whoa talk linked didn't see that one coming
no especially with you here again that's the biggest surprise but the topic for
this video is john deere tractors and
them actually getting a a jailbreak thanks to a hacker uh that was shown off
at defcon let me show you boom nope boom this is
what i've always wanted is farmers playing
video games out on the field well but that's why
this is kind of uh very interesting because
we've seen that this has been sort of like a meme like doom
someone installs doom on a pregnancy test someone installs doom on a fridge
on like a tiny little lego brick or whatever and so i think that there was
there was a tendency for some outlets this was interesting because we covered
in in tech link the other day some outlets reported on this and they were
just like whoa doom another wacky
guy installed doom on a funny thing then there were other outlets like uh ars
technica reposting a wired article
um and others that were able to see this
for what it is which is a significant moment in the right to repair
issue and the reason why i brought you on jonathan why because you're an apple
guy yeah and yeah uh apple loves locking down
hardware in the same way that john deere has
yeah but there's an argument to be made
for john deere but you would even say that i'm gonna
make that argument well i don't know probably not
but see this is why i asked you before we started recording i was like how do
you feel about iphones and jailbreaking yeah and you were like i joke what did
you i i tried i did attempt to jailbreak an iphone once in my life yes this was
to get iOS 6 on my iphone 5. um and uh it was
it was just way more work than it was worth like what i mean i mean you could talk
about the way it's locked down like it'd be really nice to be able to install an
older version of an os on on an iphone because you can do that on a mac if the
mac did support that version you can do that on basically every other type of
hardware so um but you can't do an iphone because they
they they they sign it with their servers and so if you try to install an
old version it just won't it won't it won't work so like i i was like just
trying to get it to work and it still was like it was like a temporary fix in that if i
rebooted the iphone it would just go back to oh just like some of those are things so
like they make it hard they make it really hard and for someone like me uh
not with it right because it's worth it for other people
you know i see i appreciate the work other people have done to do it because
it's um i think it shows vulnerabilities that can get fixed um it allows for a little
bit of invention i think especially in the early days of the
iphone you saw a lot of um ideas and features that people wrote for
jailbroken iphones actually trickle into iOS
um and so um i'm not against it in the in like a
really military way you're not against it from the perspective of like people
should have a right to do this of course yeah you're not like oh you're i should
i should be out there fighting right to repair legislation oh like no no but i'm
not a lobbyist but i think what i did i thought it was be it would be people to
do that get paid to that's true that's true i mean like
handsome and it's been interesting to see the right to repair movement because
i don't i can't think of anyone who like
any real people other than these like corporate lobbyists who would actually
oppose it yeah like no no no no we trust us we don't know what we're doing
but like you know it's funny because you see you see the like the things that these
lobbyists say and they're like it's less about oh people can't be trusted to
to to repair their things it's more about like if you if you enact these these
these legislations that will give uh consumers more rights to repair their
own stuff without having to deal with like authorized services or whatever
that will inhibit the ability of companies like apple or john deere
whatever to you know have tight security and like
protect against hackers and protect and and
you know quickly execute uh repair measures that
they need to do or like whatever so it's like that you know that's fair yeah
there's a perspective there yeah but it's
you know when you actually talk to people on the ground you see that it's basically only the perspective
perspective of these lobbyists well i mean as i was thinking about
uh where this topic could go um in the half hour i had to prepare um
you had more because it took me almost half hour to set up i was thinking about
my experience recently with the uh apple self-serve repair program which we did a
video on Mac Address uh go check it out it's very good um uh surprise ending um
you haven't watched it when did that come out a couple weeks ago anyway so
i was on vacation a couple weeks ago and you knew that but you never subscribed
to Mac Address clearly so i am subscribed suffice to say on TechLinked one of the
one of the most annoying there's a lot of annoying things about it like it's
great you can buy the tools to fix the iphone or you can rent the tools and
like they're really cool tools and they do the job and they help you open up
your iphone safely and easily and properly but
uh they have a system configuration
system where if you replace the screen or you replace the battery or a couple
of other parts you have to go through this rigmarole to tell the phone that
this is an official screen right and it's so annoying i took like multiple
