A New Jailbreak for John Deere Tractors Rides the Right-to-Repair Wave
wired.com
wired.com
More long term, we're going to need a digital revolution against corporate overreach, hopefully leading to a constitutional amendment.
In a way, forcing cars to be bearable helps reinforce their influence. (Quality road repair, extra consumer protection, no liability for deaths, etc.)
I'm glad you're in a situation where you have another option besides driving a personal vehicle. I'm not. I didn't build this stretched out chunk of suburb with no safe way to get anywhere on foot, so don't punish me for it.
It's not practical and everyone knows this. The utility of cars is too much to be simply tossed away. Imagine how hard visiting the mountains would be without one. Perhaps a more metropolitan person could live with just seeing pictures but I am an outdoorsman and this idea actually causes significant existential concern.
The solution is to make obviously anti-consumer behavior illegal in the same way we make monopolies illegal. Companies should build usable, fixable things. Planned obsolescence, subscription car services, etc are all a way they exploit this position they have. The free market would ideally fix this but given that it's very well known every car manufacturer is in bed with each other once one adopts this exploitative behavior the rest will surely follow. MRR is extremely desirable. Since it's not tenable for at the very least our generation to experience a less car-free life why not try to fix the thing causing the problem and THEN solve the greater problem?
How is wanting to know the actual cost of a big purchase and being able to purchase it outright "forcing your world view on others"? If you want to constantly be paying on a lease, that's your own problem. Don't act like expecting to actually own the thing I'm paying thousands of dollars for is unreasonable and somehow inhibits others from from using subscription models for everything under the sun.
You might think this is a good pro-consumer thing to have. I don't believe so. There is no reason for example a manufacturer should be able to cajole another $40/mo. out of me for heating or cooling. Or $20 for their "radio station package", or any other thing they can imagine. Sure, you could argue Tesla's performance upgrade model might not be anti-consumer in the sense that they save money building one engine/one car and the consumer gets in at a level they can afford. But what is stopping them from pushing this further? Engine mileage fees?
The point is that often times the average consumer is not considering the choices they make 5, 10, 15 years down the road. That doesn't mean it's okay for this position to be exploited, it means we need to educate people on their rights including the right to ownership and repair and do what we can to stop the exploitation of the cattle class.
I have no idea why I can't have an unlocked phone with most carriers, or a gaming system that I can install what I want on, etc. I have no idea why most computers built today use soldered on components so I have to go to the them for repair. At the end of the day I don't like not owning things. When my entire life is determined by a list of dozens or even hundreds of subscriptions I am simply a meat machine that converts calories into corporate profits. Rent for an apartment because all of the houses are bought up is yet another way they keep you on the treadmill.
If you own nothing you have no control. If you have no control your position is easily exploited. We need to fight tooth and nail to maintain control and ownership of everything we have.
Basically, leasing something encourages the manufacturer to build for the long haul avoiding obsolescence. If the manufacturer is forced to sell things outright and then provide parts for fixing the devices, well, that just encourages them to skrimp on engineering so that parts will break sooner and they'll be able to make money on the fixable parts.
This is why recalls exist, for manufacturers to fix their broken things they failed to fix before releasing to the public.
Saying it should be illegal to prevent something in no way says it should be illegal to do anything else.
If I say there should be regulation to protect the right to ride bicycles on roads, no where in that statement is the words everyone must only ride bicycles on roads.
What I didn't say is that I generally believe it's hard to engineer for multiple business models. In my mind, it's sort of one path or the other. Own or rent.
If you engineer for long-term leasing, well, the price for ownership is going to be rather high. The potential owners, especially the militant ones, will grouse about the price and maybe use this as a new way to attack. They'll say the ownership price is gouging. And then they'll want lower prices on parts too.
I see your point about absolutism. I'm not really an absolutist. I just believe that the nature of business models means that insisting on ownership will essentially push the businesses into a corner. I elided that detail to keep things a bit shorter.
