Tractor Hacking: Documentary About Farmers Fighting for the Right to Repair

FWIW we've got an '81 ford for similar reasons (also new tractors are effin expensive and hold their value very well).

Sounds great, but it's something the abandonware[1] scene has been fighting for over the past 20 years, to no avail.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abandonware

"Worse, just about all these devices have some access to JTAG ports such that you could easily program them yourself if you wanted to and had something useful to flash them with. I've run into so many products I use on a regular basis with bugs or simple but badly needed features that I could have easily fixed/hacked in with access to the source code but alas, I cannot."

IMO, it is a massive waste. Short-sighted, short-term thinking.

There are people who for whatever reason do not want you to have access to the software ("firmware") and to read/fix/improve upon it.

Some of these people comment on HN. They become active during debates over whether users would derive any benefit from being able to read and edit source code.

awesome! my botnet malware that exploits and roots your smart meter or set top box can now install new firmware with a permanent backdoor and nothing will complain because all the malware binaries are signed - by the manufacturer's key, no less - so they must be secure, right?

The embedded team where I work struggles with the same thing. Frankly this should be included with the first delivery of any industrial system. Under NDA if they absolutely must, though I don't like it.

I also don't like consumer systems being locked up, but at least it's somewhat defensible. But treating farmers as dumb, inbred "hold my beer and watch this firmware hack" hillbillies and not the educated industry professionals that they are is beyond condescending, disrespectful and is completely indefensible.

Exactly who is deemed qualified to hack farm equipment firmware is something for the farming trade associations and their insurance companies to work out, but as far as John Deere and the regulators are concerned, we're talking about professional embedded developers writing code to run on their equipment to support an industrial process, something that is completely uncontroversial in many other fields. That you're not supposed to intentionally or inadvertently convert your combine into a man-eating killbot is surely already covered by insurance policy clauses, labour laws and public safety laws.

Thus is the funniest thing I've read in ages. It's also 100% correct and this whole situation shows perhaps clearer than many, how Stallman's warnings were accurate.

In the automotive industry, people and companies will do this (at the component level). Enabling features via that the OEM has disabled due to its marked segmentation strategy via aftermarket components is done (and would be done to a greater extend if OEMs did not protect the part of their diagnostic stack that handles feature activation).

For example, XCP or UDS security access modules are sometimes distributed by the Tier 1 as a DLL so that even the OEM has no source code for the concrete authentication mechanism that is used.

For new ag machinery, embedded control systems are absolutely essential for the machine to do its job. The ECU on the engine is generally reliable and have long life. The other stuff, I'm highly dubious of the long-term maintainability of it. On our farm, we ran a lot of older equipment and did a lot of repairs ourselves. For new equipment, that will be near impossible as the electronic control systems are black boxes. Even the cabling is complicated and is generally not documented. After the machine gets a decade or two old, good luck fixing it.

I suppose you could just drive the machine in the junk pile. However, when a new combine harvester is costing around 3/4 of a million USD, that seems a bit wasteful. I don't know what the solution is though. The farmers buying new equipment don't care so much, their resale value is not suffering too badly. The manufacturers are looking for ways to sell new equipment and adding more features via electronic controls is a relatively cheap way to enhance the product.

Most farmers say they don't want all these new electronics on their machines. When Deere announced their S700 series combines, they had a video bragging about all the new improvements:

https://youtu.be/l5xJOoNyLoU

If you study it, you will notice that most of the new features are due to software changes or to electronic control systems. Little of what the machine actually does to harvest the grain has changed (metal parts, etc). This automation features are nice when they work but are a disaster when something goes wrong. The operator will have trouble to determine what the machine is doing (never mind trying to figure out how to fix it).

However, even though many farmers say they don't want it, the new machines are selling well. So, maybe you could argue the market is working. To me, it feels like there could be some externalization of costs going on. These new machines are very much less valuable as they get older vs the previous era of farm equipment. I guess the same thing has happened to automobiles. You can take a car from the 1940s and fix it up into perfect condition. If you take a 2017 car loaded with electronics, would you have any hope of fixing it to new condition in 50 years from now?

So we eventually tracked down someone who had it, and we integrated as best we can.

Basically they were just putting up a wall to people creating integrations, which is the entire method by which their software is used. So... if you can't contract someone to integrate, why would anyone choose that product going forward?

And yet they do.

But it's utterly fallacious. It's quite clear that if certain changes result in different behavior, then whomever made those specific changes is responsible for the resulting behavior. About the only leg the argument can stand on is if the code is so sloppy that someone attempting to make a simple change tickles a bug somewhere else, but enabling such lack of quality to persist is the exact wrong approach for a safety-critical system!

Furthermore, regardless of its actual merit, this is precisely the kind of Schelling point collusion that is in the collective interest to bust up. "Selling" someone a piece of capital equipment that is deliberately designed to prevent its own servicing is plainly fraudulent.

This happens not-too-infrequently in the car modding/tuning world --- the former, that is; to my knowledge no one has blamed the original manufacturer, much less successfully sued, after him/herself modding the ECU of a car and blowing up the engine.

Don't forget that a lot of other safety-critical components of cars (e.g. brakes, tires, etc.) have aftermarket replacements --- many of which actually perform better than stock.

If this "safety" attitude was prevalent since the beginning, we'd have cars that can only use approved fuel, no aftermarket parts would exist at all (their manufacturers being sued out of existence), and it'd be illegal to drive them on roads not approved by the manufacturer.

I will resist the urge to post that famous Benjamin Franklin quote this time.

Companies also use software to exert control over users and extract more money. By moving functionality from hardware into software, they can use both secrecy and laws like DMCA to restrict users' knowledge, ability, and rights to repair and modify their stuff.

The safety argument only makes any sense because so much of the system has moved from hardware into software, and this often makes the product worse, not better (e.g. your Jeep example). Compared to hardware, software is brittle, unreliable, complicated, and exploitable. However, it allows for the feature creep that marketers love and, perhaps as a byproduct or perhaps not, it transfers legal and operational control from the "owner" to the manufacturer.

If you are as committed to user freedom and well-being as you are to safety, then I urge you to modularize your vehicle design so that the safety-critical software you describe, such as auto-guidance, is completely separate from software used to, e.g., diagnose and repair mechanical problems. Then you can keep restrictions around the first kind but not the second. It sounds like, based on frustration with John Deere, you may be rewarded by the marketplace.

https://youtu.be/5XDTQLa3NjE

https://youtu.be/8wPAHu_zYDw

Why wouldn't corporations, which are sociopathic "persons" defined exclusively by their avarice not want to do so? It is more profitable to prevent repair. It more profitable to force you into buying more.

Apple have been fighting the ability to run your own code on the device since day one.

This is part of the business model of the "app store" purchase model and not very surprising.

I'm sure even you have heard that Microsoft have been anti-consumer once or twice over the years.

In this case their general lack of effort around security (see the whole IoT mess) may be a good thing, as it means any DRM is more hackable.

The flipside of that is the firmware may also be buggier, but then again, you're also more likely to be able to fix those bugs due to the hackability. The old Douglas Adams quote comes to mind: "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair."