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American Farmers Are Still Fighting Tractor Software Locks (npr.org)
Manufacturers lock consumers into restrictive "user agreements," and inside "there's things like you won't open the case, you won't repair," complains a U.S. advocacy group called The Repair Association. But now the issue is getting some more attention in the American press. An anonymous reader quotes NPR:
Modern tractors, essentially, have two keys to make the engine work. One key starts the engine. But because today's tractors are high-tech machines that can steer themselves by GPS, you also need a software key -- to fix the programs that make a tractor run properly. And farmers don't get that key.
"You're paying for the metal but the electronic parts technically you don't own it. They do," says Kyle Schwarting, who plants and harvests fields in southeast Nebraska... "Maybe a gasket or something you can fix, but everything else is computer controlled and so if it breaks down I'm really in a bad spot," Schwarting says. He has to call the dealer. Only dealerships have the software to make those parts work, and it costs hundreds of dollars just to get a service call. Schwarting worries about being broken down in a field, waiting for a dealer to show up with a software key.
The article points out that equipment dealers are using those expensive repair calls to offset slumping tractor sales. But it also reports that eight U.S. states, including Nebraska, Illinois and New York, are still considering bills requiring manufacturers to sell repair software, adding that after Massachusetts passed a similar lar, "car makers started selling repair software."
"You're paying for the metal but the electronic parts technically you don't own it. They do," says Kyle Schwarting, who plants and harvests fields in southeast Nebraska... "Maybe a gasket or something you can fix, but everything else is computer controlled and so if it breaks down I'm really in a bad spot," Schwarting says. He has to call the dealer. Only dealerships have the software to make those parts work, and it costs hundreds of dollars just to get a service call. Schwarting worries about being broken down in a field, waiting for a dealer to show up with a software key.
The article points out that equipment dealers are using those expensive repair calls to offset slumping tractor sales. But it also reports that eight U.S. states, including Nebraska, Illinois and New York, are still considering bills requiring manufacturers to sell repair software, adding that after Massachusetts passed a similar lar, "car makers started selling repair software."
I think it's a great thing that people who typically vote for more corporate freedom finally get to see the price of unrestrained corporatism.
It seems like somebody needs to step in and develop a root kit for those tractors.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Until now, the whole "software lock in" thing has been something few politicians can grasp. Worse, it's something that few of their constituents give a shit about, so they don't bother to even try to understand it. Usually, everyone who would has something else they care about and few actually depend on it for a living. Outside Silicon Valley, who gave 2 shits about software?
This could definitely be a game changer. First, farmers are a VERY vocal group and the proverbial epitome of freedom of the land, founder spirit and everything that the average American feels good about. Everyone has a farmer somewhere in his ancestry and everyone can at least somehow understand how that's important. These people make the stuff you eat, after all!
And more important, people understand fixing agricultural machines. Maybe they don't do it themselves, but basically everyone who didn't exclusively grow up in a downtown area of a metropolis has at some point in time notice that these things break down and that some oil-covered mechanic is working his magic lying underneath one of those beasts to make it wroom again. People understand that this is a necessity, and more important, people expect this to be possible. They grew up with this being possible. This not being possible is something they'd consider impossible, and, worse, someone keeping you from fixing something you own, at least if it's something outside the "fixing costs more than buying a new one" throwaway-appliance garbage, is someone people consider despicable.
This could wake up our politicians. Mostly because it's no longer large corporate lobbying groups against consumers. It's large corporate lobbying groups against large farmer lobbying groups.
Grab the popcorn, folks, this is going to get interesting!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
"If the consumer can not repair the purchased item, then the vendor must provide free parts and labour for the advertised lifetime of the item, provided within a reasonable response time for the industry and item in question".
In other words, a mandatory all-encompassing warranty with an SLA.
You want to lock in your customer base? How about the customer base locks in the manufacturer?
It is quite simple. If you lock your software with DRM or artificial lock, the unrestricted warranty of whole product including hw+sw fix automatically rise from 1(2) to 10 years. And the manufacturer / vendor is hereby required to be able to fix any issue on such product until the copyright to it is expired.
Except that if you buy Chinese you will have to buy a new tractor each time it breaks down. But maybe that's cheaper - you may get two Chinese tractors for the price of one American.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The farmers have voted for the candidate that will be all for the farmers and will be doing what is needed for the farmers. Right?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The real solution however is for us tech nerds to start performing outreach to the farming community and get them on board to lobby together against hardware enforced software signing. With the brunt of America's farming community behind us (as a result of their own problems caused by Tivo-ized tractors.) we should have no trouble pushing legislation through congress to end Tivoization once and for all.