chat sessions and i mean i think we may have broken the volume button on the
phone so i couldn't actually go into diagnostics mode blah blah blah blah
um but we got it to work but i was just thinking about like why does it have to
be that way why can't it just be as simple as just transparency uh of the
display manufacturer that's found in the about page like if you were to get a screen on your old desktop computer
you'd know that you bought a viewsonic and it was right right and
and it's just like literally in front of you right right so why can't that be done on on a phone like what's well you
know exactly that's the question right and i feel like uh ifixit has done a great job
of working with i think they've worked with google and
samsung microsoft maybe some other people as well did they i think there
was some sort of partnership with apple as well well it could be that like i
fixed a consulted apple apple's like what do you think we should do and i physically said do all these things in
apple's like i think it was more that where you know apple kind of sees the
the winds blowing here where okay this right to repair thing is important uh
you know the u.s president biden did an executive order last year in 2021 yeah
we talked about this a little bit before the show that wasn't like legislation
that's just him saying hey regulatory people
let's get some right to prepare you in this case
right to repair specifically was for agriculture in that executive order and
i'm just at the fact sheet here it says encourages
the ftc to limit powerful equipment manufacturers from restricting people's ability to use independent repair shops
or do diy repairs such as when tractor companies block farmers from repairing
their own tractors i think it said such like that was the example given but i
think that he also talked about electronics in a different thing maybe
but anyways regardless what he said applies broadly to you know just it
should apply bro yeah companies who do these kind of things
um so back to the uh hacker installing doom
on a tractor yes um well no i think that's that's all part
of the conversation but i think the reason why this is so interesting and
why some people were just kind of like uh some people saw it as not just
another like wacky installing doom on something weird thing
is because john deere has been one of the you know as you said they were they were
basically not named by name or were they named by name in the executive order but they
were referred to yes large agricultural manufacturers
right so this has been a controversy for a
while and the best argument that i saw
against giving regular people access to these
systems is that instead of like it just being an iphone or something
it what you're dealing with is you know large powerful farming equipment yeah
with motorized spiky bits on them maybe i don't know
yeah i don't own a farm i i don't i
don't go on farms i did when i was a child
now i got another topic journey i was like because the other okay wait wait
wait let me finish my point so it's large powerful
farming equipment and i think i found this post back in 2017 because i think
uh there was sort of oh that's where this is from i thought this was recent yeah there was a burst of activity uh
talking about this stuff in 2017. there's also a vice article uh talking
about the uh the black market of john deere tractor hacking where you know
people took this into their own hands and maybe they weren't able to like
fully fully jailbreak or fully like get full access to it as uh as it appears
that this uh sick codes hacker has but
um yeah back in 2017 they were talking about it and this guy posted on a hacker
news uh y combinator uh actually i don't entirely know how this
site works anyways this guy says that he um used to work for john deere and he
worked on software yeah and that was his argument essentially that like listen
guys really dangerous these are not riding lawn mowers they are 30 ton
combines and 20 ton tractors tilling fields with massive horsepower behind
them they have real potential to end people's lives in the event of failure
and these tractors do in testing fail in spectacular ways if a team of a hundred
engineers struggle with their code code blaze codebase internally joe farmer oh
that's rude isn't going to have a effing clue how to repair their software
correctly now this was great because i was like
okay you know what that's a fair point yeah you don't want people killing
themselves with apple it's like
what are you scared of what are we scared of people like
letting a virus onto their iphone and whoopsies what i mean but this is like
consulting at least this argument kind of makes a makes a play for it's like
listen you're not playing around with toys these are important tools
see the thing about computers is what
they're really complicated machines think about computers is
binary code so i i mean i i remember car guys so i
you see this sort of thing you're a car guy i am a car guy that's i don't get it
but continue um and so you see this sort of thing with computers and cars and
like in the early days of of computation in cars it was like engine management
systems they were very closed systems they just figured out how to manage the
the cars ignition and whatever yeah and that was it
and then you start seeing the tech industries
move fast and break things culture sort of creep in
oh you know what you really want is over-the-air updates oh my gosh and i
