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Comment by orangepanda | Hacker News Reader

Farmers are in a position to spin right-to-repair as a matter of national security - a cyber attack could leave the nation without a food supply

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Farmers are pretty much slaves to large corporations now, they still have some clout but it is diminishing day by day. Large supermarket chains buy out the independent farmers after first unfairly dumping produce to depress the price to where the farmers go out of business. Then they put their own people in there, typically for a regular wage and without any power to set prices or to ensure that a farm is operated sustainably and responsibly.

A nationwide independent farmers strike on the basis of right-to-repair laws probably wouldn't get off the ground but if it did then effect might be less than what is needed to effect change and could very well play right into the hands of their opposition.

Yeah, that ship has pretty much sailed.

People no longer spin their own thread, weave their own cloth, and make their own clothes.

Most of the metal objects we own are cranked out by the millions in a factory, not hand-forged by the village blacksmith.

And so on.

To the extent those activities still exist, they are hobbies, or maybe skills exhibited as part of a tourist attraction.

For some reason, though, the "family farmer" still has mystique, while the "family weaver" and the "family blacksmith" don't. There are a number of reasons for that, but on a basic level, the situations are exactly the same, and are occurring for exactly the same reasons -- large-scale mechanized production is simply more efficient on every level.

When clothes were spun, woven, and tailored by hand, most people could only afford one or two garments.

When all metal objects were hand-forged by a smith, they were scarce and super-expensive. Sometimes people would burn down old buildings just to salvage the nails.

Same thing with food. Other than for psychological or medical reasons (anorexia and such), it is very, very rare for people to starve to death in modern Western societies. That wasn't the case in the era of the "simple family farmer".

citizen/soldier/farmer the Romanitas ideal. Also kind of rolls up into the whole Cincinnatus thing.

"the "family farmer" still has mystique" It has a mystique because its a useful political fairytale that still proves effective. It is probably spun and refined in the lobbying arms of the large corporate farms in much the same way the "personal carbon footprint" is in the lobbying / advertising arms of oil companies. Large farming companies have massive political / lobbying influence and use it to their financial benefit, family farms get almost none of that. Similar to how politicians use soldiers as shiny tokens but for the most part do almost nothing for them but the large defense firms sure do get a lot of dollars.

Agriculture specifically has been an important part of American mythology from day 1. For a lot of people, farming is either a personal/family identity, or part of a broader sense of identity in the USA.

It is also somewhat different from other "traditional" professions/trades in that it was not obsoleted by factories and mass production.

"Family weaving" disappeared because it became economically unviable. "Family farming" did not disappear because it is still economically viable, and it holds an extra-special place in the American cultural identity.

Mechanized agriculture is not at all like other forms of mass production. It comes with an environmental debt that must be repaid, or the land becomes barren. To call it more efficient is to ignore this debt, which we can get away with until all the fertile land is gone.

People romanticize small farms because they're stuck in crowded cities working industrial rat race jobs that are meaningless in the large scheme of things. Is it any wonder that the idea of space, beautiful natural surroundings and a hand in creating something really meaningful (and what is more meaningful than food?) would lead there?

> Large supermarket chains buy out the independent farmers after first unfairly dumping produce to depress the price to where the farmers go out of business.

I don't think that actually works. Corn farmers could short corn futures or buy put options to lock in their price, and if Walmart tried to drop the nationwide price of corn by 30% to drive some farms out of business, that would cost many many billions competing with finance companies.

Plus the government puts limits on the number of futures positions you can have outstanding, to prevent market manipulation. And it's illegal to collude with others to get around it.

But do the farmers want the kinds of changes that would allow them to not be slaves to supermarkets and John Deere? Farmers have a strong leaning in politics towards a side that doesn't like treating people as babies who can't make their own decisions. They could strike on the basis of fighting back against supermarkets throwing their weight around. I agree that striking because of right to repair makes no sense; the fight back against locked down equipment would be to not buy from manufacturers that lock their stuff down.

I don't agree with the idea that we don't need regulation, but it's important to consider that telling people they need the government to protect them will lead to those people pushing back even harder against change.

I mean, this is like a fanfic comment. Can you cite ONE example of this happening? Maybe in a hyper niche crop, but this is easily a very, very, VERY rare occurrence. Don't know of really any farmers (outside of super small scale organic ones) that deal with supermarkets directly

I guess I was a little unclear. My point was that if these things are happening, then there are ways to counter them that don't involve government intervention.

And the parent comment was talking about how a strike due to right-to-repair would backfire which, to me, was implying that strikes couldn't work at all. I don't believe that's true which is why I pointed out that a strike could help for other issues. I don't know what else a farmer might strike over in terms of the issues they currently face, so I just reused what the parent comment was stating as fact. But if there are other similar issues affecting them now, you could swap one of those in.

