This 8-year-old young man is an absolute gem! His name is Jackson and he lives in Indiana, and he truly and deeply loves farming and farm equipment. The Farm4Profit podcast describes him as "your farming grandpa, reincarnated" and explains that he is "known for his quick-witted comments and knowledge of tractors, farming, trucks, and more!" — Read the rest
John Deere must heere a right-to-repair lawsuit filed against it by customers sick of its efforts to prevent them repairing their own equipment, reports Reuters. The agricultural giant John Deere wanted to dismiss claims (pdf) alleging that it operates a monopoly through its products and the ability to service them. — Read the rest
John Deere, makers of farm machinery and vehicles, applies copyright law to make it illegal to repair your own equipment. After years of debate, anger and hacking, the company now promises to allow users to do so without voiding warranties or facing the prospect of legal action. — Read the rest
John Deere uses DRM to prevent its own customers from repairing their own vehicles, pushing them to use the company's own overpriced service options. A new jailbreak for the systems announced this weekend at DEFCON by Sick Codes restores a measure of ownership to the owners. — Read the rest
When the law comes calling Dusty Mobley takes off. The second time was the charm for the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office, as Mobley managed a less creative but more effective getaway the last time they came calling.
— Read the restAt around 9:30 a.m.
Willie Cade's grandfather Theo Cade was one of John Deere's most storied engineers, with 158 patents to his name; he invented the manure spreader and traveled the country investigating stories of how farmers were using, fixing, modifying and upgrading their equipment; today, Willie Cade is the founder of the Electronics Reuse Conference, having spent a quarter-century repairing electronics, diverting e-waste from landfills and rehabilitating it for use by low-income schools and individuals.
As I wrote last week, the California Farm Bureau (which lobbies for the state's farmers) struck a deal to gut the state's Right to Repair legislation, a move that will cost farmers their right to fix their own tractors and other heavy equipment.
Farmers are the vanguard of the Right to Repair movement; accustomed as they are to fixing their own equipment (you can't wait for a repair tech when the tractor doesn't work — as the saying goes, you have to make hay while the sun shines), they were outraged when companies like John Deere started using DRM to pick their pockets, creating tractors whose engines wouldn't recognize a new part until they paid a tech a few hundred dollars to drive out in a day or two and key an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard.
John Deere has turned itself into the poster-child for the DMCA, fighting farmers who say they want to fix their own tractors and access their data by saying that doing so violates the 1998 law's prohibition on bypassing copyright locks.
Tim O'Bryant, aka Cotontop3, is a logger in Mississippi who vlogs daily. In this episode, he uses the pincers on his log loader to toss leftovers from log bucking, which takes a surprising amount of dexterity.
John Deere is notorious for arguing that farmers who buy its tractors actually "license" them because Deere still owns the copyright to the tractors' software; in 2015, the US Copyright Office affirmed that farmers were allowed to jailbreak their tractors to effect repairs and modifications.
Rick Friday has been the editorial cartoonist for Farm News for 21 years, with a weekly slot in every Friday's paper.
John Deere freaked out over a a petition to the Copyright Office to let tractor owners break the DRM on their vehicles in order to diagnose and fix them.
Last year, hell froze over as Apple supported a (weak) right-to-repair law in California. This year, it thawed out. Apple is opposing a decent right-to-repair law in Oregon.
What is this? Cold feet? Waffling? Tech-flavored HyperNormalization?
— Read the restTwo words: parts pairing.
Signed a year ago but effective immediately! New York has just become to first state to implement broad, mandatory right-to-repair legislation for consumer products. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, if you can't fix what you bought, you don't own it. — Read the rest
Earlier this month, the Clough Community Vision Committee in Portlaoise, Ireland held a fundraiser to help them build a new community center, with the grand prize being a brand new John Deere tractor worth €100,000. There was some confusion, however, when the winning name was pulled from the raffle ball in front of a crowd at a local pub on St. — Read the rest
So much for Ron DeSantis' tough-guy act against Disney, in which the petty governor crowed about "punishing" the company that opposed his Don't Say Gay bill. His bigoted retaliation antics — dissolving Disney's Reedy Creek Improvement District — turned out to be a bite with no teeth, leaving "most of the district's special powers intact," according to Tampa Bay Times. — Read the rest
$5m worth of new farm vehicles somehow made their way from a Russian-occupied city in Ukraine to Chechnya. Whoever expected to enjoy the plunder sadly found that the vehicles were inoperable, having been remotely disabled by the manufacturer.
— Read the restSome of the machinery was taken to a nearby village, but some of it embarked on a long overland journey to Chechnya more than 700 miles away.
Farmers are increasingly sick of high-tech tractors that are expensive to buy and usually impossible to fix yourself due to their integrated digital technology. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, "Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days." — Read the rest
Captain Elle Ekman is a US Marine Corps logistics officer; in a New York Times op-ed, she describes how the onerous conditions imposed by manufacturers on the US armed forces mean that overseas troops are not permitted to fix their own mission-critical gear, leaving them stranded and disadvantaged.
