prevent outside influences from being able to brick my tractor (or whatever), if it's broken I want to be the one who has broken it." Is this something that could simply be solved by aggressive anti-trust? Surely this isn't the best future we can come up with.

First we need an industry certification that encapsulates all the end user requirements. Then we need consumers to vote with their dollars, or regulation to enforce compliance.

It is extremely frustrating to watch "connected" "smart" devices repeatedly do exactly what we knew they would do, and yet nobody ever learns a damn thing. People will keep on buying Internet-connected devices, manufacturers will keep making them, this sort of thing will keep happening, and the rest of us will struggle to even find mass-manufactured things that are not Internet-connected and "smart".

Even devices that are pretty much for "self-hosting" are increasingly trying to sneak in cloud-connected back doors, like Synology DSM trying to sneak in cloud authentication to your local NAS. Stop trying to make the devices I bought for the purposes of having locally-managed devices depend on cloud services! My local network is not just a fucking gateway to cloud services!

Maybe the solution is not to abstain from the latest tech, but to regulate companies that make these devices so the shenanigans are actually illegal. It is not a problem that should only be solved by ideologically driven people who are willing to tinker and suffer, but rather a protection all citizens enjoy.

I'm not fully convinced that legislation alone can fix all of our problems, but for what it's worth, I'm all for it.

That said, regulation probably won't solve my problem, because what I want are devices that are specifically not designed to just be cloud-connected thin-client devices. I doubt regulation is going to entirely prevent this class of device from existing. And it's only going to get worse: look at what Microsoft is doing, they're literally trying to shift Windows into being a fucking cloud service.

Legislation is the most direct way to solve multi-agent coordination problems, which is what this is. The majority of consumers want cheaper easier products, but in aggregate that leads to negative outcomes for society where we have traded off important values that can't compete on price.

The problem is getting voters and legislators to buy into the idea that those values are important and not worth trading off.

As long as companies can buy politicians in the US don't expect it to take off.

If anything regulators will prefer to abolish NON-connected devices.

The very iPhone I’m reading this on is one trade war/sanction away from becoming a useless brick of electronics that probably can’t even show the time without calling to Apple every now and then.

I gave up on Ubiquiti because of the cloud nonsense. Altium is pushing cloud hard (and pushing me to KiCAD). I'm a weirdo for using a mac w/ only a local account (no apple id). I can't buy any new or electric vehicles because they're all 'smart'.

The cloud is artificial, so it must be chemtrails, which explains why modern software feels like its giving me cancer. Wake up sheeple. /s

If you want an electric truck (or potentially an SUV), consider looking at an Edison Motors pickup truck retrofit. They are technically Diesel Electric instead of pure electric but you can customize the battery load if you want to run full electric. They don't do all the stupid cloud connected software stuff and they are all about repairability/self maintenance.

Probably the only electric vehicle manufacturer that isn't egregiously tech-bro-y and dripping in dark patterns.

Can’t you use ubiquiti fully locally? I haven’t tested my setup but I can access the web ui directly through the device ip

Iirc they've got a one-year timeout for updates, after which they'll make you sign in with a unifi web account in order to update. Deeply frustrating.

I'm almost grateful to the manufacturer for demonstrating the terrifying kind of cyberattack enabled by such remote update/lockout functionality.

Just imagine this kind of thing happening in a (probably not so distant) future in which a significant fraction of all electricity is being generated in a decentralized way, using devices such as this...

There was already a case (many years ago), where something was wrong with an update. All inverters from a country did not start anymore. (You have to set the country or grid code in each inverter, so they know the grid limits).

I'm not sure about this.

I know various hackers, back in the day, were congratulated for their "public service" of showing vulnerabilities. The problem is that we've to a network infrastructure that is only secure by piecemeal bug fixes and ad-hoc filtering and moved to situation where hacking is a (maximally shady) business.

Will things be different with power grid and other infrastructure because lives depend on it? I don't see any indications.

"The society at the stage of the integrated spectacle is characterized by five principal features: incessant technological renewal; fusion of State and economy; generalized secrecy, unanswerable lies; a perpetual present." Guy Debord, Commentaries on Society Of The Spectacle

That is sort of a silver lining. We can use PR disasters as levers to make regulation happen which will hopefully add some protection in the future.

As a consumer and homeowner I try my hardest to buy "smart" things that only have local control, especially for important systems like power and HVAC. Our standby generator has a manufacturer supplied wifi pod that I never set up. Instead I use an RS485-to-USB dongle and monitor it myself with open source software. Our HVAC is the same to the greatest extent possible. When shopping for a new robot vacuum Valetudo[1] compatibility is an overriding concern.

If/when we have solar installed it will not be connected to the manufacturer or distributor's cloud systems.

[1]: https://valetudo.cloud

I love the idea of Valetudo but flashing devices with it is a hell of a lot of work (if you can at all) and projects like these aren't entirely safe from takeovers from malicious actors either.

This time, it's a malicious manufacturer, next time it's a malicious hacker. Doesn't seem like connecting these to the internet is worth it.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

.. 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")

I feel for customers impacted by this but hate that the only real choices customers have are local, but expensive, equipment or affordable, but outsourced equipment.

This is endemic in the home automation space. Nearly everything is made and operated on Chinese soil. Like security cameras, or, in my case, our LiDAR and camera augmented robot vacuums.

Some components, like lights and switches, have (very) expensive American alternatives. Some support ZigBee or Matter and can be controlled locally. Many many others require cloud infrastructure operated outside of the US and become bricks without it.

I would love to see the US mandate ITAR for all IoT devices sold in the US. If anything, that will help prop up local alternatives like Matter since that will be way cheaper than building compliant cloud-connexted devices.

The question is whether a customer has to actually connect these things to the net.

They do in many cases. Example: GE CYNC Wi-Fi lights require a connection to Savant's servers, which I believe are split between US and CN. They are one of few vendors that make BR30 smart lights. Philips and LIFX aside, all of the other vendors require an Internet connection.

Where is the government when you need it…

Reason #42 that I don't want to own my electric supply equipment. I'm happy to pay a utility to provide AC power to my service panel.

The same utilities that are already turning off power at even the chance there are red flag warnings? Surely you're joking.

I have never had my utility power cut for any cause other than storm/ice damage. And it's generally back on within a day, without any involvement on my part. If a hailstorm destroys my rooftop panels or a misbehaving vendor remotely shuts off my inverter, these are problems I now have to solve for myself. No thanks.

Your panels are covered by your home insurance, just like your roof. So you'd already be talking to your insurance agent if you had any hailstorm damage to your home. I'm really sure I see the point.

Not a very productive comment...

Title is a bit misleading and makes it sound like Sol-Ark did this. They did not. Title should be "Deye manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US". They are the same entity but this wording avoids confusion about Sol-Ark being responsible.

Interesting to see China do the same thing as the US did to China so many times. Only now it's wrong

Export controls =! Remotely disabling already-purchased hardware

As far I know, software like CADs also just stopped in russia after the war started.

<holding-hands> Whoa, we don't talk about that here </holding-hands>

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