| masraum |
05-10-2022 03:15 PM |
I'm guessing those weren't plain Jane tractors. I suspect these are the very large, very high end devices used on bigger farms.
But there's some other interesting stuff in the article.
(not the whole article, just a few excerpts)
Quote:
Deere perceived many opportunities to extract new sources of revenue from farmers.
For example, they fitted out their tractors with clusters of new sensors: torque sensors on the wheels that measured soil density, humidity sensors on the undercarriages that measured soil moisture, and location sensors on the roof that plotted density and moisture on a centimeter-accurate grid.
This information is very useful! Farmers can use it to practice “precision agriculture,” broadcasting their seed according to these maps to maximize yield.
But Deere farmers can’t get that data — at least, not on its own. Deere bundled that data with an app that comes with seed from Monsanto (now Bayer), its preferred seed vendor. The farmers generated the data by plowing their fields with their tractors, but Deere took the position that the farmers weren’t the owners of that data —Deere was.
Deere bundled the data with the farmer and sold both to Monsanto. The next time someone tells you “If you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product,” remember this. These farmers weren’t getting free, ad-supported tractors. Deere charges six figures for a tractor. But the farmers were still the product. The thing that determines whether you’re the product isn’t whether you’re paying for the product: it’s whether market power and regulatory forbearance allow the company to get away with selling you.
But selling farmers their own soil telemetry is only the beginning. Deere aggregates all the soil data from all the farms, all around the world, and sells it to private equity firms making bets in the futures market. That’s far more lucrative than the returns from selling farmers to Monsanto. The real money is using farmers’ aggregated data to inform the bets that financiers make against the farmers.
could offer drivers is the option to turn off all that surveillance.
VIN-locking metastasized out of the automotive sector and took root in every part of our lives. Apple would love to VIN-lock its phone screens, and they’ve done so several times, but had to back down after customers and independent cracked-screen repair places raised hell. After the FTC and the Biden Administration threatened to directly regulate Apple to force it to facilitate repair, the company created an official home repair program, albeit a very limited one.
Other sectors have been more successful in rolling out VIN locking. One company that led the way here is Medtronic, the world’s largest med-tech company (and, thanks to an Irish reverse-merger, one of the world’s least-taxed med-tech companies).
For more than 20 years, Medtronic’s PB840 ventilators have been the workhorses of the field. But Medtronic decided to juice its profits by VIN-locking the parts in the PB840 (hospitals, like farmers, have fixed their own equipment since time immemorial: when a patient has a medical emergency, you need to be able to fix whatever piece of gear their doctors need, not call a manufacturer-authorized technician who’ll arrive days or weeks later).
That was terrible before the pandemic, but when the world’s demand for ventilators spiked just as Medtronic’s authorized service technicians were grounded, this VIN-locking racket became a major threat to public health.
Hospital technicians around the world scrambled to nurse their PB840s along, keeping them in service. A common PB840 repair involves swapping a working screen out of a busted ventilator into a working ventilator with a busted screen.
Screens are VIN-locked components, though, so the resulting, perfectly functional device would not work until an authorized tech flew out to the hospital and typed in an unlock code — and remember, the pandemic grounded all those technicians.
Thankfully, an anonymous Polish ex-Medtronic employee had kept the unlock code generator from his previous job, and he cloned it, packaged the resulting gadget in whatever enclosures he could find — old guitar pedals, table lamps and alarm-clocks — and mailed them to med-techs at hospitals around the world, saving lives.
Why did this hero remain anonymous? Because he was breaking the law. Article 6 of the EU Copyright Directive bans the production of “circumvention devices” that bypass VIN locks. In the USA, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes trafficking in circumvention devices a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine — for a first offense.
Every three years, the US Copyright Office holds hearings on DMCA 1201, in which they entertain petitions to allow users of locked devices to bypass those locks (yes, you have to ask the US government for permission to reconfigure your own property, and yes, mostly, the answer is “no”).
In the 2017 edition of these exemption hearings, John Deere filed a stunning brief with the Copyright Office: in it, they explained that farmers do not own the tractors they spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on.
In fact, the farmers can’t own these tractors, because the software that animates these tractors (and enforces VIN locks and restrictions on using your own data) belongs to John Deere for the full term of copyright — 90 years — and the farmers merely license that code, and they are bound by the terms of service they have to click “OK” on every time they switch on their ignitions.
Those terms specify that even if a farmer repairs their own tractor, swapping a broken part for a working one, they must pay hundreds of dollars and wait for days for an authorized Deere technician to come out to the end of their lonely country road to key in an unlock code.
This is the system that let the Ukrainian Deere dealership brick those tractors between Melitopol and Chechnya.
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the author is a busy guy
Quote:
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, and blogger. He has a podcast, a newsletter, a Twitter feed, a Mastodon feed, and a Tumblr feed. He was born in Canada, became a British citizen and now lives in Burbank, California. His latest nonfiction book is How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. His latest novel for adults is Attack Surface. His latest short story collection is Radicalized. His latest picture book is Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest YA novel is Pirate Cinema. His latest graphic novel is In Real Life. His forthcoming books include Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid (with Rebecca Giblin), a book about artistic labor market and excessive buyer power; Red Team Blues, a noir thriller about cryptocurrency, corruption and money-laundering (Tor, 2023); and The Lost Cause, a utopian post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias (Tor, 2023).
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