Slashdot Mirror
Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware (vice.com)
Tractor owners across the country are reportedly hacking their John Deere tractors using firmware that's cracked in Easter Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums. The reason is because John Deere and other manufacturers have "made it impossible to perform 'unauthorized' repair on farm equipment," which has obviously upset many farmers who see it "as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time," reports Jason Koebler via Motherboard. As is the case with most modern-day engineering vehicles, the mechanical problems experienced with the newer farming tractors are often remedied via software. From the report: The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut down a tractor and there wouldn't be anything a farmer could do about it. A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment [...] arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software." The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and "authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors. "If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it," Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. "You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic -- he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can't drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part." "What you've got is technicians running around here with cracked Ukrainian John Deere software that they bought off the black market," he added.
Seems to me they have their customers in a fairly tight grip, by the balls, one could even say.
Actual truth. I grew up in a county that was heavy farming with a city industrial base, the friend I had in high school who were in farming families and are still doing it and many of them have long since moved off Deere equipment. Most are using either Fendt or Mahindra simply because of what you're talking about. Dropping $90k(CAD) for a base model Deere is what drove people away from them. The bullshit they're pulling now is just driving them to their competition, especially when you can get the same from a rival company for 1/3 or less with exactly the same warranty coverage.
Om, nomnomnom...
That's a different conversation. If you modify the tractor in a way that is unsupported by the manufacturer, you void the warranty and John Deere is released from responsibility. It's not at all unlike your TV, or your cell phone, or millions of other products on the market. But what we're talking about here goes well beyond that. John Deere and other manufacturers are lobbying government to make law out of the notion that while you might have paid upward of a quarter million for that tractor (not an unusual sum with modern agriculture equipment), you don't actually own it, and you're not allowed to do anything with it that John Deere doesn't expressly allow.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
Regarding the right for owners to have a choice in how their machines are serviced...
In Europe there is legislation coming into effect in July 2021 which will requires OEMs to provide information to 3rd parts service tool manufacturers and Independent Operators such that they can achieve the same level of diagnostic capability as the OEM with their own tools.
See links like:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal...
http://www.cema-agri.org/publi...
In the U.S. there is no equivalent legislation in the U.S., but I would not be surprised if we see something similar in a few years. There are groups lobbying to this end, such as;
http://repair.org/association/
Disclaimer: I work for one of the 'other' Ag manufacturers on the topic of making the machines comply with this legislation
I work in AG, and this is not true at all. Mahindra has all the same ECU's and tech other tractors have, its required for Tier 4 emissions. From what I've seen their tech is vastly more simplistic. The diagnostic abilities of their stuff is extremely limited where it just throws a code rather than giving data streams from the different subsystems.
The same can be applied to any business. Every used big iron, or the so-called midrange systems that run the world's financial systems? They're milked to death by annual fees, regardless of "updates". Got more CPUs? Cost goes up. Got more storage? Cost goes up. Even MS are happy on this model, and you can bet Apple are itching at it when they have a product that doesn't require buying new. The whole world is moving to rental or sucking blood on a monthly basis.
Purchased Adobe software recently? No, you can't. Already monthly subs on annual contracts today. Greed has won.
Libertarians believe very strongly in property rights and that one of government's most important functions is to preserve property rights:
https://www.lp.org/platform/
The only proper role of government in the economic realm is to protect property rights, adjudicate disputes, and provide a legal framework in which voluntary trade is protected..
I don't know of any Libertarian that would consider a tractor, whole or in part, that would belong to John Deere after a farmer has voluntarily paid for it.
What does "buy American" mean though? Mahindra is an Indian brand, but makes most of their US-sold tractors in the United States. John Deere is a US brand, but manufacturers tractors and parts all over the world.
Same thing goes with automobiles. Is that US brand vehicle made in Mexico American? Or is the Japanese brand made in the US?
Or is your American-based Apple iPhone that's made in China by a Taiwan company with parts from many other countries "American"?
I can't tell if your post is tongue in cheek and hence quite funny in a dry sort of way, or ignorant of the features common to modern farm machinery. Modern tractors do indeed have fancy dashboards, GPS, and mandated speed restrictions. Modern farm machinery is getting rather close to autonomous activities like we see in passenger vehicles for public highways. Many machines can be started at the beginning of a row and then will proceed down the row on its own, automatically turn at the end and return along the next row, guided by GPS the whole way. The idea being to more precisely control fuel consumption, pesticide applications and so on.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
That's Jalopnik, a site that has decided that every single part of any German car will fail every five minutes and will cost $1 million to replace
They are essentially correct. Check out for example the typical longevity of and replacement cost for the vaunted S-Class air suspension. The parts are still too new to chance getting from third parties, so you have to go to the dealer. If you don't have a very good relationship with them, you're into thousands per corner.
despite the fact that their conclusions are mostly based on a small number of American-market models with a very shady service history and lots of aftermarket parts
You should be able to buy aftermarket parts. If the design requires insanely fancy-pants parts, it's not a good one. For example, the chain tensioners in the 40V 4.2 liter Audi V8. The 32V engine doesn't have VVT, so it doesn't have them, and it's considerably more durable as a result. Both have the same stupid Flennor/Gates timing belt with a 60k lifespan. California mandates that timing belts have a 90k lifespan, Audi said "sure whatever" and rated it for 90k. It's the same belt. Chains or gears forever. But that's apparently too noisy for luxury. I'd be better off with a LS motor, which has none of these considerations and yet is just as efficient.
in the real world, German cars tend to be the most reliable
They tend to be the most expensive. That is, they require a lot of dollars invested to make them reliable. I've got a full service history on a 1997 A8 Quattro to show how and why that is the case. In spite of that I've been going through an epic to transfer its transmission into a 1998 that I got as a parts car. It's got half the miles on it, and it's in nicer condition in general inside and out. If I weren't capable of doing this stuff myself, it would make more sense to just buy something else, because it would cost too much to have it done even by an independent mechanic to justify given the low, low value of the vehicle. And its value is in turn low not just because of its age, but because of the expense in servicing it.