just like i don't know about that and like does in the case of like john deere
tractors like this like what do you
why do we need all these firmware updates and why do you need to only go to the dealer for that
um yeah you know like right it's just so you're you're somebody who's more into
the like analog type of car situation like you know
well you don't like when you you don't like that they're basically turning cars
into like fancy uh cutting-edge tech products no i don't
like the culture of the of silicon
valley uh creeping the the bad aspects of the
culture of silicon valley creeping its way into into the in the way we interact
you would prefer you'd prefer cars to be a bit more of like a known known uh quad
i just i don't want known i don't wanna i i don't i don't want touchscreens
actually that's funny because i just saw an article today talking about uh some
study i didn't i just scrolled yeah yeah i saw it yes but it was like oh people
prefer or touch screens are they're basically
objectively worse than buttons oh yeah unbelievably so right so then the
question is like okay so the way silicon valley works and the way that
that structure is and how they interact with software and hardware blah blah
blah and that going into agriculture equipment like is
that's probably not a good thing right right but but you can see these
companies like john deere taking advantage of
of the structure for instance like the digital millennium copyright act and
that sort of thing and yeah yeah for doing it i see what you're
saying and then there's like greater consequences to that because it's not
just a phone this is like okay there is this argument that tractors are
dangerous and you know you shouldn't have the ability there anymore absolutely but but because
they should have they should they should be they don't need to like i don't know what's the updates for
the updates are so that you you can till
uh until two percent more crop
i mean honestly but like if that was an update i don't know if that's a real
update but uh because we just made it up just here but if that was a thing that
happened you know mate i can see farmers wanting that because they're like wait
if if i spend two percent less time doing a thing that's true it takes me
like hours to do yeah that i definitely like if you have some sort of like you
know whatever tilling management system like
um okay i should i have another thought so
when i was researching the ipad pro and i was scratching my head as to like
what's the professional use of this device yeah uh i was talking to colin
actually but uh he kind of showed me this farmer who had who uploaded videos
about like how he farms and he has an ipad and it was like really cool how
all this technology is working together where he showed the ipad screen and it
was basically showing exactly how he was how he was planting the seeds
on the field and you could like see and it like these things run
semi-autonomously as well like he just sits there and it's just going well you
can see like you can see you can see where the seeds go in and what seeds
didn't go in and so we could go back and check and like there's like a whole mapping system it's like
it's really cool saying harvest moon totally but like a really complicated
advanced version of that in the real world uh and like so there's like really cool
stuff uh there's really cool technology there
um which is really great and i guess there is a difficulty in terms of how does it
all interact with each other but um
i don't know like that's a use case that's that's a positive that is a
positive use case but this is what's going to be locked down completely exactly exactly so like after all
this this guy wrote this post he's like oh you don't you don't want to deal with
it it's too dangerous be so it should be locked down and honestly the first reply
posted on april 10th 2017 by plinkplunk
uh-huh uh a hero a hero in the in the industry have you heard of him before no
you've seen all those posts no but i like his name
um he's basically like listen that's you know that's fine but
the fact that things are locked down now means that
uh that farmers when things happen and they
need to fix their stuff they can only go to these authorized
guys and it's not these authorized dealers and it's not like your iphone
where you can just like book a genius appointment and use your laptop uh in
the meantime or lose or use your old phone or whatever and then like you know
just pop into the apple store and give it to the person and they fix it immediately you know this is a situation
where your your farming equipment has broken down it's sitting in the middle
of the field it costs apparently hundreds of dollars
just to get a service call in in some cases and then you're sitting there
waiting for the guy to show up to to take a look at it because only that
person has the like software capable to get into the the nitty-gritty with it
and try and fix the issue and that's just honestly as soon as i read that i
was like well okay that blows up the danger
argument then yeah because now the dangers crops going bad yeah and then
the other side of that is that i've seen lots of people saying listen
farmers have been dealing with dangerous farm equipment for hundreds thousands
whatever i don't know of years centuries at the very least yeah it's definitely
longer than that yeah that humans have been around i'd say but also like you