The lived reality of many farmers is that the John Deere computer systems are far less reliable and less maintainable than the mechanical systems of previous generations. With failure of the computer system being both common and completely crippling the tractor. In 50 years time what are the options going to looks like? Hopefully a lively community of fixers will be able to install the 2070s version of the raspberry pi and keep it running.
Deere has shipped a system that cannot be secured.
Thanks, Deere.
"He's unsure how comprehensively the company can patch the flaws without implementing full disk encryption, an addition that would mean a significant system overhaul in new tractor designs and likely wouldn't be deployed in existing equipment."
If you want to own something, you need to understand it.
Consider open source software. Why is compiled code not good enough? Because it's too hard to understand, so you're at thw mercy of the company that does understand it. Open souce puts others outside the company on a more even footing for understanding the code.
But complexity and the rate of change in products really gets in the way of understanding. Especially for anything involvong software, which is almost everything. You can see it even with open source software that has become such a giant maintenance burden that there's no way you can reasonably fork and maintain it without a pretty major investment.
The only hope of restoring the concept of ownership is to simplify and slow down. In many cases, this means a regression to simpler times, but not all. We can reach much better trade-offs than exist currently, but it will take a lot of work and education.
Let me give an example: the notion of buying something seems simple now, but it's actually a contract in the context of a lot of statutes and even more case law. Why can't signing up for a web service be accomplished without an unreadably-long contract? It can, but we need to develop the right statutes and case law and expectations to enable it.
The right to own is orthogonal to what you do with the thing you own.
The right to choose who I trust to operate my thing, and why, is just as important as the right to operate it directly myself.
Even if I can't write all the code in my doorbell, I am still harmed by an inability to choose who's code runs on the doorbell, and still harmed even if I do have a choice but none of the available choices are open source because some artificial process prevents it.
It requires no simpler times to simply choose freecad instead of autocad, etc. It doesn't even require deep knowledge to make that choice either.
Source: I own a model 3
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-forced-an-upda...
https://mobile.twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1222613978427...
I’d also consider remote feature removal a form of unattended update–the first of which really made the news a pretty long time ago when they disabled autopilot on all Tesla’s in Hong Kong.
Tesla is in the news fairly frequently due to them revoking peoples features, is toyota?
People single out Tesla because they are the "John Deere" of automobiles.
I have a Hyundai, i can have it serviced pretty much anywhere, can you take your Tesla to the local mechanic?
I think these behaviors are horrible and I'm not defending them. My point is that it's an industrywide problem, not just a Tesla problem.
> Tesla is in the news fairly frequently due to them revoking peoples features, is toyota?
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/12/toyota-owners-have-to-p...
And if you say one occurrence isn't "frequently", then when was the last time Tesla was in the news for that before this most recent case of reducing one owner's battery range?
> People single out Tesla because they are the "John Deere" of automobiles.
How so?
> I have a Hyundai, i can have it serviced pretty much anywhere, can you take your Tesla to the local mechanic?
For most things I can. Can your local mechanic replace broken parts in the high-voltage system of your Ioniq 5, or reflash its infotainment system?
Great you sent me a link about paying $8 to use your remote start.
why are there so many stories like this one:
"Right off of the top, it’s no secret that Tesla will disable features before reselling a used vehicle that’s traded into it. While that might sound shady it’s within their right to do so. What isn’t so common is the situation that led to one owner walking out of his house one day to find his Model S with 80 miles less range than just a few minutes previous."
Is this not "john Deere" type activities?
how about this: "Tesla’s $16,000 Quote for a $700 Fix Is Why Right to Repair Matters"
or this: Hundreds of Tesla drivers were locked out of their cars at the start of the weekend after the manufacturer’s mobile app suffered an outage – and dozens voiced their complaints on social media.
If the software doesn't work, neither does your car, is this not things "John Deere" is known for?
i dont drive an Ioniq so i wouldn't know the answer to your question.
