A bill to allow consumers to control their own devices is pending in Congress
cio.com
cio.com
another user's summary:
tl;dr
1. Make sure you’re registered to vote — lawmakers check.
2. Lawmakers don’t care about people outside of their district.
3. Your signature — physical or electronic — on a mass petition will mean little.
4. The communication must be individual. Email, Letter, Phone call.
5. Know where your representative stands.
6. Communicate — even if you and your representative disagree.
7. Say “thank you" - to reinforce the behavior you want
8. Enlist the help of friends in other districts. - they write their own reps
Call your congressperson's local office and talk to someone on the phone. Offer to explain the reasoning behind the need for this law, and back that up with some credentialed knowledge of tech. If you've ever worked on your own car or modded a piece of hardware, so much the better.
If you want change, cynicism like yours is crippling.
From the US House press release linked in the above, money quote: '“The YODA bill, today, I did file,” said Congressman Farenthold. “YODA simply states that your device belongs to you. If you wish to sell that device, the software that enables it to work is transferred along with it, and that any right you have to security and bug fixing of that software is transferred as well.”'
http://farenthold.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Documen...
It will be legal to fix your own tractor. It will also be legal to change the software on devices you own.
When I challenge people on this I eventually get down to what people really want: they want to disable the emissions controls. A qualified engineer (which most mechanics are not - but I suspect those reading this are) given the source code we don't give out can get our engines a little more fuel efficient at the expense of not meeting emissions, or a little more powerful at the expensive of being less reliable. When you read the above you will begin to understand why we made the engineering compromises we did, and see why we don't really want to give out the requested information. It isn't necessary to do repairs, but it is necessary to do things that you shouldn't do.
That is not to say I'm against the idea of this bill, just that the justification you are being sold is built on a lie. I think this bill needs to be carefully written to address this.
I don't own a tractor, but if I did, I'd want the option to be able to 'root' the tractor and install different software on it. You shouldn't have to ask permission, violate EULAs, or violate the law to innovate.
What you would do it connect to the CAN bus and read all the data there - same as what most people do for cars - except there is a lot more interesting data for you to work with. There is not need to root the tractors, or install different software, just install your own computer, connect it to the CAN bus and do what you want. Our 10 year old computers that do this on a 200mhz CPU sell for $5000 - I'm convinced you would want something more modern that is also cheaper for your experiments.
There is one exception to the above: if you want to do computer steering you need an encryption key that we don't generally make available to the public. There is too many safety concerns to let us just give that away.
They can already steer the tractor in any direction they want, for any nefarious purpose. You're just removing their ability to automate away labor (steering). This is essentially an economic, not a safety-oriented, policy.
I have ethical concerns.
Would you buy a house with a locked room in it, if the home-builder retained possession of the key? Does the de facto ownership of the contents of the locked room transfer with the title to the house, or with possession of the key? Is the owner of the house justified in removing the lock and opening the room? Is the builder justified in rigging explosives inside the room to go off if the lock is bypassed?
Ownership means that you don't need to ask permission to do what you want. No matter how many warning signs you put up to protect idiots from their own idiocy, at some point, you are going to have to finally let someone that wants to drive off a cliff go over the edge. You have to let someone destroy their own engine. You have to let someone own their own device.
Don't use this as an excuse to wage war on general purpose computing.
Because owners could just re-enable emissions control until after the test.
On the other hand, my political beliefs tend to say that government exists to protect you from me and me from you, and the emissions of your vehicles falls into that category. So maybe there's an argument to be made that at least certain parts should be locked down?
(for the record, I don't think any of it should be for the sake of competition and home repair, I'm asking for the sake of conversation / devil's advocate)
/rant
Direct question: what does it cost to buy the software and tools to read and clear codes on a modern John Deere? What if I want to maintain a range of machines spanning 1985 to present?
If you are reading this you can probable figure out how to wire up an arduino as well. The electronics are easy, though you probably have to buy the standard from ISO to write the code.
Note, the above covers current tractors. Some of the older tractors used an older protocol, God help you if that is your tractor.
https://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
It effectively claims that the guy couldn't repair his machines without a specialist who had to be flown out directly. I guess it's not a question of OBD-II, so my bad for making it about that, but it's still a question of repairability. I can't find a first hand account from him, so I'm willing to believe it was more complicated than a single paragraph in Wired. Why couldn't he just buy the manual and repair it? What codes and interfaces don't show up on OBD-II?
I work for an automaker, and I'm well aware that you can get the base codes from a cheapo harbor freight OBD reader, but that won't let you reset all of the errors you might be getting, and OBD codes don't tell you as much as the engine computer knows, for that you need $4000 worth of hardware and a yearly license for very expensive hardware. John Deere is no different, if the mechanics I've talked to are any guide.
I guess the point I'm making is that the availability of a manual is only so good if it says "hook up your Tricorder and check this hex address." I would need a Tricorder for that, and I'm fresh out.
Their solution to this problem is to have a fuse that's opened after you, the owner, makes the decision to accept changes to the bootloader signature verification. You accept the liability and risk involved with this change.
Unfortunately the difference between this example and yours is that the risk of the root-my-smartphone decision impacting the public is quite a bit lower. For that matter, a better comparison might be the FCC's ruling change regarding routers which don't use any bootloader verification method [1]. Their concern is to the impact on the public spectrum. Though it's pretty interesting that they didn't care about it when it was just the ISM band, they only got involved when it started to threaten FAA doppler radar [2].
Linksys and other vendors seem to comply by partitioning the functionality for the radio from the other router features.
It seems like something most would agree with
yet somehow surveillance/privacy laws don't have to be renewed for years on end?
Actually they typically do (e.g. USA Patriot act). Sadly it's usually a rubber stamp with a bit of ritualistic, minor opposition attached.
Whether all the effort is worth it depends on how you rate your odds and how effective you think your efforts are at increasing those odds. If you want to argue the particulars then that's legitimate, but simply pointing out that attempting something every year in the past didn't yield results doesn't prove it is irrational to continue doing it.