can develop and design uh fail-safes
and you can also you know develop and
design ways to make sure that simple
repairs are manageable i feel like printers
come to mind where a lot of the time
instead of either repairing their printer or taking it somewhere to repair
people just buy a new printer when their ink runs out now there are there are ways to get
around this obviously people have like you know fill your own ink cartridges
and some companies are better than others but uh yeah it's not just apple but i think
apple is such an interesting uh example because they are in the news
a lot we talk about them on our channel well just the biggest company yeah and i
think that they've they've put forward the argument again and again that we
know what's safe and good to run on our hardware and
you don't and so you need to rely on us apple has really high standards for the
products they want to make and they believe that by controlling the whole
aspect of it they can do a better job
and there have been examples where that has worked and there's been examples
where that hasn't worked um and so for instance they have really
high standards for the displays that are installed on iphones and like i can tell
if somebody's had their screen repaired with the less quality oh yeah yeah
really yeah and like this is good this takes back years like somebody with an iphone 4 i
remember looking at the screen i'm like oh you got your screen repaired i'm like
what how do you know so like you can you can eyeball that you can
eyeball it that's how that's so good that's how good the oem screens are
right but on the flip side if someone who doesn't
care about that wants to spin less to fix their screen because their phone's
four years old and they just want to get another year or two out of it yeah i i
don't see why that should be prevented you know it's interesting i feel like i
feel like we're coming into this era in the sort of like modern
technological internet age where
uh you know there was there was this golden era of like oh the internet is
this we we kind of talked about this on uh we did hackers on they're just movies
uh this week with luke and we talked about how you know when
the internet was first kind of arriving everyone was like wow it's this like new
technology it's gonna it's gonna level the playing field it's going to make it
so that people aren't uh you know discriminated against based on things
like race ethnicity age whatever skin color blah blah blah and you can choose
it in the meta version yeah well because because instead of like being yourself
on the internet you can be anyone and you can choose a handle and be anonymous
and blah blah and back then you know without our knowledge of today they were
like yeah this is going to be a lead to a utopia and now and then we
kind of went through this period of cynicism which we still are in i think
there's like a lot of noise it's just starting it's it it is
uh you know because the internet has been instead of being
this big open play uh field it's been splintered into these like corporatized
uh you know mini internets that interact with each other and that's yeah and the
metaverse is the next thing there but is it i'm saying in other ways like with
right to repair i think that there's like we're going past the phase
where companies have have had as you said used other
types of laws and other ways of thinking like the digital millennium copyright
act dmca and they're like hey wait if this is a
precedent we can use that to lock down our hardware over here
and we're coming past that a little bit now where i think the people are seeing
this and we're seeing legislation come up in america and canada and other
places that are like
actually now we kind of understand how this is working and we understand what
these companies are doing what we meant yeah yeah exactly exactly so now it's like
maybe we can start to create some sort of like common sense
legislation where it's like uh we've lost something in the
digitization of this stuff like there was this scenario where
farmers could go and like fix their own equipment because it was analog yeah and
then we tried to digitize everything and put pooters and everything yeah
and we realized wait a second
you can't turn everything into a computer and have it locked down in the same way that like people used to lock
down pc systems yeah yeah yeah now we're coming out the other side
this is hopeful hopefully well it seems like it seems like we are i mean no it's
there's been good movement um it's very slow very brittle um
but very brittle it is yeah it's just like you're just you're like is this
gonna well the way it works is gonna be lots of arguments
um and so i'm excited at the prospect but like it's
unless there's like real legislative change
if we go through all those court cases and blah blah blah blah blah it's gonna take forever and i guess it's still good
it's probably gonna take more time to considering like changes in the demographics of those
elected leaders who make write the laws yeah how their understandings of how
things work go and and then there are philosophies behind that
but um yeah we've just lived in and we're just we just that that techno
optimism from the early days of the internet and
even even computing was sort of taken advantage of it was to our uh detriment
those dang corporal corpo rats
i mean we all signed up for it was like oh wow this is so exciting it's all gonna be really great and then you're
