[HN Gopher] A New Jailbreak for John Deere Tractors Rides the Ri...
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A New Jailbreak for John Deere Tractors Rides the Right-to-Repair
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Author : WithinReason
Score : 198 points
Date : 2022-08-14 08:40 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| contingencies wrote:
| Honestly the DRMification of everything is getting out of hand.
| It's not just tractors. Much of the industrial gear for sale has
| the same problems. Vendors seem to think it's acceptable. We need
| a DRM-free mark and a complaints registration system to provide a
| PR-pushback mechanism.
| hulitu wrote:
| Wait till the Mafia finds out. "Nice car you have there. Do you
| want it to still going ?"
| cronix wrote:
| Kind of like, "hey, that battery that came with the used car
| you bought was larger than the previous owner paid for, so we
| reduced what you can use by 1/3 unless you pay us $4,500?"
|
| https://electrek.co/2022/07/26/tesla-ransom-customer-
| over-80...
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| DRM and copyright. The information freely available outside
| such IP silos puts you decades in the past, with the gulf only
| widening. So odd, how it happened that way. /s
| mellavora wrote:
| Yes, I agree with you.
|
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| There's a business case for periodically killing people who
| miss loan payments, to keep the other debtors on their toes.
| The idea that the concept of theft has to be eliminated in
| order not to justify these business practices is an infinite
| license for them to continue.
| zahma wrote:
| I know more and more farmers are tech savvy and getting
| acquainted with the tools of the trade -- or at least their kids
| are, but is your average farmer going to know what to do with a
| root terminal? I'd be worried about further crippling / bricking
| my six-figure machine. Log dumps are great for troubleshooting,
| but fixing the problem isn't necessarily straightforward. And any
| misstep could be calamitous.
|
| 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?
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think it's a reasonable point. I know some farmers, and in
| every case I can think of the answer is "probably not".
|
| 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.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Pulling back the camera a bit, this question astounds me. I
| guess I'm finding it very very odd the extent to which people
| don't understand (or better, remember) that _the hackers most
| always win here, and those wins are nearly always a good
| thing._ It 's true that the companies end up rerouting and
| finding other ways to preserve profits (and subsequently get
| real quiet about these defeats) but for me the recent history
| of tech is _about wins like this._
| zahma wrote:
| But the question is what is the victory and what or for whom
| is it good for? So I'm not sure I understand your
| astonishment as if it's so obvious that breaking into the
| software has inherent value.
|
| 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...
| jrm4 wrote:
| I'd say your last question is way too narrow and short-
| term. It's almost by definition hard to explain because it
| takes a while to see and/or appreciate the effects?
|
| 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.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| I remember when Motherboard did a piece about this issue they
| interviewed a farmer. He basically said something along the
| lines of:
|
| > 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| On the other hand, Googling and downloading random shit is
| also the perfect way to end up with malware or break things.
| Wouldn't it be better if you didn't need to download
| unverified tools from potentially shady websites just to
| repair what you own? If your product requires specific
| proprietary software to repair, that software should be
| provided when the product is sold.
| bluehazed wrote:
| I feel like this comment is seriously underestimating the
| average farmer, these are people with complicated jobs and wide
| ranges of skill sets. Also when your livelihood is threatened
| unless you learn how to do something, you're gonna learn how to
| do that thing.
| zahma wrote:
| I'm in no way demeaning a farmer by asking if their skill
| sets can be applied to complicated software. What I'm really
| wondering is what it takes to fix a hardware problem with
| this software. I wouldn't underestimate anyone whose life
| depends on fixing a problem...
