Farmers need cypherpunk help too

[grarpamp]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware

Right to Repair
Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware

A dive into the thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking.

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they
buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their
equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on
invite-only, paid online forums.
Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and
other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized"
repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their
sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their
livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.
"When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don't have
time to wait for a dealership employee to show up and fix it," Danny
Kluthe, a hog farmer in Nebraska, told his state legislature earlier
this month. "Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to
fix]."
The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over
again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut
down a tractor and there wouldn't be anything a farmer could do about
it.
A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October
forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and
prevents farmers from suing for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of
goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or
non-performance of any aspect of the software." The agreement applies
to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor
with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and
"authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.
"If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he
wants with it," Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in
Nebraska, told me. "You want to replace a transmission and you take it
to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the
tractor can't drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an
hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB
port to authorize the part."
"What you've got is technicians running around here with cracked
Ukrainian John Deere software that they bought off the black market,"
he added.

"I take the hog waste and run it through an anaerobic digester and
I've learned to compress the methane," he said. "I run an 80 percent
methane in my Chevy Diesel Pickup and I run 90 percent methane in my
tractor. And they both purr. I take a lot of pride in working on my
equipment."
"What happens in 20 years when there's a new tractor out and John
Deere doesn't want to fix these anymore?"