People tend to politic in their best interests regardless of expressed ideology. I don't think very many farmers are in favor of ending farm subsidies, Iowa corn growers are very much for ethanol pledges, etc.

I'd take it a step further and argue that ideology follows policy, in that people adjust their ideologies to support the policies that benefit them, or to be compatible with the candidates whose policies would benefit them.

Can't they stop buying equipment that is locked like this?

I suppose it's a bit similar to buying a smartphone with a swappable battery. You can do it but at some point the industry just doesn't offer it anymore.

Or buying an iPhone even though you really want to be able to instal things not blessed by Apple.

Can't homeless people get a job so they can afford an apartment? Couldn't you have bought a car with airbags before they were mandatory? Can't you just buy a flip phone with 3G instead of spending all this money for features your grandma doesn't need?

"Vote with your wallet" is only possible in certain markets and for certain goods. It is not the norm.

Counter argument. The software locks help prevent the cyber terrorists from attacking the food supply.

Just be-careful of the weapons you choose to wield against well funded campaigns. Do we want another “giving access to car maintenance data will lead to you being attacked in dark car parks”?

My point is, if the anti right to repair side came out with “omfg, rtr will allow hackers to attack food production”; we can come back with pointing out how dumb of an idea it is (just no one point out the car hacking village to anyone :-p), but if you lead with the national security angle, you have given the the anti r2r side free rein to say “no, closed locks are better then open locks when it comes to keeping the bad guy out of your home”.

You can give the user a firmware write-screw (Chromebooks),

and bootloader locks (and reasonable smartphone).

Prop up the next excuse!

I'm for right to repair, my point was about how it plays out in the "publics" eyes, not techies eyes.

But the issue I personally have with "firmware write enable" switches is that the ave person doesn't want to mess about with then every time there is an update and bootloader locks are still locks you often have to seek the permisson of the vendor to unlock OR they get disabled once you need "unsupported access" and not re-enabled (sometimes, re-enabling them disables what ever you needed it disabled for in the first place so you can't re-enable it).

One of the criticisms of Windows XP was that lots of "ave joes" just ignored Windows Updates, so even though MS released patches for bugs you could still find plently of vulnerable systems, after all your ave joe just wants to "get on with it" when they are using their computer. Putting in hinderances for the "avg joe" will (imo) only lead to fewer devices taking up firmware updates.

However a) we are talking about farm gear, so its not like its your "avg joe" using them, plently of farmers are used to getting it fixed, even if its just a bodge so they can get their job done b) if the bootloaders/firmware switch still allows updates from "a trusted source" while locked then it doesn't hinder auto-updates and allows the techies of the world to play outside the sandbox.

You're describing an education problem, not a software problem.

Trying to retrofit the same code to 100k different models of machine will never work, even when we're at Windows 18.

Educate the people around you about basic computing shit, and donate to institutions that do it at scale.

> The software locks help prevent the cyber terrorists from attacking the food supply.

No, they don't. In fact, this makes them MORE vulnerable IMO. Hack John Deere and push a malicious update that bricks the fleet.

Just stating what the arguement will/has been. It was a simpliar aguement to what what was recently stated in auto right to repair https://youtu.be/EozPi1qmH44?t=60 - not terrorists but still pretty dam high on the fear factor.

I fully agree that its just a single supplychain hack away from remote bricking not just John Deere but also pretty much anything connected.

I'm just trying to make the point that the other side are not against using scare tactics already, do we really want to push them to even greater scare tactics?

EDIT: Remember, its not the geeks you have to win over, its the general public and / or lawmakers (who stereotypically have not always what I would call "geeks") that have to be won over.

Thankfully in that Massachusetts case the bill allowing mechanics to access the data passed, I personally don't think an escalation of the tactics from our side would end well for us.

Counter-counter argument: If farm equipment must have software that is critical for it to function (which is debatable), it's hardly rocket surgery to air-gap farm equipment by design. In fact, it takes a shocking amount of arguably pointless effort for it not to be air-gapped.

That would make it immune to any cyber terrorist without physical access to each individual machine. If they did have access to a significant amount of farm equipment, then software protection would be the least of the concerns in terms of food security.

The problem with that is they are getting more and more connected for fleet management and automation, so the arguement would be that things like JDLink are no longer permitted.

At that point, it’s more time effective for the attackers to disable the management hub or attack any other piece farther up the supply chain. The oil pipeline ransomware shutdown is a perfect example of attack efficiency. I don’t know of a situation where air-gapping already automated farm equipment is the most important next step.

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