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| Yeah, I'm an engineer that has worked closely with farmers
| for much of my career. I'm in absolute awe. They are an
| unbelievable wealth of knowledge of all kinds of technology,
| hydraulics, mechanics, weather, genetics, soil science,
| hydrology, forecasting, business, etc. etc. etc. The list
| just keeps going. And in general, if your numbers are telling
| you one thing and the farmer is telling you another, I'd
| usually bet on the farmer.
|
| 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.
| symfoniq wrote:
| Indeed. One of the smartest human beings I know is a farmer.
| His breadth of knowledge is astounding.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > is your average farmer going to know what to do with a root
| terminal?
|
| 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.
| scopecreep wrote:
| Modern tractors are more technologically advanced than a Tesla.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| Test0129 wrote:
| Not only are you estimating the astounding ingenuity of farmers
| it's not hard to make a convenient interface for a jailbreak.
|
| 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.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Farmers, on the whole, are phenomenally capable people. They
| have to be. They know how to get knowledge when they need it,
| and when presented with broken equipment they'll diligently
| work through the challenge using all the resources available to
| them. If you can search your way to victory, so can they.
| mahoro wrote:
| Normally I would appreciate this work but now it's likely to be
| used in Chechnya for tractors stolen in Ukraine:
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/02/ukrainian_tractors_de...
| izacus wrote:
| And? Screwdrivers and Ford cars from Ukraine work in Chechnya
| as well, what's the issue there exactly?
|
| You don't have enough of your life controlled by corporations?
| PostOnce wrote:
| Will you also be disappointed to learn that terrorists benefit
| from penicillin?
|
| 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.
| judge2020 wrote:
| I mean, the whole shtick of Find My (iPhone) is that someone
| can't use it if they steal it, even if they do a DFU reset to
| factory settings. This makes it incredibly unattractive for
| would-be criminals to start stealing iPhones unless they have
| a way to ship them to China for parts disassembly.
|
| 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.
| rozenmd wrote:
| Wait until you hear about Toyota pick-up trucks
| npteljes wrote:
| This even got a paragraph on the Wikipedia
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Hilux#Use_by_militant_g.
| ..
| Geonode wrote:
| We're going to have to do this for cars soon.
|
| More long term, we're going to need a digital revolution against
| corporate overreach, hopefully leading to a constitutional
| amendment.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Your future care won't start at all, until it has verified its
| secure boot chain against Skynet.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| ...err... car
| _fat_santa wrote:
| My optimistic prediction is that there will be regulation
| around this pretty soon. Were going to have laws similar to
| smog standards that specify what can and can't a car
| manufacturer can charge a subscription for. I would imagine
| legislation would look something like.
|
| > 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > You may offer subscription features, but you must also give
| the option of a one time purchase that unlocks the feature
| forever.
|
| You can subscribe to air conditioning for $10 per month, or
| buy it outright for $100,000.
| dento wrote:
| Limiting the one-off purchase to some multiple (maybe 100)
| of the monthly payment should be part of the law too.
| kurupt213 wrote:
| Constitutional amendments are dangerous. The whole constitution
| is at risk of change during a constitutional convention. We are
| at risk of losing much more than we gain
| swader999 wrote:
| Constitutions don't matter when media, big tech and judiciary
| are controlled or in cahoots in a single party system.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Is it, though? Getting 2/3rds of the US to agree on anything
| seems to be nigh impossible these days. I don't see how a
| convention could be called to amend [extremely popular issue]
| but then all of a sudden enough of the convention votes to
| scrap the Constitution altogether.
| Test0129 wrote:
| It really will. After riding in a friends Tesla I realized that
| the mixture of OTA updates, unauditable firmware, and the rise
| of subscription add-ons for cars means that in the future it
| will likely be _necessary_. With phones, the cost is cheap
| enough (sometimes free) that people won 't jailbreak. When you
| realize your car can be remotely shut down for using
| aftermarket parts or driven back to the lot autonomously for
| missing a payment suddenly it's not just necessity, it is duty
| to jailbreak the car.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Why do people always seem to single out Tesla when
| complaining about stuff like that? Are they really worse than
| any other automaker in that regard? How much of Toyota's
| firmware can you audit?
