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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

If John Deere were to go out of business tomorrow, a huge swath of our world's farmers would be unable to produce anything thanks to tractors turning off and not working properly.

Ergo, you can count on JD not going out of business any time soon. "Too big to fail" and all that. JD's master plan has now come to fruition.

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But can you count on their tractor DRM servers not being DoS'ed, or hacked and taken down for an extended period?

Hmm. That would imply that it's not just a fairness problem or a copyright politics problem, but a national security problem.

The downside to computerizing & networking everything is the multitude of vulnerabilities you open.

There's that angle, yeah, but it's the creation of a single point of failure that I was thinking about. And not even in all that tech-centric a way.

My hometown used to make a sizable chunk of the US's fasteners, and there was real concern during the Cold War that dropping a single bomb on it could cripple the entire nation's industrial capacity. Here, it seems like there may be an unacceptable strategic risk that a bomb dropped on Moline, Illinois could cripple the entire nation's food production capacity.

If left on the open internet and not an intranet.

All networks have vulnerabilities, regardless if they're connected to the internet.

But then it will not be a problem of business greed and stupidity... it will become a "national security threat", which will require more taxpayer money to solve, and of course may lead us closer to a war with whatever countries remain to be invaded by this immoral government. And "poor" JD will be just a victim of this vile threat "against us all".

I haven't seen anything indicating that the operation or repair process requires some sort of online authorization.

What if the server rack is in the farmers house and not connected to the internet? Deere could just send a regional technician as needed to patch or troubleshoot. They probably already send regional salesmen to farmers regularly, what's another seat in the car?

What if they got bought up by a hedge fund, raided, and sold for scrap?

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