Maybe a nationwide boycott by the farming and techie community. Let's see how everybody feels after a week or two of internet and agriculture blackouts.
Try, just TRY to get around John Deere. It's not like you have a lot of options.
John Deere, ~67% market share followed by Case IH at ~17% and New Holland at ~9%, that's perilously close to a monopoly. You could try to give big old JD some hard competition by importing tractors from places where they don't try to rape you over software updates but if you do 'The Donald' will slap a 30% import tariff on you so farmers are now literally fucked in every possible way.
I live on the ISS you insensitive clod, we simply use Zulu time.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
The only real farming left in the US are large industrial farms.
Quit parroting that left wing lie. It's total bullshit that one 5 second Google query absolutely disproves.
"using those expensive repair calls to offset slumping tractor sales."
maybe people dont want to buy new tractors with this new "tractor with expensive propitiatory software, so they are keeping their old tractors, and even buying old tractors because they can fix them their selves without some greedy corporate tractor dealer scalping their pocketbooks every time they need work done on their tractor
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Hey, over 98% of Austria voted for a "reunion" with Germany in 1938, so I guess Austrians are fans of destroyed towns.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Farmers talk amongst themselves, a lot, so a crop threatening failure to provide needed service, can quickly become a huge negative in the minds of any farmers shopping for new equipment.
Nothing like "pissing off your best customers to make more profits" as a business model, is it.
Except that if you buy Chinese you will have to buy a new tractor each time it breaks down. But maybe that's cheaper - you may get two Chinese tractors for the price of one American.
That's not necessarily a bad thing although I'd go for E-European or Ukrainian before Chinese but that requires you to be a bit more hands-on (like farmers used to be) and fix stuff yourself unlike when you use western equipment where you typically call in a service person. If Americans can use AK-47s without being worried about catching communism from them why not Ukrainian trucks or tractors? I came across a bunch of civilianized Ukrainian KrAZ army trucks in a farming village in western Europe and we're not talking some former communist nation, this was deep inside bedrock NATO territory. So I'm walking around these things taking a very close look, largely because I'd seen these beasts in news footage from war zones except painted green instead of red and with rocket artillery or AAA guns in place of the hydraulic open-box bed, when this guy shows up. He asks if he can help me so I just told him the truth, that I was pretty amazed to see these things in that particular corner of the world, which made him quite a lot more friendly and we got talking. He told me that him and several farmers in the area had decided to set up a truck pool and found it was an expensive proposition until somebody discovered that several of these Soviet/Ukrainian cold war army trucks could be had brand spanking new for the price of a much smaller number of MAN,Mercedes,Volvo,... trucks, so they just bought a couple of dozen of these things. There was little that could break down, when it did the parts were cheap, electronics were minimal and they had hired a Ukrainian mechanic to maintain them who knew these things better than his own trouser pockets.
Fuck it, having worked briefly with farmers when I was younger, I'll play devil's advocate here:
1) Farmers know damned well that companies like John Deere sell their hardware at cost (or even a loss), with the intention of making their money in servicing the vehicles.
2) Farmers will howl like dogs if John Deere says "Okay, we'll sell you models that you can fix yourself. But they'll cost twice as much to buy."
And if you hadn't yet deduced it from the previous two points:
3) Farmers are a notorious bunch of whiny cheapskates who live to complain about EVERYTHING and will go to any length (legal or otherwise) to save a penny. Seriously, asking a farmer about his farm is like asking an old person about their health--expect to hear nothing but complaints, how much they're suffering, how they need this and that, woe is me, etc. And they will do ANYTHING to make even an extra dime, including hiring illegals, buying seed they know damned well is illegal, cutting corners on sanitation requirements, trying to cheat their workers and work them off the clock, lying to the government about their crop yields to get higher insurance or fallow payouts, etc., etc., etc.
In other words, farmers want their cake and to eat it too. They want all the latest developments in the technology, and they want it to be repairable by third parties--but they also want it to still be as cheap as it is now (at the price that's based on a maintenance subsidy).
And that's me playing devil's advocate for today and risking the karma hit from those of you who've never had to deal with farmers before.
John Deere should respond. "Dear farmers: We can sell it to you cheap or we can sell it to you repairable. Pick any one."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I'm not going to say I have strong evidence to disagree with your observations about farmers. But I do live in an area that's still largely rural, in Western Maryland. And my interactions with them (including doing some computer service work for a couple of them) tells me they're not very different from anyone else trying to remain successful, running their own small business.