I don't agree with this.
> paying $8 to use your remote start
An $8/month subscription, not an $8 one-time payment.
> why are there so many stories like this one
Again, when was the last time this happened?
> Tesla will disable features before reselling a used vehicle that’s traded into it
This isn't the same thing at all. There's nothing wrong with removing features from a vehicle while you're the owner of it. If someone traded in an ICE car with a turbocharger, would it be wrong for a dealer to remove that before selling it?
> What isn’t so common is the situation that led to one owner walking out of his house one day to find his Model S with 80 miles less range than just a few minutes previous." Is this not "john Deere" type activities?
Yes, that's definitely wrong of them and "John Deere" type activities. But you originally made a stronger statement, that Tesla is the John Deere of automobiles. For that to be true, they'd have to do significantly more of these "John Deere" type activities than other automakers do, which they don't.
> how about this: "Tesla’s $16,000 Quote for a $700 Fix Is Why Right to Repair Matters"
They originally asked for $16,000 to replace a part that someone else later successfully repaired for $700. They didn't stop him from doing so, remotely brick the vehicle afterward, or anything like that. Isn't this how things are supposed to work?
> or this: Hundreds of Tesla drivers were locked out of their cars at the start of the weekend after the manufacturer’s mobile app suffered an outage – and dozens voiced their complaints on social media.
This wasn't wrongdoing either. First of all, the outage was an accident. Second of all, the cars could still be unlocked and driven through a local Bluetooth connection from the app, or with the key cards that are included free with every vehicle.
> If the software doesn't work, neither does your car, is this not things "John Deere" is known for?
But as I said above, the cars did work even when their software didn't.
> i dont drive an Ioniq so i wouldn't know the answer to your question.
My point was that on a Tesla, independent mechanics can do a lot of things but not everything, and I expect the same to be true about a Hyundai too.
If you say so.. personally, if I bought a used car, then found out features were removed i'd be pissed off.. then again, i am not a tesla apologist.
The "owner" is not the one removing the features.. TESLA IS.. so they can charge the new owner to restore the features.
FOr your turbocharger - Yes, if it was listed on the car's features, then removed after you bought it, it would be wrong to remove it. In fact this could be considered fraud.
Apple consumers and Tesla consumers have one very odd feature in common - ruthlessly defending things.
I dont get why they feel a "need" to do this. You seriously wrote "there is nothign wrong wiht removing features.." .. OMG.
If you enjoy having tesla do this to you, by all means continue to buy their products. I dont think their behaviour is fair and so i wont buy one.
My point was that when they disabled FSD in those cases, Tesla was the owner.
> FOr your turbocharger - Yes, if it was listed on the car's features, then removed after you bought it, it would be wrong to remove it. In fact this could be considered fraud.
Let's use a simpler example then: imagine my spare tire wore out and I didn't bother replacing it. Is it fraud if I sell my car without doing so?
> You seriously wrote "there is nothign wrong wiht removing features.." .. OMG.
You elided a critical part of what I said. Here's what my whole sentence was: "There's nothing wrong with removing features from a vehicle while you're the owner of it."
> Again, when was the last time this happened?
Tesla Remotely Disabled 80 Miles Of Range From Customer’s Car Demanding $4,500, Backtracks When The Web Finds Out BY STEPHEN RIVERS | POSTED ONJULY 27, 2022
Not sure the "when was the last time this happened" matters, it is a fairly regular thing with them. in this case it was July 27, 2022.. is that too old, too new for you?
1: People in fact do routinely successfully modify or wholly replace the ecu code in other cars.
2: And they even only do that for fun (tuning). Most vehicles never give people any reason to even want to mod the software since other vehicles haven't had nearly as much history of being as invasive or caprcious. They are starting tonadopt these undesirable norms lately, but that is because of Tesla leading by example and making it at all thinkable.
