In what looks like a victory for farmers in the United States, the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) has struck a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with equipment vendor John Deere regarding the repairability of its machines. As farming has become … Continue reading
Last Saturday, I sat in a crowded ballroom at Caesar’s Forum in Las Vegas and watched Sickcodes jailbreak a John Deere tractor’s control unit live, before an audience of cheering Defcon 30 attendees (and, possibly, a few undercover Deere execs, … Continue reading
farmers around the world have turned to tractor hacking so they can bypass the digital locks that manufacturers impose on their vehicles. Like insulin pump “looping” and iPhone jailbreaking, this allows farmers to modify and repair the expensive equipment that’s … Continue reading
A class action lawsuit filed in Chicago has accused John Deere of running an illegal repair monopoly. The lawsuit alleged that John Deere has used software locks and restricted access to repair documentation and tools, making it very difficult for … Continue reading
Web sites for customers of agricultural equipment maker John Deere contained vulnerabilities that could have allowed a remote attacker to harvest sensitive information on the company’s customers including their names, physical addresses and information on the Deere equipment they own … Continue reading
Congress has released the final version of the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and critics have been quick to point out that previously proposed rules giving the US military the right to repair its equipment without having to rely … Continue reading
[…] three white-hat hackers helped a regional rail company in southwest Poland unbrick a train that had been artificially rendered inoperable by the train’s manufacturer after an independent maintenance company worked on it. The train’s manufacturer is now threatening to … Continue reading
The combine harvester, a staple of farmers’ fields since the late 1800s, does much more these days than just vacuum up corn, soybeans and other crops. It also beams back reams of data to its manufacturer. GPS records the combine’s … Continue reading
A person’s “right to repair” their own equipment may well become a US election issue, with presidential candidate Bernie Sanders making it a main talking point during his tour of Iowa. “Are you ready for something truly insane?” the veteran … Continue reading
Today, the EU held a routine vote on regulations for self-driving cars, when something decidedly out of the ordinary happened… The autonomous vehicle rules contained a clause that affirmed that “data generated by autonomous transport are automatically generated and are … Continue reading
In a field of sugar beet in Switzerland, a solar-powered robot that looks like a table on wheels scans the rows of crops with its camera, identifies weeds and zaps them with jets of blue liquid from its mechanical tentacles. … Continue reading
What began with printers and spread to phones is coming to everything: this kind of technology has proliferated to smart thermostats (no apps that let you turn your AC cooler when the power company dials it up a couple degrees), … Continue reading