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John Deere will pay farmers $99 million over right-to-repair lawsuit (www.theverge.com)

submitted 2 days ago by lemmydev2@infosec.pub to c/pulse_of_truth@infosec.pub

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John Deere has agreed to pay farmers $99 million to resolve a class action lawsuit that accused the agricultural giant of preventing farmers and mechanics from accessing the materials needed to repair equipment, as reported earlier by Reuters. As part of the proposed settlement, John Deere says it will make repair resources available for a […]

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[–] CannonFodder@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's very real. I ran a small high tech company for a while. We had to sell off our products to larger companies because we couldn't handle supporting all the hacks people did to our stuff. We purposefully made it accessible, because that seemed to be good. But then users hit so many corner cases when they try to do weird shit with the product. And if you don't support their own crap on your product, they give you bad word of mouth. Sucks, but there it is. I don't know what the solution is.

[–] prime_number_314159@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago

What you are describing sounds very, very different from the hacking (and repairs) when it comes to John Deere tractors. The repairs are almost purely replacement or refurbishment of mechanical, hydraulic, and/or electric assemblies that comprise the machine. Meanwhile, the hacking is primarily using software to gain access to diagnostic information from the onboard computer.

This is a case where John Deere could eliminate very nearly 100% of the motivation to hack their tractors by letting their customers have access to the data created and stored by the machine they bought.

Conversely, as far as I understand it, if someone modified your product in an unintended way, in contravention to your instructions, you would have been within your legal rights to refuse them repairs as long as their changes caused the damage (or prevent the repairs). This is true whether or not what they did constituted "hacking" in a technical sense.