A Toyota firmware from a few years ago had very little capacity to harm or offend or frustrate since it simply wasn't in control of very much, and didn't change or do anything different after purchase, and ultimately was at least replaceable by replacing the entire ecu if not by hacking the stock one, and also the stock one was hackable. Not officially or by design, but people do it anyway.
If you thought you were conjuring up some ridiculous idea, in fact it is a very common thing, and yes Tesla is by far absolutely ridiculously worse than everyone else on this front.
Did the manufacturer let them do this, or did they have to do something equivalent of a jailbreak to do it?
> Most vehicles never give people any reason to even want to mod the software since other vehicles haven't had nearly as much history of being as invasive or caprcious. They are starting tonadopt these undesirable norms lately, but that is because of Tesla leading by example and making it at all thinkable.
Didn't OnStar exist before Tesla did?
On-star was more wrong in principle that in actuality.
The worst thing about on-star was simply that even if you didn't pay for the service, it was still there and could both track and to a very limited extent control the vehicle under someone else's control. But in fact they never did anything much with it, and now it's not even a thing anymore, and if you wanted as an owner you could hack it out without disabling the car. on-star is on the same spectrum with tesla, at opposite ends.
But if you know enough to even mention the name on-star in this context, then you know enough to know it doesn't actually compare at all, which exposes something unflattering about your argument.
Tesla absolutely deserves no breaks or excuses on this or a few other topics.
OnStar still exists, and to my knowledge, all of the stuff you mentioned is still possible with it.
> if you wanted as an owner you could hack it out without disabling the car
This is true of Teslas too. Some of their earlier cars only supported 3G, so we know from the 3G shutdown exactly what you'd lose with no connectivity at all, and it's not that much: https://electrek.co/2022/02/23/tesla-vehicles-3g-modems-are-...
> Without an upgraded modem, you will not be able to:
> * Remotely control climate controls, locks and charge settings
> * Get navigation and traffic updates, including Supercharger availability and outage information
> * Stream music online using your touchscreen
> * Receive remote diagnostic support from roadside assistance
> * Access over-the-air software updates
The Constitution should be amended to eliminate 3rd party circumvention of existing constitutional protections. Why is it that an agency needs a warrant to track you directly, but not to purchase tracking data from a data broker? How much less tracking and general invasion of privacy would Congress tolerate if the government wasn't directly benefiting from it?
It's not different than if the police ask "can I search your vehicle" and you say "yes". You consented to a search. At that point there is no concept of what is legal & what is not.
More accure comparison would be if you left your car with a garage to have it serviced(giving them permission to enter the vehicle), then the police come to the garage and pay them some money to enter your car and search it.
The only thing I can think of that don't follow this is real estate. Racial covenants were functionally invalidated by the federal government a while back. But you can attach almost any other restriction to property you want. For example, you can include a no-commercialization clause when selling property.
> You may offer subscription features, but you must also give the option of a one time purchase that unlocks the feature forever.
or
> You are allowed to charge subscription for features A, B and C. But critical features including X, Y and Z must be provided standard on a vehicle at no extra charge.
You can subscribe to air conditioning for $10 per month, or buy it outright for $100,000.
Took it to my normal garage who are very good, but they clearly couldn't fix it because they didn't have VW's proprietary software tools.
Ended up taking it to an official Skoda garage and they easily fixed it and didn't even charge me. I presume even they felt bad charging someone £80 to press a button in some software that only they have access to.
I wish pervasive theft wasn't creating a business case for more of it
see i.e. https://www.techdirt.com/2021/08/05/home-depot-tech-will-bri... and many related articles.
https://electrek.co/2022/07/26/tesla-ransom-customer-over-80...
I’m all for right to repair and sticking it to John Deere for trying to squeeze farmers, but I don’t see the end goal. A suite of hacked Deere software with various troubleshooting modules? Or is it just going to be a bargaining chip to encourage Deere to further open up its platform?
