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.
