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Deere to allow farmers to repair their own equipment

wsj.com

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Re: Deere to allow farmers to repair their own equipment

#171

Post by mindslight »

Lutger wrote: post #118
boltzmann-brain wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my analysis of what's going to happen if this goes through. First, quote from the MOU [1]: > AFBF agrees to encourage state Farm Bureau organizations to recognize the commitments made in this MOU and refrain from introducing, promoting, or supporting federal or state "Right to Repair" legislation that imposes obligations beyond the commitments in this MOU. In the event any state or federal legislation or regul…

I only hope a very aggressive competitor emerges that disrupts Deere out of existence. Sometimes I wonder why groups such as farmers dont band together to form a collective which can protect them against such predatory companies.

Because you can trademark colors, and ultimately the color is the most important aspect of a tractor.

Re: Deere to allow farmers to repair their own equipment

#172

Post by 29athrowaway »

themitigating wrote: post #87
29athrowaway wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The damage is already done. MBAs had no long-term vision, so in each company they infested, they made poor strategic decisions such as moving manufacturing overseas, which then forced other companies to move their manufacturing overseas. The countries they chose have zero respect for intellectual property. So now what's left are zombie companies milking their cash cows dry as international competitors arise and take…

The goal of any business is to make money, it's why they exist. Moving production overseas saves money. I don't see why this has anything to do with MBAs

Making money is an indicator that you are producing something that consumers need and want but it should not be the ultimate goal.

A company should stay true to its mission and vision.

Re: Deere to allow farmers to repair their own equipment

#174

Post by ddulaney »

robin_reala wrote: post #55
ddulaney wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to imagine this working, even in a perfect world. Set aside regulatory capture and corruption and politicking and pretend that everybody does a genuine best-effort attempt to be honest. It's extremely hard to know ahead of time which products will ultimately be reliable and which will be flaky. Most flaky components weren't designed with that in mind -- there are some exceptions, but maintenance headaches are no…

It’s already the case that you have to do this for certain groups of products in France under the AGEC laws. Take for example this dishwasher: https://www.ikea.com/fr/fr/p/diskad-lave-vaisselle-encastrab... . It has an “indice de répairabilité” of 7.4, generated from a bunch of different factors such as ease of disassembly, availability of spare parts and documentation, and the ability to factory-reset it. The data s…

I like that a lot. Judging from the criteria (in my extremely limited French) it’s a measure of effort rather than outcome, but honestly effort is all we can really ask for.

Re: Deere to allow farmers to repair their own equipment

#175

Post by mindslight »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #167
fluoridation wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that copyright sucks, but I don't see, in copyright-free world, what would prevent a hardware manufacturer from making the firmware impossible to modify for example by using hardcoded signature verification.

If the tractor is my property, I don't understand what gives John Derr the right to prevent me from modifying it how I see fit. Imagine they did this with a physical object, broke into your house and stopped you from opening the engine - that would be tresspass and a dozen other crimes. Why is it legal just because it's digital? This is why people are calling it Neo-feudalism or digital feudalism, the relationship is…

> I don't understand what gives John Derr the right to prevent me from modifying it

OP described exactly what prevents you from modifying hardware you own how you see fit:

> hardware manufacturer from making the firmware impossible to modify for example by using hardcoded signature verification.

If you don't understand this entirely technical mechanism, then you should read into it to find out what we're really up against. Basically, the chip running the software is set up to only run software that has been cryptographically signed by the manufacturer. If you modify the software, the chip refuses to run it.

If you painstakingly opened the chip and managed to change a few of the right bits, you might be able to convince that one chip to run different software. But you wouldn't get any information that would help you run software on other, unmodified, chips - the private signing key stays with the manufacturer, the chips themselves only contain the public verification key. Of course manufacturers employ techniques to prevent such physical attacks, so you wouldn't have an easy time of it either.

The straightforward path to overcome would be to completely swap out the chip for another without such a restriction, and completely rewrite the software, but then you're up against the churn of the market - the model (and hardware revision) you've specifically designed a replacement for will be a tiny fraction of the market.

Re: Deere to allow farmers to repair their own equipment

#176

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

andrewstuart wrote: post #83
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pity that people are content to just quietly hate from home. If we had the gumption to get off our asses and sabotage our enemies I think the world would be a better place.

What do you mean?

In the US we're taught to believe that the market will handle this kind of thing. But it won't. Relatively few of us are in the market for a tractor. We can't all "vote with our dollars" and go buy a tractor from a less shady vendor.

But as a human who likes food, my desire to make sure that nobody has a "press here to make the people hungry"-button is legitimate.

If it turns out that the existing political machinery is ineffective at preventing the creation of this button, US norms provide no recourse. If the government makes you mad enough, you overthrow the government (ideally peacefully).

But what do you do when a private company becomes a significant threat? Send them a strongly worded letter? Companies don't speak english, they're just sensitive to their bottom line. If you want to communicate with them, you have to influence their bottom line.

So I mean that I think we'd all be better off if we considered periodic slashing (drilling, maybe?) of for-sale tractor tires, and other forms of nonviolent sabotage, to be legitimate political speech. If certain lines were crossed, we ought to encourage each other to get off the couch and go practice that speech.

Re: Deere to allow farmers to repair their own equipment

#177

Post by rkangel »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #128
rkangel wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I philosophically agree, I struggle to reconcile it with some other practicalities. I (mostly) design and build radio systems, and as the manufacturer it is our job to ensure that it is a well behaved radio system - transmits in the frequency bands it's meant to, at the power it's meant to, without leaking and interfering with other things. For a consumer product, where much of the radio implementation is in so…

It wasn't a big problem in the days before manufacturers had the technical capability to prevent tinkering so why would you expect it to be a big problem now?

Because much more is in software than it used to be.

In the past, most of the key aspects of the radio were pretty fixed in the hardware. Whereas now, more and more of the radio is in software (and/or FPGA), or at least configurable from software. Tinkering in that case requires a "per person" level of skill. Whereas tinkering with software requires one person to be able to tinker, and then lots of people can use the result.

Re: Deere to allow farmers to repair their own equipment

#178

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

gorbachev wrote: post #99
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a pity that people are content to just quietly hate from home. If we had the gumption to get off our asses and sabotage our enemies I think the world would be a better place.

I think the stereotypical Hacker News response would be to encourage people to disrupt Deere with a startup farm equipment company. Maybe that could rectify this ridiculousness in about 5 - 15 years (if successful).

Starting a company is the heroic way to solve this problem. I mean head over to the dealership with an angle grinder and just start breaking things.

If the company is truly a threat to your community, and if the damage is targeted and restrained enough to be considered an act of protest and not chaos for the sake of it, then a jury of your peers ought not convict.

Re: Deere to allow farmers to repair their own equipment

#180

Post by dns_snek »

> Should state or federal right-to-repair legislation be enacted, both Deere and the federation have the right to withdraw from the agreement with 15 days’ written notice.

Is this supposed to be a threat? Should legislation be enacted, they would be forced to comply with it. At that point any "voluntary" agreement seems pointless.

Are they trying to coerce individual states into not passing right to repair under the assumption that should one state pass a right to repair law, they would retaliate by discontinuing access to spare parts and related materials in other states?

Am I missing something?

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