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backroad-life · 2 months

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Credit: Backroad-life

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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John Deere's repair fake-out

Last week, a seeming miracle came to pass: John Deere, the Big Ag monopolist that — along with Apple — has led the Axis of Evil that killed, delayed and sabotaged dozens of Right to Repair laws, sued for peace, announcing a Memorandum of Understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation to make it easier for farmers to fix their own tractors:

https://www.fb.org/files/AFBF_John_Deere_MOU.pdf

This is a move that’s both badly needed and long overdue. Deere abuses copyright law to force farmers to pay for official repairs — even when the farmer does the repair. That’s possible thanks to a practice called VIN locking, in which engine parts come with DRM that prevents the tractor from recognizing them until they pay hundreds of dollars for a John Deere technician to come to their farm and type an unlock code into the tractor’s console:

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

Like all DRM, VIN locks are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 law that criminalizes distributing tools to bypass “access controls,” even if you do so for a lawful purpose (say, to fix your own tractor using a part you paid for). Violations of DMCA 1201 carry a penalty of 5 years in prison and a $500k fine — for a first offense.

This means that Deere owners are locked into using Deere for repairs, which also means that if Deere decides something isn’t broken, a farmer can’t get it fixed. This is very bad news indeed, because John Deere tractors are just computers in a fancy, mobile case, and John Deere is incredibly bad at digital security:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

That’s scary stuff, because John Deere is a monopolist, and a successful attack on the always-connected, networked tractors and other equipment it supplies to the world’s farmers could endanger the global food supply.

Deere doesn’t want to make insecure tractors, but it also doesn’t want to be embarrassed by security researchers who point out that its security is defective. Because security researchers have to bypass Deere tractors’ locks to probe their security, Deere can leverage DMCA1201 into a veto over who gets to warn the public about the mistakes it made.

It’s not just security researchers that Deere gets to gag: the company uses its repair monopoly to threaten farmers who complain about its business practices, holding their million-dollar farm equipment hostage to their silence:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

This all adds up to what Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business model,” an abuse of copyright law that allows a monopolistic corporation to reach beyond its own walls and impose its will on it customers, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

If Deere was finally suing for peace in the Repair Wars, well, that was wonderful news indeed — as I said, a seeming miracle.

But — like all miracles — it was too good to be true.

The MOU that Deere and the Farm Bureau signed is full of poison pills, gotchas, fine-print and mendacity, as Lauren Goode documents in her Wired article, “Right-to-Repair Advocates Question John Deere’s New Promises”:

https://www.wired.com/story/right-to-repair-advocates-question-john-deeres-new-promises/

For starters, the MOU makes the Farm Bureau promise to end its advocacy for state Right to Repair bills, which would create a repair system governed by democratically accountable laws, not corporate fiat. Clearly, Deere has seen the writing on the wall, after the passage in 2002 of Right to Repair laws in New York and Colorado:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

These two bills broke the corporate anti-repair coalition’s winning streak, which saw dozens of state R2R bills defeated:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/26/nixing-the-fix/#r2r

Deere’s deal-with-the-devil is a cynical ploy to brake R2R’s momentum and ensure that any repairs are carried out on Deere’s terms. Now, about those terms…

Deere’s deal offers independent repair shops access to diagnostic tools and parts “on fair and reasonable terms,” a murky phrase that can mean whatever Deere decides it means. Crucially, the deal is silent on whether Deere will supply the tools needed to activate VIN locks, meaning that farmers will still be at Deere’s mercy when they effect their own repairs.

What’s more, the deal itself isn’t legally binding, and Deere can cancel it at any time. Once you dig past the headline, the Deere’s Damascene conversion to repair advocacy starts to look awfully superficial — and deceptive.

One person who wasn’t fooled is sick.codes, the hacker who has done the most important work on reverse-engineering Deere’s computer systems, culminating in last summer’s live, on-stage hack of a John Deere tractor at Defcon:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/15/deere-in-headlights/#doh-a-deere

Shortly after the announcement, Sick.codes tweeted how the fine-print in the MOU would have prevented him from doing the work he’s already done (including “a direct stab at me lol”):

https://twitter.com/sickcodes/status/1612484935495057409

As with other instances of monopolistic, corporate copyfraud — like, say, the deceptive Open Gaming License — the John Deere capitulation is really a bid to take away your rights, dressed up as a gift of more rights:

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/706163316598407168/good-riddance-to-the-open-gaming-license

[Image ID: Hieronymus Bosch's painting, 'The Conjurer.' The Conjuror's shell-game table holds a small John Deere tractor that the audience of yokels gawps at. One yokel is wearing a John Deere hat. The conjurer is holding a wrench.]