| frob wrote:
| I think it's mostly because of how aggressive and one-way
| tesla is. My 6-year-old volt can probably get firmware
| updates over the air, but I've never stepped into my car to
| discover that the emergency blinkers are now hidden, the
| windshield wipers are now on the other side of the column,
| and my battery has been limited to only 60% of what I
| bought because telsa flipped the wrong bit 4 years ago and
| two owners back and has decided to "remedy" my experience.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Yes they are, and by far not just barely.
|
| 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.
| macNchz wrote:
| Tesla has pretty clearly led the way on some of this stuff,
| they've been doing unattended OTA software updates and
| remotely-revokable paid add-on features for years. Other
| manufacturers do not have more auditable firmware, but they
| are behind in how much control they have of their vehicles
| once they're in a customer's hands.
| Karunamon wrote:
| Please give a source showing "unattended" OTA updates.
| The car never updates without the owner initiating it,
| since the process makes the car unusable anywhere from 20
| minutes to an hour.
|
| Source: I own a model 3
| macNchz wrote:
| There's a bunch of anecdotal reports of forced updates
| being applied when owners have been holding back for a
| long time:
|
| https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/tesla-forced-an-
| upda...
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/greentheonly/status/1222613978
| 427...
|
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Tesla is way ahead of other manufacturers in terms of
| putting modern tech in their cars (their navigation UI runs
| at more than 10 frames per second which is _still_ a
| challenge for a lot of legacy automakers) which also gives
| them more opportunities to use this modern tech for user-
| hostile purposes. However, greed isn 't specific to any
| single company and the other manufacturers will eventually
| follow suit.
| xbar wrote:
| Tesla is cutting edge in corporate overlordship?
| kennend3 wrote:
| why do testla apologists take offence to this and come to
| their defence, usually with "whataboutism"?
|
| 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?
| josephcsible wrote:
| > why do testla apologists take offence to this and come
| to their defence, usually with "whataboutism"?
|
| 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?
| kennend3 wrote:
| it very well may be in industry wide problem, but Tesla
| seems to be front-and-center of this problem.
|
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > it very well may be in industry wide problem, but Tesla
| seems to be front-and-center of this problem.
|
| 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.
| kennend3 wrote:
| > 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?
|
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > The "owner" is not the one removing the features..
| TESLA IS..
|
| 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_."
| kennend3 wrote:
| opps. missed a point.
|
| > 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?
| josephcsible wrote:
| I know that one just happened. I meant when was the last
| time before that one, to see if there's any backing to
| the claims that this happens "so many" times and
| "frequently".
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Not only do I want the right to 100% own something after I
| buy it, I think we'll need the right to buy in the first
| place. Similar to the right to pay in cash? Otherwise buying
| will just be replaced with leases.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| If there are enough customers like you these offerings will
| exist. If not, you're just trying to force your world view
| on others...
| Test0129 wrote:
| I think that this is a form of exploitation by car
| manufacturers to be honest. Consider that ownership can
| be expensive and so charging subscriptions with walled
| gardens and lock-ins makes sense for lower income
| consumers.
|
| 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.
| npteljes wrote:
| No, demand will not translate to supply. The first
| priority of producers is not to satisfy demand, but to
| retain and gain power. On the demand side, what people
| really need doesn't translate perfectly to market demand.
| The imperfections of these sides won't create a system
| that satisfies the participants. What I'm trying to get
| at is the phenomenon of market failure. From the supply
| side, history saw countless examples when this happened;
| think of any cartel and monopoly.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| What if the majority of customers have my view but
| manufacturers realize they can extract more money from us
| by not giving us a choice?
| EarthLaunch wrote:
| That incentivizes customers to shift to a significantly
| different alternative. For instance, a less car-centric
| life.
|
| In a way, forcing cars to be bearable helps reinforce
| their influence. (Quality road repair, extra consumer
| protection, no liability for deaths, etc.)
| ehnto wrote:
| People will just lease cars even if it doesn't align with
| their world view, because many of us live in car-centric
| cities where that would not be a sensible hill to die on.
| Just like many of us pay an amount of rent that no longer
| feels fair, because taking a morale high ground and not
| doing so would leave us homeless.
| Test0129 wrote:
| Supposing this was even possible, that enough people
| banded together and said "enough with cars" and decided
| to change the way of life, it would take several decades,
| maybe even a century, to turn a town that is primarily
| driven to a town that is primarily walked.
|
| 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?