There's a difference between rooting a device to stick it to DRM overlords, playing pirated games, or running your own homebrewed whatever on your phone versus enabling a platform through which someone can fix a complicated machine that's worth 1000x a PS5. The farmers taking out loans on these machines are betting their entire lives on it.
I'm definitely not saying this is inconsequential, but I really want to know just how many farmers are going to plug in, jailbreak, and get to tinkering with machinery that is their livelihood -- not just an expendable piece of hardware that gets discarded when its bricked...
Let's see if this is a close enough analogy; I'll forever maintain that Linux won the OS wars decisively broadly, and that 1-2% of the desktop is an overwhelming victory. The numbers don't sound great, but what you want to do is to compare to "what would this look like if it was only 'big-company' owned software," and the answer is very different. We probably wouldn't even be talking about "Operating systems" at all. Just "Windows" and "Apple" boxes.
Keeping this stuff open, by whatever means, law, hackery, force, whatever, has long term down the road multiplicative effects.
These people are CEO's of massive enterprise operations managing tons of capital in a high-risk, high-tech, unbelievably complex environment that they must constantly stay on top of.
Often times even replacing a tire is so expensive on a tractor after paying the highwaymen their fee the probability of bricking the tractor is probably not even factored in. John Deere more-or-less bricks your tractor anyway. So, arguably, it's no loss if you brick it given the alternative could be not putting food on the table because you spent 3 years of checks on repair or you'd have to buy a new one anyway.
However, most of the non-farmers I know wouldn't be able to, either. My brother has a lot of rooted devices — to stream movies, play video games — but he's not tech-savvy. Usually, there's some guy on eBay who will ship a hacked device to your house, or a co-worker who will do it for a few bucks.
Unlike an iPhone, you wouldn't ship a hacked tractor (any more than you'd download a tractor...) but markets form on their own, and I suspect that's what would happen here.
> I had no idea how any of this worked but I needed to get my tractor running so I got to Googling and figured it out.
Don't underestimate farmers. They might not be tech savvy in the traditional sense. But if you told them they needed to jailbreak their tractors to plant this season, they would figure it out.
Who cares?
The question is 1) whether your exceptional farmer will have a root terminal available to them if they want to use it, and 2) if your average farmer calls a programmer, will they have a root terminal available to work on the farmer's behalf?
> A suite of hacked Deere software with various troubleshooting modules? Or is it just going to be a bargaining chip to encourage Deere to further open up its platform?
I don't understand how you don't think these would be massive achievements.
The goal isn't to stick it to John Deere. Who cares about John Deere? The goal is to push John Deere the company out of the tractor you bought.
If you can run a modern planter or sprayer with autodrive/gps then copy/pasting a string of text into a terminal is not going to be a problem.
Case in point, I work with local farmers and I'm deeply familiar with OS design, sheep shearing robotics, geophysical air survey, integrating sat + air + land data, sympbolic algebra systems, fixing old motocycles, automating pumps and irrigation, and a slew of other skills.
We've already got a local alternative non John Deere supply line for IT parts that often break (sensors, touch screens, monitors, etc) and for various mechanical parts.
Most people in the rural community know a FiFo (Fly in | Fly out) worker or three in mining | oil & gas which provides access to global state of the art mechanical workshops and automation R&D (see Rio Tinto + robotics).
The are many things that can be done by developing stand alone Tractor OS's - integrating drone cloud data and control for one, removing the John Deere "data spying" for another (all crop data gets phoned home to John Deere "for free").
You don't have enough of your life controlled by corporations?
The fact that a good thing can be used by anyone, including bad people, does not make the thing itself bad.
In fact, the greed of the John Deere corporation is the shameful thing here.
This antidote to that greed is good.
If a similar E2E security system existed for the tractors, the aggressors might’ve simply torched them instead of using them to better their own efforts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Hilux#Use_by_militant_g...