#pluralistic #copyfraud #right to repair #r2r #headfa #deerlife #john deere #tractors #big ag #licenses

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mitchipedia · 2 years

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Russian looters stole 27 pieces of John Deere farm equipment, collectively valued at $5 million. But the John Deere dealership bricked the tractors over the Internet, using a built-in kill switch.

Yay, right?

No, because the same technology could be used by John Deere against any farmer. And it was built to be used against Americans, says Cory Doctorow.

We see the same kind of kills switch technology built into cars, iPhones, and even ventilators and medical implants from Medtronic.

Those kill switches will inevitably be used by criminals, because John Deere and other vendors have terrible infosec.

Cory:

Tech monopolists love kill-switches, and they exhibit heart-warming confidence in their own ability to prevent their abuse. That confidence is terribly misplaced. These can and will go wrong, with terrible consequences. It’s important not to get swept up in the industry’s self-serving cheerleading about these kill-switches working in ways we like, because of all the ways they can go wrong.

#technology #monopolies #kill switches #John Deere #Ukraine #Russia #tractors #Cory Doctorow

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muttball · 1 year

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Pink Farmall

#tractors #farmall #pink

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robjohnsonsworld · 4 months

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Will County Threshermen's Association

#youtube #tractor #tractors

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thatthirdtriplet · 2 months

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Relationships:

Tim Drake/Kon-El | Conner Kent Tim Drake & Kon-El | Conner Kent Bart Allen & Tim Drake & Kon-El | Conner Kent & Cassie Sandsmark Tim Drake & Damian Wayne Tim Drake & Bruce Wayne background Tim Drake/Tam Fox

Characters:

Tim Drake Kon-El | Conner Kent Cassie Sandsmark Bart Allen jack Drake Dana Winter’s Mia Dearden Martha KentJonathan "Pa" Kent Alfred Pennyworth Damian Wayne Dick Grayson Jason Todd tam Fox Bruce Wayne

Additional Tags:

Fluff and Angst the core 4 are best friends Tim and Kon's complicated best-friends-but-maybe-more dynamic Tim Drake-centric recreational Drug Use mostly just core 4 hanging out and having fun but with an undercurrent of existential dread because Tim knows he's not supposed to be there lots of themes of grief and loss but some happy moments tooTime Travel implied/Referenced Drug Addiction lots more characters have cameo appearances but I'm tagging the main ones set in the UK rather than America

Summary:

It should’ve been scary, being thrown a year and a half back in time with no explanation, but Tim didn’t feel scared. He was in the barn with Bart and it was warm – it had been a warm spring that year, he remembered – and nothing bad had happened yet. If it was a dream, it was a good one.

Seventeen-year-old Tim Drake will stop at nothing to find Bruce, but his quest is put on hold when he wakes up in the past. He’s sixteen again, in a blissful sanctuary from everything that keeps him awake at night. Here, his friends are still alive, and so is his father. And so is Conner, who especially sticks in Tim’s mind: their tumultuous, ambiguous relationship came to an abrupt end when Conner died, and Tim still wishes he’d found the courage to tell Conner how he felt.

But Bruce is absent from the past, too – if this really is the past. To find him, Tim knows he needs to find a way back to the present. But that means giving everything up for a second time, when he’s lost so much already.

#tim drake #timkon #kon el kent #conner kent #cassie sandsmark #bart allen #martha kent #jonathan kent #dick grayson #bruce wayne #jason todd #damian wayne #jack drake #dana winters #mia dearden #tam fox #Tractors

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stone-cold-groove · 7 months

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Spirit of ’76 edition Cub Cadet lawn tractor - 1976.

#cub cadet #vintage tractors #lawn tractors #lawn care #tractors #lawn mowers #the 70s #1976 #the spirit of ’76 #vintage advertising

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mckitterick · 5 months

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Timing is everything

this famous photo was featured as a center spread in the British Daily Mirror newspaper on Oct 9, 1962

photographer Jim Meads was with his two children as the then-experimental Mach-2 Lightning F1 fighter jet roared in to land at De Havilland Airfield near their home

a fuel leak caused catastrophic failure and the plane flipped. pilot George Aird ejected at the last moment, hit a greenhouse, and fell through the roof, breaking both legs as he landed unconscious on the ground. the water from the sprinkler system for the tomatoes woke him, and his first thought was that he must be in heaven