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| That will be a hard sell in the US outside of urban
| areas.
| msrenee wrote:
| So let car companies run roughshod over consumers because
| you don't like cars?
|
| 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.
| davemp wrote:
| There is historical precedent for those with power
| forcing leases on the general population (lords and
| peasants).
| msrenee wrote:
| These offerings exist now, but have you tried to buy a
| vehicle outright in the last 10 years? At least half the
| salespeople I spoke to when I was looking for my truck
| would not even tell me the sales price of the the used
| vehicles on their lot. They wanted to know how much I
| could pay per month. Seriously. They used every sales
| tactic they could drum up to hide the price of the truck
| they were selling. Is that not a bit terrifying to you?
|
| 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.
| chasil wrote:
| It sounds like all Deere equipment can be placed in
| administrative mode.
|
| 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."
| chmod600 wrote:
| Ownership is a more nuanced concept in a world of
| complexity. It's a bit like a 12-year-old emperor: he's not
| really the leader because he doesn't understand what's
| going on.
|
| 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.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| No regression or simpler times needed.
|
| 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.
| npteljes wrote:
| It does raise the issue of the 12-year-old emperor, but
| nevertheless, the right should be granted by regulation.
| People don't understand lots of things and entrust
| themselves to different entities to make their life
| easier. But they should not let go of the rights that
| allow them to take the matter into their own hands. As
| long as we're on the topic of children, they have human
| rights too, for example, and while I don't imagine they
| exercise them often by themselves, that doesn't mean they
| shouldn't have them in the first place.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| While I generally support the right to repair, I'm not sure
| that forcing 100% ownership works in all cases. There are
| just plenty of cases I can imagine where it's better for
| the manufacturer to continue to own something and lease it
| to people.
|
| 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.
| tomrod wrote:
| > it's better for the manufacturer to continue to own
| something and lease it to people.
|
| This is why recalls exist, for manufacturers to fix their
| broken things they failed to fix before releasing to the
| public.
| bluehatbrit wrote:
| I think MonkeyMalarky is saying they want the right to
| purchase something to own if they choose, not to rule out
| all forms of leasing.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Why do some people leap to that unimplied projection? I
| see it all the time.
|
| 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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| Exactly. Remember the GM EV1? That's going to be everything
| soon unless we do something.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Cars are already like this. My Skoda Octavia had a headlight
| levelling issue. Pretty clearly just needed recalibration. Can
| you do that through the dash interface? Of course not. God
| forbid they actually use that huge touchscreen for useful
| diagnostic information.
|
| 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 PS80 to press a button in some software
| that only they have access to.
| 34679 wrote:
| Technically, an amendment could say anything, but historically,
| the US Constitution outlines rules the government is supposed
| to follow.
|
| 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?
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Because you consent to the data gathering and tracking when
| you signed up for the service.
|
| 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.
| causality0 wrote:
| You could make the argument that contracts which say one
| party can spy on the other and do whatever they want with
| the data fall under the category of unconscionable.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Yes, you can make the argument. But it apparently doesn't
| weigh very heavily on most of America's consciousness.
| gambiting wrote:
| You never constented to your data being given to the police
| though(or more accurately in this case - to be sold to the
| data broker and _then_ given to the police)
|
| 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.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| At least in the US almost everything follows "right of
| first sale" doctrine. Otherwise I'd have a claim against
| a car dealership when I trade in my used vehicle.
|
| 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.
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