like wait a minute what's going on yeah yeah and before you know it and then and then
you can do anything about it your metaverse citizen number
two three five six you were facebook user whatever like it was it was already
back then yeah like it was so um
it's just taking a long time i guess it is people to be like oh maybe this
doesn't matter i s but i see some but i see some hope uh like i mean this this
jailbreak for john deere equipment comes after john deere had already said like
they've been under pressure for a long time and i think they had already said
uh i think it said somewhere that john deere had
like pledged to make things easier yeah
sure where was it it's in here somewhere oh facing mounting pressure john deere
announced in march that it would make more of its repair software available to
equipment owners the company also said at the time they will release an
enhanced customer solution next year so it's like even john deere who is like
the worst uh example of this stuff has seen this
pressure and has relented a little bit but you know they're not moving fast
enough and this is what's so great about hacking this is another thing we talked
about on the podcast they're just movies subscribe today about hacking as a as a
thing i always thought of hackers as like bad you know obviously there are
white hat hackers and black hat and red hat and all these different types of
hackers but for the most part when people when you say the word hackers
most people in the world i think would think of like evil you know
trying to trying to steal money and stuff it is but like again back in the
90s hacking was this like cool new thing that if you were keeping up with the
developments and technology and stuff you could do things that other people couldn't do and it just came down to
what kind of a person you were if were you a bad person
or were you a good person and like trying to
uh trying to do this type of stuff
jailbreaking equipment so that cut con consumers have more power and are able
to counter these sort of like lockdown measures uh by i have something to show
you because we're running out of time but i thought you might be interested in
this technically we have two minutes this is kyleen's from ifixit he said
sick codes is jailbroken john deere and this is just the beginning turns out the
entire food system is built on outdated unpatched Linux and Windows ce hardware
with lte modems yeah remember Windows ce
i i don't but what do you
i well i guess like i could guess what it is but you don't even know Windows c
Windows ce it was at the like the tournament edition it was like it was
like installed in like palm pilots oh yeah yeah yeah okay i used that my
brother had one of those hit a Windows pocket yeah with Windows on it i was
like this is the coolest thing in the world i had a Windows mobile phone which was like a long drive the last Windows
ce and it was the worst phone in the whole of human history
so this is very reassuring combined was super cool i played snake on there oh
nice i did have a palm pilot with palm os that was much better but the tweet is
is interesting because it as you said
yeah it indicates that like oh once we realize this kind of stuff yeah
it's like you know it's like i mean it's like learning your honda infotainment is is like Android 4.
yeah you're like oh great uh what do i do with this i'm dead
if anyone gets access to this but honda's engine management and the
infotainment are split off sure but more importantly okay you you might see that
and you're like oh no i'm vulnerable but at the same time it's like oh sweet this
is vulnerable i can hack it and do what i want with it because it's it's harder
than i can figure it out um last thing in conclusion is that biden
made this executive order it seems like that has kind of like and and also
pressure from like grassroots uh organizations like louis rossman
obviously yeah uh is has done a big push on this and we talked about uh cause
that he's uh focusing on now more on the WAN Show so he's still focusing on that
uh canada apparently has a couple right to repair bills but like they seem to be
really specific like there's one that's technic oh
sorry this one was talking about tpm's and i thought they was talking about the
trusted platform modules on Windows on uh
x86 hardware which is like a Windows 11 requirement yeah
but this canadian bill that i found bill
c-272 which uh was passed through
the second reading i don't know exactly what that means even uh of our own government
i'm not sure uh but it's not talking about trusted platform modules it's talking about
technological protection measures so that could be anything oh i'm reading
one about like the convention of the copyright act for repairing
okay is that a canada thing yeah yeah well this one is apparently talking
about more broad things as well firmware restrictions encryption
so anyways the point is that the tides are changing
and i guess really slowly apple
is is not as good as as Android after all
you later i wouldn't say just kidding thanks for watching
i'm trying to end the episode jonathan and i'm trying to there is
we don't have a standardized way to end talk linked so this is here's what you
do you just start editing in like some music
they're playing my own channel is playing me off yeah
i'm believing you can do that that's the magic of subscribe subscribe to mac
address please and thank you and see you later