Last I checked on tractor pricing, John Deere products suitable for farm use weren't exactly inexpensive, as it is. You really believe they're selling all of these tractors at or below their cost to build them? I'd like to see some evidence to back that claim up.....
I'm sure that this is just an attempt for the industry to find a new avenue to monetize its products -- seeing how far they can push the boundaries before the law pushes back. The auto industry would *love* to impose the same rules on every car and truck it sells -- but that change would impact so many people (including hundreds of thousands of independent garages, auto parts dealers, etc.) - it can't realistically enforce it right now.
Picking a relative niche market like farm tractor sales is a better strategy. John Deere knows that #1. it has enough market share so farmers can't go to that many alternatives to avoid them, and #2. it sells a product that's not just purchased for pleasure or convenience. The success of an entire season's crop is at stake.
Besides, it wasn't always this way. Not all that long ago, a John Deere tractor had no such software lock because the technology to implement it didn't even exist yet. Did you suddenly see tractor prices drop sharply when they decided to start subsidizing them with this forced maintenance?
One farmer interviewed on CBC radio said the seasonal nature of farming ensures there's nowhere even close to an adequate supply of service people available when they're needed, and calls for service are often hundreds of miles apart. So during the time he desperately needs his tractor working, and could fix it easily himself, he's required to wait for hours or even days for a service rep to show up, plug in a USB drive, and fix some software glitch in a matter of seconds.
The farmer, whose identity was protected, had downloaded "grey market" software to do such repairs himself.
The manufacturer's representative who was interviewed afterward made a completely unconvincing case. He claimed they would have somebody at a farm almost instantly, and that they weren't interested in prosecuting farmers who downloaded hacked repair software. In other words, the manufacturer's representative was a bare-faced liar.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The issue isn't the software breaking as much as the software has lockouts for any and all replacement parts. Consider if you changed the oil and you had to log into your car to check the RFID tag in the oil filter and if you didn't have the password and an RFID approved oil filter the engine wouldn't start.
It also means you can't alter any part of the operation of the tractor that is computer controlled. You want a custom library for a specific crop: Pay John Deere. There was a story about a month ago about farmers buying hacked motherboards. https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
Architectural plans are like computer source code with a couple of differences: You only compile once.
The problem is it cost the farmer $500 to do the repair on the previous model themselves, in an hour. The new model also costs the farmer $500 to do the repair themselves, in an hour; however, the tractor won't "go" until they pay a technician an additional $1,500 to drive out, wave their badge at the device, and whisper the secret word into its ear.
Part of the complaint is they can't fix their tractor and get back to work; they have to take a relatively-significant hit to productivity and put their farm at risk waiting for a service call.
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You could try to give big old JD some hard competition by importing tractors from places where they don't try to rape you over software updates but if you do 'The Donald' will slap a 30% import tariff on you so farmers are now literally fucked in every possible way.
Those same farmers evidently voted for Trump overwhelmingly so if they do get hit with an import tariff they have no right to complain. They knew the guy was a xenophobe and protectionist when they voted for him. They made their bed so they can sleep in it.
Only downside I can see is that those costs ultimately get passed along to you and me. Allowing JD to engage in this sort of shenanigans ultimately is paid for by us at the grocery store.
Except that if you buy Chinese you will have to buy a new tractor each time it breaks down.
Do you have a lot of experience with Chinese farm equipment, or are you just spreading baseless crap about something you know little about?
Having traveled a lot in China over the last ~20 years, I have at least seen some f the things they use in the fields. A lot of it is clearly rather old, but then it wouldn't be old, if it broke down and had to be scrapped every year, as you say. In fact, it must be both reliable and repairable, like things used to be in the West not all that long ago; back when the saying was that all you needed to repair a Land Rover was a hammer and a bit of string.
One of the contraption I've seen in China looks a bit like an oversized garden tractor - the ones with two wheels and a pair of handles - but very big. They've got one enormous cylinder and sound like an old fashioned fishing vessel. When I tell farmers here in UK about that one, they all go "I wish I had one of those". Simple, reliable and repairable is gold when your livelyhood depends on getting things done in time, before the weather turns.
Your mistake is assuming a 'farmer' is some guy that has been farming since birth like his father and grand father before him.
Corporate megafarms are the new customers that JD is catering to. I wouldn't be shocked if they do have a TaaS in place already. They have service contracts that say if a tractor is down for more than N hours JD reimburses them.
It's the MO of most heavy equipment these days in mines and on big construction projects.