#SolarStorm#GPS#Farming#JohnDeere: "The solar storm that brought the aurora borealis to large parts of the United States this weekend also broke critical GPS and precision farming functionality in tractors and agricultural equipment during a critical point of the planting season, 404 Media has learned. These outages caused many farmers to fully stop their planting operations for the moment.
One chain of John Deere dealerships warned farmers that the accuracy of some of the systems used by tractors are “extremely compromised,” and that farmers who planted crops during periods of inaccuracy are going to face problems when they go to harvest, according to text messages obtained by 404 Media and an update posted by the dealership. The outages highlight how vulnerable modern tractors are to satellite disruptions, which experts have been warning about for years."
If you own an Alexa, you might enjoy its integration with #IFTTT, an easy scripting environment that lets you create your own little voice-controlled apps, like "start my Roomba" or "close the garage door." If so, tough shit, Amazon just nuked IFTTT for Alexa:
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But when we hear about remote killswitches in the news, it's usually part of a PR blitz for their virtues. Russia's invasion of Ukraine kicked off a new genre of these PR pieces, celebrating the fact that a #JohnDeere dealership was able to remotely brick looted tractors that had been removed to Chechnya:
When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the #enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.
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#JohnDeere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and then uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:
#RightToRepair has no cannier, more dedicated adversary than #apple whose most innovative work is dreaming up new ways to sneakily sabotage repair while claiming to be a caring environmental steward, a lie that covers up the mountains of #ewaste that Apple dooms our descendants to wade through.
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VIN locking is everywhere. It's how #JohnDeere stops farmers from fixing their own tractors - something farmers have done literally since tractors were invented:
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare - but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.
And of course, it's in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about #JohnDeere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they'd been relocated to Russia?
„Wer ein Fahrrad des niederländischen Herstellers besitzt, muss um die Funktionalität seines Vanmoof-Rades bangen. Viele Funktionen sind an die Server des Herstellers gebunden. Konkurrent Bikey hat eine iOS-App entwickelt, mit der sich die E-Bikes weiterhin nutzen lassen.“
Great news!: #Colorado sides with farmers securing their #RightToRepair their -very-expensive equipment rather than wait for and pay for locked-in, proprietary services.
This is movement is gathering momentum: "10 other states have introduced similar legislation, including in Florida, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, Texas and Vermont."