The average person would love to be driving something like this around now that it's been handed down from someone who could afford to absorb the expense of its initial depreciation, but they can't afford the maintenance to keep it from disintegrating. It's two hundred bucks in crankcase vent breather hoses I worked around with silicone hose and a right angle fitting, and thirty bucks for a little y-shaped vacuum hose I went ahead and bought, and the headrests don't go up and down because the drive flex cable jacket stretched over time due to heat cycling and has to be shortened and the rear sun shade has come unglued and is catching on the rear parcel shelf and the arm rests tend to crack and Audi would like a thousand dollars for one but you can often pick up a pair of them from the facelift model for a couple hundred and the list goes ever on and on.
I've been talking about Audi for a long while, but I also own a 1982 Mercedes-Benz 300SD (W126) and guess what? Mercedes is doing its level best to kill off the platform. You can get basically all the parts for cars which are older than the W126 from the Mercedes Classics parts program, but there are a number of parts for the W126 which you can no longer get new from anyone for any price. The primary example which is going to kill off these cars is the locks. Mercedes does not sell ignition locks at all any more, and an otherwise fully matched lock set will set you back painfully. No one is re-keying these locks or making fresh keys, either, but that doesn't really matter because while it had at the time the strongest column lock ever devised for a production auto, the lock itself is beyond flimsy. It also only took me about an hour and a half to figure out how to remove a completely failed and jammed lock and column locking mechanism from my car and then do it start to finis
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
My 2013-era Lenovo T430 laptop limits the mini-PCIe WiFi cards that it accepts to a short white-list of allowed models. I would never have bought this machine if I had fully appreciated that restriction at the time. I would gladly modify the hardware and software of this laptop to remove that restriction, but considering the time and difficulty, it is just much easier to just never buy a Lenovo product again.
I'd imagine no-one would want to buy a used tractor with these restrictions - hell, reselling one may well be against the licensing agreement.
A search engine indicates that New Holland seem to have a similar market share to John Deere, and that there are several other smaller manufacturers. Why would anyone buy John Deere under these circumstances?
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
The high end tractors they are really talking about are only available from 2 manufacturers. Modern Farmers are going to pull a chisel point plow, Disk Rippers, Clump busters and a cultipacker 60 feet wide in one pass over 5,000 acres, with a tractor that has 500 drawbar HP; next day pull a planter 120 feet wide.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Not sure if it is the case in the US, but where I live, I can not sign away my rights to file a lawsuit if I wanted to and my life depended on it.
"Be he SAID he wouldn't sue." would be laughed at so hard in court and would make you guilty almost by default.
Most countries including the US has laws against fake legalise that is intended to scare other people away from suing. This is actually illegal almost everywhere, it is just not enforced, and the lack of enforcement is building precedence.
How proprietary, what most think if a tractor is 25-100 Hp , everybody and there brother sells one $10.000-50,000), what most people think of as a big tractor is 100-175 Hp range $100,000-175,000 and they numerous manufactures, what a Farmer thinks of as a big tractor is 450-642Hp and is in the neighborhood of a $1/2 million, there 2 manufactures.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Since the arrival of the automobile several federal laws have been passed. The earliest laws prohibited manufacturers from requiring repairs by the dealer, required manufacturers to make parts available and prevented manufacturers from restricting access to repair information and diagrams and also probhited sales contracts that required dealer repairs. In the 70's the Magnuson warranty act prohibited manufactures from voiding warranties for repair work not done by the dealers. In the 90's these laws were expanded to prevent manufacturers from using software as a partial weapon (the software rules should have went much further and prevented any DMCA enforcement and even voided copyright restrictions on modification to equipment you own) to get around the previous restrictions and was included in the emissions law.
Tractors were included in all of these laws excepting the emissions requirements up until a few years ago when the Republican controlled congress deliberately exempted farming equipment with a small change (as part of a unrelated government funding bill) from the prior federal laws. This allowed John Deere to start enforcing all these draconian restrictions that congress had prior to this deliberately prevented and Deere can now can even force purchasers to sign contracts during purchase forcing them to use dealers and even allowing the manufacturer to disable the equipment at a later date as part of these contracts. Prior to the laws revision these contract terms would have been illegal and unenforceable.
The only low information voter is you and your ignorance of federal law that protects you from being forced to use the dealer for your car service. I'd blame the Democrats for this if they'd been involved as I'm NOT a partisan tribalist which to assholes like you means I'm with the opposite tribe. I'd be a millionaire if I got a $1 for every time I'd been accused of being a Democrat or Republican because I've got an opinion on an issue and the relevant tribe is on the other side.