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John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

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Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#101

Post by VladVladikoff »

dataflow wrote: post #95
cgyvbunji wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think if he did that people wouldn't pay attention. My experience is that when you complain to people about digital rights they just glaze over unless you walk them through all the ins and outs and the implications.

I share his videos here but nobody seems to see them and/or care enough to vote; all I get is crickets. It's baffling to me. Examples: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48802162 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395520 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043208

I clicked on one, he was rambling about wearing sunglasses because of studio lights, seems like pointless drivel, so I stopped watching.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#102

Post by trollbridge »

snypher wrote: post #18
mothballed wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you tell them how easy it makes it to bypass emissions restrictions. My tractor was shipped with a screw turned down to Opening up John Deere tractors for right to repair virtually assures they will ~all be doing emissions deletes. Part of their lock-down was profit seeking, but the other half is that different vendors had different ideas interpretations of the law about how locked down the system had to be to…

If we could get our operators to just run regen when they should, it wouldn't be an issue. They don't mind filling DEF and we don't mind paying for it.

The bigger problem is when the DPF system stops functioning properly. This happens quite frequently, and is (by design) not a user-serviceable system. Then you can't "run the regen when you should".

All of this to reduce "particulate" which is not the actual polluting part of diesel emissions, even though it is the part you can see. The polluting part is what you can't see.

The EPA changed its rules a year ago to allow measuring NOx emissions (which makes sense) instead of just measuring DEF consumption (which does not make much sense) before forcing an engine into "limp" mode, and in particular retrofitting a system to measure NOx and reflash the computer (including aftermarket solutions to do so) is no longer considered emissions tampering. This should have been done a long time ago.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#103

Post by userbinator »

Gigachad wrote: post #32
ggoo wrote: post #7

Bananas that stuff like this needs to get litigated in our society - if you asked 100 random people "should farmers be able to repair their equipment", you would get 100 yes's.

Because they don't ask it like that. It'll be "Woke communists want to confiscate the money of enterprising businesses." Combined with some AI generated video of the right to repair supporters laughing in an evil way or something.

The same side can also say "Woke environmentalist communists want to stop you from tuning your vehicles or rolling coal." That will probably get even more support, given what I've seen of the political leanings of farmers and RtR supporters in general.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#104

Post by trollbridge »

dreambuffer wrote: post #15

There's a cognitive dissonance on this site where everyone claims to hate this attempt at regulatory capture, yet they would do it too if it was their tech company and call it a "moat", and many are actively working towards that.

I haven't done this with any of our technology. Of course, I'm also not as profitable as some companies and have much less control over trying to lock my customers in.

This does mean my YC application is far less likely to be accepted.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#105

Post by sothatsit »

ggoo wrote: post #98
sothatsit wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not so simple a problem. Should people have the right to do whatever they want with hardware they buy? Yes. But the regulations that would require John Deere to change their practices and designs for repairability are not about your rights, they are about what we require John Deere to provide. And the more you require John Deere to provide, the more costs add up. When designing regulations that we require compa…

> It is not so simple a problem. Should people have the right to do whatever they want with hardware they buy? Yes. It's actually so simple you answered it right here! It's John Deere's problem to comply with the regulations we as society require of them - that is the cost of doing business.

That part is easy. How much we require John Deere to do to support people repairing their tractors is not.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#106

Post by parineum »

cogman10 wrote: post #87
syntaxing wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Admittedly I have never worked in the agriculture industry, but I have been a mechanical engineer for multiple industries before I became a software engineer (a good 5 years I was in a position where I quoted customers). You really cannot imagine that out of the 44B gross revenue and 5B net, that a "non tiny fraction" was not related to right the repair? Collections of receivables + Proceeds from sales of equipment o…

Yup. The two things John Deere did was make it impossible to diagnose problems with software lockouts and they did software locks for common parts. Imagine, for example, needing to pay $1000 to replace an oil filter because you needed to buy the official John Deere oil filter and have the John Deere technician drive out to install it and flash the tractor to start up with the new filter. That's what John Deere was up…

> Imagine, for example, needing to pay $1000 to replace an oil filter because you needed to buy the official John Deere oil filter and have the John Deere technician drive out to install it and flash the tractor to start up with the new filter.

>That's what John Deere was up to.

Is that an actual price and the actual process?

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#107

Post by sandworm101 »

SideQuark wrote: post #59
syntaxing wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP but I went through some data and John Deere makes 5B NET profit for the worse years. 10B for their best (only looking back 10 years). I wouldn’t be surprised these anticompetitive (as in anti “consumer”) has netted them north of 10B.

Last year was 5b net profit on 44b revenue. Attributing more than a tiny fraction of profit to the right to repair stuff is wild dreams, given the amount of physical goods they sell. Nothing in their SEC filings shows anything mentionable about such claims. It does break out actual profit by company sectors.

Repair is everything with such equipment. Be it an airliner, fighter jet, TBM, those big trucks in mines, factory robots ... any industrial machine that moves will, over its lifetime, cost more in repair and maintenance than its sticker price.

I talked to a hobby farmer once about a tractor. It wasnt cheap, but he spent more to biuld it a proper shed than he spent on the (used) machine. Leave it out in the rain/snow/mud all winter and it wont be there for you in spring. Maintenance and support is everything.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#108

Post by maldev »

Cider9986 wrote: post #16

Shout out to Louis Rossmann for doing a ton of work on Right to repair. He started a website called Consumer Rights Wiki to document anti-consumer practices. https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Main_Page He's also involved with FULU Foundation which has a bounty of 25k to get Ring cameras working without Amazon's servers. https://bounties.fulu.org/bounties/ring-video-doorbells

I wish he wasn’t such an ass. Had a never meet your heroes moment outside defcon a few years ago. Not a friendly person and went from big fan to disdain when I hear his name.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#109

Post by shuwix »

We need same for Lenovo Deere, John Dell ... Soldered RAM's, soldered SSD's lately, batteries which have by purpose just slightly different size not to be interchangeable.

And for mighty HP and their printers, management needs to be put to wall and shot. There's no other solution.

Re: John Deere owners will get the right to repair equipment under FTC settlement

#110

Post by wojciii »

throw2ih020 wrote: post #97
dataflow wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share his videos here but nobody seems to see them and/or care enough to vote; all I get is crickets. It's baffling to me. Examples: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48802162 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48395520 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47043208

HN audience prefers text to video; videos rarely do well here compared to other sites.

I ignore video posts. Why would I spend 20 minutes watching something when I can read the same in one or two minutes?

I read inhumanely fast.

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