Hacker jailbreaks control unit that stops farmers repairing their tractors, then runs Doom on it

[.wil]

While the mainstream reacted with disgust to the BMW stuff, anyone who's ever been near a farm probably wasn't so surprised: farming equipment has been screwing them like this for decades. The biggest firm in the agricultural manufacturing field is John Deere, which makes all kinds of machinery that runs on the company's proprietary software: which both monitors farmers extremely closely and force them to involve John Deere whenever there's a problem. These tractors are designed so that farmers can't fix problems themselves.

This is on one level a nasty monopoly practice, but the implications of it are much wider. There's the simple fact that a huge amount of the world's food supply depends on John Deere equipment, and so any large-scale software problems could be catastrophic. John Deere itself might not have any plans to do such a thing, but then again it did recently show it could 'brick' Ukrainian farming equipment stolen by the Russians. The scarier prospect is that so much of the farming industry depends on John Deere keeping its systems secure from bad actors.

Hacker jailbreaks control unit that stops farmers repairing their tractors, then runs Doom on it

John Deere manufactures equipment that it keeps an extraordinarily tight grip on.

www.pcgamer.com

b-b-b-b-based!

 

[Corpsefriedchicken]

Honestly, I'm just letting it sink in that we need fucking Smart Tractors.

 

[weedville]

 

[Raddy]

Honestly, I'm just letting it sink in that we need fucking Smart Tractors.

Its mostly GPS stuff for the bigger ops for keeping rows in line and to program sprayers n depth of plow blades etc. I know the bigger harvesters use different computer modules they swap out depending on what they're harvesting.
I didn't realize John Deere was that shitty but im not surprised.

 

[Call Me Tim]

John Deere has been doing this for years now. They put in some sort of "stop" code which is to prevent farmers from conducting repairs on their equipment. From what I understood it was a "Check Engine Light" on steroids. I think it shut down the machine until a Deere Tech reset it and serviced the equipment.

Whenever companies do proprietary shit like this: Compaq, IBM, etc., it often spells their own demise.