New John Deere Jailbreak Law Helps Farmers Reform

A new jailbreak code for John Deere tractors was revealed Saturday at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas, It is the latest tool in right to repair The movement struggles to make everything more durable and sustainable.

Farmers are accustomed to repairing what’s broken with their own hands, but manufacturers intentionally put locks in the tractor’s program to prevent unauthorized repairs. The The company promised to simplify thingsbut didn’t make an effort until March of this year. But there was always a choice: you can Tractor breakthrough And bypass only security tokens held by merchants.

Expert hacker Sick Codes spoke about John Deere’s vulnerabilities at DefCon last year. After John Deere used his work to plug some security holes, farmers’ reaction was less than positive, according to him wired:

“The right-to-reform side was a little bit opposing what I was trying to do,” he told WIRED magazine. I heard from some farmers. One person emailed me and was saying “You broke all of our stuff!” So I thought I’d put my money where my mouth is and prove to the farmers that they can access the hardware.”

This year, Sick Codes says that while he is primarily concerned with global food security and the exposure that comes from poor farming equipment, he also sees important value in allowing farmers to have complete control of their own equipment. “Free the tractors!” He says.

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“Farmers prefer old equipment just because they want reliability. They don’t want things to go wrong in the most important part of the year when they have to pull things off the ground,” says Sick Codes. “That’s what we should all want, too. We want farmers to be able to fix their stuff when things go wrong, and that now means being able to fix or make program decisions on their tractors.”

Since Sick Codes first released its research on tractors in 2021, the Right to Fix movement has also scored quite a few wins, such as wired pointed out:

After years of wrangling in the United States over the “right to repair” the equipment one buys, the movement appears to have reached a turning point. The White House issued executive order Last year, the Federal Trade Commission directed the a plus enforcement efforts on practices such as voiding warranties for external repair. This, along with New York State pass The Right to Reform and Creativity Law Activist pressureIt generated an unprecedented momentum for the movement.

click to access wired For the full story, including how Sick Codes hacked the whole thing