John Deere remotely locked thieves out of $5m stolen equipment

Absolutely no way this is paid "lobbying" to convince people that it's actually great for John Deere to have full control over and data on the tractors it sells.

I find it highly questionable, that John Deere can do this. People should buy from alternative manufacturers instead of supporting such practices.

That being said, I have seen right to repair videos on YT where owners have hacked their own tractors, so they can be repaired by the guy who was always repairing them and not by Apple.

John Deere should not have the capability to remotely lock down any part of any vehicle outside of very specialized use cases. We've already seen how they've abused lack of DRM regulations. Nightmarish.

Funnily there's been old news stories that American owners were going to Ukranian forums to download hacked firmwares for these tractors, so the Russians^W thieves should also just figure out who those Ukranian coders are.

It's odd that owners were not given this capability independent of John Deer.