If you've never gone down a rabbit hole of watching tractor videos, that may change after watching tractors topping tulips or planting potatoes on Tractorspotter:

I'm keynoting the O'Reilly Security Conference in New York in Oct/Nov, so I stopped by the O'Reilly Security Podcast (MP3) to explain EFF's Apollo 1201 project, which aims to kill all the DRM in the world within a decade.

In spring, 2015, American farmers started to spread the word that John Deere claimed that a notorious copyright law gave the company exclusive dominion over repairs to Deere farm-equipment, making it a felony (punishable by 5 years in prison and a $500K fine for a first offense) to fix your own tractor.

The agricultural sector is increasingly a data-driven business, where the "internet of farming" holds out the promise of highly optimized plowing, fertilizing, sowing, pest-management and harvesting — a development that is supercharging the worst practices of the ag-business monopolies that have been squeezing farmers for most of a century.

Bruce Schneier explains the short, terrible history of the Internet of Things, in which companies were lured to create proprietary lock-ins for their products because the DMCA, a stupid 1998 copyright law, gave them the power to sue anyone who made a product that connected to theirs without permission.

Motherboard's Jason Koebler follows Kyle Wiens around the Electronics Reuse Conference — Burning Man for the service-people who fix your phones, laptops, and other devices — in New Orleans. Wiens is founder and CEO of Ifixit, whose mission is to tear down every single thing you own, write a repair manual for it, and source or manufacture the parts you need to fix it yourself.

Matt Reimer's homebrew autonomous tractor uses open source components to accomplish the kind of automation that John Deere's super-proprietary tractors are known for.

Every three years, the Librarian of Congress allows the public to request exemptions to a law that makes it a felony to break a digital lock, even on on a device that you own, and which you are breaking for a lawful purpose. For the past year, public interest groups have been spending their scarce money and resources writing petitions to the Copyright Office, arguing that people who own devices with computers in them should have the same property rights as they do in their non-computerized devices: the right to open, change, and improve the things they own in lawful ways.

If you've wondered why it matters that the Internet of Things is being born with the inkjet printer business model, here's why.

GM has joined with John Deere in asking the government to confirm that you literally cannot own your car because of the software in its engine.

Just days after the Senate rejected the Obama administration's bid to fast-track the secretive Trans-Pacific Partnership, they've backtracked, and now they're getting ready to rush fast-track through.

The FBI wants backdoors in all your crypto, and UK Prime Minister David Cameron made backdoors an election promise, but as Stanford lawyer/computer scientist Jonathan Mayer writes, there's no way to effectively backdoor modern platforms without abolishing the whole idea of computers as we know them, replacing them with an imaginary and totalitarian computing ecosystem that does not exist and probably never will.

In the wake of John Deere's claims that the software in its engines means that its farm equipment is "licensed," not "sold," I talked to the Globe and Mail about what digital locks mean for the idea of property in the 21st century.

Ifixit's Kyle Wiens writes about the state of modern farm equipment, "black boxes outfitted with harvesting blades," whose diagnostic modes are jealously guarded, legally protected trade secrets, meaning that the baling-wire spirit of the American farm has been made subservient to the needs of multinational companies' greedy desire to control the repair and parts markets.

Author Mark Dery charts America's ecocidal obsession with nice grass

Kevin McFarland reviews episode 6 in season 1 of HBO's crime drama "True Detective," starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. If you're new to the show, start with our introduction here. This post contains spoilers.

(Reuters)

The Atlantic has a list of the 31 advertisers on this morning's episode of the Rush Limbaugh show. I just put my Netflix account on hold, and will cancel it if they continue to sponsor the program. I'm also going to trade in my John Deere tractor for a Caterpillar. — Read the rest

Peggy Munson is the author of "Fairgrounds," a short story in my new Erotic Treasury.

Peggy's story is about a group of young perverts who work at the circus. Their world is informed by lifelong genderfuck and the profound physical disabilities of a couple of the main characters:

"This is not one of those postmodern Canadian sideshows," [Daddy Billy] warned, "with adorable, tumbling twins.

The latest thing in "experience" funerals is a Harley Hearse from Milwaukee's Krause Funeral Home — it joins a host of specialty funeral options available around the world, including "farmers being pulled to their rest by John Deere tractors" and "cremation urns that look like tear-drop motorcycle gas tanks." — Read the rest