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Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

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Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#31

Post by skinkestek »

kebman wrote: post #27

Is owning John Deere tractors somehow controversial, since they're talking about how owners were "doxed"? Is there a special place on the web where we can laugh at the hall of shame of John Deere tractor owners? Jokes aside, John Deere are pretty good tractors tho. Very common among farmers here in Norway. ^^

> Very common among farmers here in Norway. ^^

Another question: are Norwegians overrepresented here on HN? I've been wondering this for a while but I'm unsure if it is that or of I just happen to notice everyone who in any way signal that they are Norwegians.

(Yes, I live in Norway to.)

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#32

Post by anonymfus »

nightowl_games wrote: post #6
HEHENE wrote: post #2

Having worked on a John Deere integration for an agtech company I can't say I'm surprised. The MyJohnDeere API had a lot of idiosyncrasies that smelled like inexperienced or mismanaged development, especially around authentication/authorization. At the time I was working on it they had some extremely arcane authentication process that required round-trip emails, various link clicking and code entering, and all kinds…

We need a new word for these high tech massive farming operations. I come from the Canadian farming sector. Most of the farmers here are individuals, or medium sized family operations. Even the big farms aren't "high tech". There just a lot of guys and a bunch of leased machines. We have essentially 0 "high tech" farms. I wouldn't say "modern farms are very high tech operations", I'd say "high tech industrial players…

I like the idea of SMBC author Zach Weinersmith to repurpose a word "villain" for them IIRC what he wrote on his twitter correctly.

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#33

Post by newsclues »

nightowl_games wrote: post #6
HEHENE wrote: post #2

Having worked on a John Deere integration for an agtech company I can't say I'm surprised. The MyJohnDeere API had a lot of idiosyncrasies that smelled like inexperienced or mismanaged development, especially around authentication/authorization. At the time I was working on it they had some extremely arcane authentication process that required round-trip emails, various link clicking and code entering, and all kinds…

We need a new word for these high tech massive farming operations. I come from the Canadian farming sector. Most of the farmers here are individuals, or medium sized family operations. Even the big farms aren't "high tech". There just a lot of guys and a bunch of leased machines. We have essentially 0 "high tech" farms. I wouldn't say "modern farms are very high tech operations", I'd say "high tech industrial players…

Southern Ontario has farm tiling fields with high tech gps tractors.

Lots of tech for data and tracking

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#34

Post by arwhatever »

kebman wrote: post #27

Is owning John Deere tractors somehow controversial, since they're talking about how owners were "doxed"? Is there a special place on the web where we can laugh at the hall of shame of John Deere tractor owners? Jokes aside, John Deere are pretty good tractors tho. Very common among farmers here in Norway. ^^

“Oh no, now I’m ruined!” :-)

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#35

Post by protomyth »

bane wrote: post #15

For those in the big tech scene...it's not so weird to have technology in farm equipment. In fact, I just listened to a podcast about a software developer who had spent time working for the welding division of caterpillar where they worked on some R&D problems over the last 40 years that are still not solved.

Yeah, a lot of farmers are willing to try new things. The local farmers (ND outlaws corporate farming) bought a pretty expensive drone that has got to be about 5' ft across. Heck, combines are not exactly low tech these days.

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#36

Post by bigfuggin »

ourmandave wrote: post #29
trollied wrote: post #3

I’m not surprised by this. They’ve made themselves a target because of their Right To Repair shenanigans. https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/320183-john-deere-fa...

How is doxing some guy who bought a tractor sticking it to JD? That's just a hacker being an asshole.

From the article:

> There is no evidence that hackers exploited these flaws. The researcher, who goes by Sick Codes, reported them to John Deere on April 12 and 13...

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#37

Post by throwaway0a5e »

GuB-42 wrote: post #24
universa1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm... having grown up on a farm in Germany and even though my father was only employed as the manager, it still felt more like "our" farm. It was definately a big farm compared to the german average, but then that average also includes a lot of part-time/side-business farms, where. Despite the size, the general methods between a smaller and a larger farm are not that different imho. But the amount of tech in a moder…

> Also it is a somewhat bogus comparison: Mostly nobody complains that their car / laptop / smartphone comes from a factory, but for farming there is this strange preference for something of 50-100years past. It is not specific to farming. Handmade, artisan stuff sells well, even when it is objectively worse. And in general, people are more sympathetic to small businesses than big, faceless corporations. We value the…

Who's we?

I know a guy who can't go through a drive through without lecturing everyone in the car about how being able to get 400kcal for a buck and a half is an amazing feat of societal progress. But he's old and emigrated from Poland so...

My example may be an outlier but there's plenty of people who are happy to get Chilean produce in January and don't care how much methane their 75/25 beef emitted. HN has the spare cash and brain cycles to care about a lot of things that normal people don't even think about.

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#38

Post by speeder »

GuB-42 wrote: post #24
universa1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hmm... having grown up on a farm in Germany and even though my father was only employed as the manager, it still felt more like "our" farm. It was definately a big farm compared to the german average, but then that average also includes a lot of part-time/side-business farms, where. Despite the size, the general methods between a smaller and a larger farm are not that different imho. But the amount of tech in a moder…

> Also it is a somewhat bogus comparison: Mostly nobody complains that their car / laptop / smartphone comes from a factory, but for farming there is this strange preference for something of 50-100years past. It is not specific to farming. Handmade, artisan stuff sells well, even when it is objectively worse. And in general, people are more sympathetic to small businesses than big, faceless corporations. We value the…

I think this is because when an artisan makes something, usually you know he tried hard, even if it ends being crap because subpar skills.

With industrialized products you know they want it cheap, resulting in crap product that didn't need to be crap.

For example once I had to repair my Electrolux fridge, when I opened it up I saw two very nasty things: 1. the holes between parts were all misaligned, to the point it was impossible to insert the screws intended to go in them. 2. it was then glued with a ton of glue spread "randomly" all over the place, it was obviously shoddy.

And the issue I had to fix in that fridge? They used the cheapest "defrost" button they could, one that notoriously got stuck often, so your fridge would stay in "defrost" mode forever and stop working, the solution was disassemble it, force the button back with a screwdriver, assemble it again... every time you used the button.

Re: Bugs allowed hackers to dox John Deere tractor owners

#39

Post by bordercases »

p_l wrote: post #26
louis___ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really cool stuff happening in agtech. I don't know if I agree with you. These kind of agtech farms tend to get heavy on pesticides use and tillage, which on the long term kills the ground life. And it leaves the farmers' hands tied when a bug happens : https://www.vice.com/en/article/xykkkd/why-american-farmers-...

They tend to be because it's cheap and easy to be this way. Meanwhile they are also the biggest levers if appropriately motivated (whether by extra legal or legal incentives) to use better solutions.

> They tend to be because it's cheap and easy to be this way.

This is descriptively correct - and stupidly unsustainable. Something like 1/3 of US topsoil has already been consumed.

Your second claim is vaguely correct but doesn't have much insight.

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