6 ms·

Companies generally don't want you in the software for safety reasons. While true there is intellectual property around the guidance and swath generating algor

• Lxr 9y ago
  That's a poor argument in my opinion. Should my washing machine have no serviceable parts because I might electrocute myself?
  • eksu 9y ago
    OP was talking about tractors software and machines that can run people over and kill them, not washing machines or serviceable parts.
    • jdc 9y ago
      I agree; unlike washing machines, apparently, these tractors are made to be unserviceable.
    • vvanders 9y ago
      Yup, tractors and most farm equipment are fucking dangerous. Even the compact/subcompacts regularly maim/kill people. I can totally understand wanting to minimize every possible new vector.
    • ravenstine 9y ago
      Shouldn't that liability come with owning the device? I don't understand how we've come to think, as a legal system, that the maker of a tool is responsible for the behavior of modifications made to their tool. Maybe that's not even true, but it seems to be believed so. If it is, I find it preposterous. Perhaps there's some money to follow. Washing machines can malfunction and cause fires, hypothetically. Just because one device is designed in a way that is particularly dangerous doesn't mean the same reasoning can't be applied to another device that is dangerous to a lesser degree.
      • userbinator 9y ago
        Washing machines can malfunction and cause fires, hypothetically. Not just hypothetically: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12610218 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12610218 Mind you, those were unmodified so the maker does take the blame; but if the cause is known, modifications can make them safer too.
        • randomdata 9y ago
          > modifications can make them safer too. Very much this! I have a large agricultural tractor that has a transmission controlled by software. While it works great most of the time, there is a bug where it will occasionally not disengage the clutch for about a minute when this condition occurs. One time, due to the tractor showing no signs of going anywhere, I accidentally left the tractor in gear and left the cab. Everything seemed fine until about a minute later when it finally kicked into gear and started moving with me standing beside it. Fortunately, I happened to be in a low gear and was just creeping along when it started moving. I was able to get back in it and get it stopped. If it had been going faster, who knows how bad the outcome could have been. This is something I would be fixing if I had access to the code.
          • emcrazyone 9y ago
            hmm, sounds suspicious, in that the seat sensor was disabled? Even our vehicles won't move, when in gear if no one is in the seat. Seat senors cut the drive train. Even my 15 year old el-cheap-o Sears garden tractor does the same thing: cuts the engine off if I stand up out of the seat while in gear.
    • zeth___ 9y ago
      Anything with mains power can set your house on fire.
  • cortesoft 9y ago
    No, but both the law and morality are allowed to utilize thresholds for determining acceptable risks; we weigh the risk of someone hurting themselves or others against the benefit of allowing people the ability to modify the hardware. Obviously we will all have different opinions about the relative value of risk vs freedom, but we should be able to settle on some median for how we value each. No matter what, it isn't the case that aggreeing with the idea that some machines are so dangerous we should prevent modification of the software forces us to agree that we are right to prevent modification of software on machines that have any danger at all.
• jdc 9y ago
  Name two suits where someone argued that Alice is liable for what happens when Bob modifies her product.
  • ryanmarsh 9y ago
    I don't think your response is fair because even if those suits haven't been filed yet you can't honestly say that you know for certain they won't ever in the future. The concern is legitimate.
    • jjoonathan 9y ago
      The possibility that a large company might have to fight and win a lawsuit is not a plausible and certainly not an acceptable excuse for destroying the repairability of their products.
      • ryanmarsh 9y ago
        Yes I believe that is one pillar of the argument. The other is whether or not companies are using reparability (or lack thereof) to increase revenue or protect channels.
      • emcrazyone 9y ago
        it's not and you're right. The right to repair effects agricultural equipment. Hacking the software to add features or disable things is not repairing it!
• mindslight 9y ago
  This is indeed one of the specific instantiations of the generic single-actor control-delusion that has always been with us, but has been greatly exacerbated by the rise of software. And I've no doubt that it's enough to keep the engineers' cognitive dissonance stoked - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" plus a bit of ego stroking from the implication that being able to work on this particular code is really special. But it's utterly fallacious. It's quite clear that if certain changes result in different behavior, then whomever made those specific changes is responsible for the resulting behavior. About the only leg the argument can stand on is if the code is so sloppy that someone attempting to make a simple change tickles a bug somewhere else, but enabling such lack of quality to persist is the exact wrong approach for a safety-critical system! Furthermore, regardless of its actual merit, this is precisely the kind of Schelling point collusion that is in the collective interest to bust up. "Selling" someone a piece of capital equipment that is deliberately designed to prevent its own servicing is plainly fraudulent.
  • justonepost 9y ago
    Very well said, but I still like the poignant - "All professions are conspiracies against the laity” (George Bernard-Shaw), which is likely based on Adam Smith's earlier writing: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
  • vvanders 9y ago
    Except that tractors are more dangerous than your car/appliance/whatever. You'd be amazed the amount of carnage running a brushhog at 1000rpm will do when it was designed at 540rpm. They will happily throw the 3-4 foot blade right though 1/2in steel up to 300-400ft in whatever direction the wind takes them. When that process is controlled by software all it takes is flipping the wrong high order bit in the PTO controller. On a manual tractor it's very clear when the PTO lever is in 1000rpm vs 540rpm(and usually on a separate lever from engagement) vs an opaque software stack.
    • 9y ago
• userbinator 9y ago
  or calibration changes cause engine to to over-heat and burn up and generally the company is held responsible for it This happens not-too-infrequently in the car modding/tuning world --- the former, that is; to my knowledge no one has blamed the original manufacturer, much less successfully sued, after him/herself modding the ECU of a car and blowing up the engine. Don't forget that a lot of other safety-critical components of cars (e.g. brakes, tires, etc.) have aftermarket replacements --- many of which actually perform better than stock. If this "safety" attitude was prevalent since the beginning, we'd have cars that can only use approved fuel, no aftermarket parts would exist at all (their manufacturers being sued out of existence), and it'd be illegal to drive them on roads not approved by the manufacturer. I will resist the urge to post that famous Benjamin Franklin quote this time.
  • SteveGerencser 9y ago
    We already have tractors that are required to use only factory oil. The use of any other oil voids the powertrain warranty.
    • mrguyorama 9y ago
      Voiding the warranty is perfectly fine. I don't think it's the burden of Deere to support aftermarket modifications. The current situation however is more like the tractor bricking itself and never working again if you attempt to open the oil reservoir yourself, without the per-requisite authenticated repairman keys
  • emcrazyone 9y ago
    Tractors & Combines are way more expensive than cars so it's not a fair comparison. You can't use a cherry picker to replace a tractor engine... At least the large kind. Tractors and Combines use DEF and I hear reports of people defeating it. Our software has checks to look for such activity.
• petre 9y ago
  The solution to this is obviously simple: just require hacked tractors to remove all branding and void the warranty once it's been hacked. Also include a liability waiver so that if someone tampers with the software or hardware, the company can not be held liable anymore.
• bo1024 9y ago
  I won't say the safety argument is meritless. But it is not the whole story. Companies also use software to exert control over users and extract more money. By moving functionality from hardware into software, they can use both secrecy and laws like DMCA to restrict users' knowledge, ability, and rights to repair and modify their stuff. The safety argument only makes any sense because so much of the system has moved from hardware into software, and this often makes the product worse, not better (e.g. your Jeep example). Compared to hardware, software is brittle, unreliable, complicated, and exploitable. However, it allows for the feature creep that marketers love and, perhaps as a byproduct or perhaps not, it transfers legal and operational control from the "owner" to the manufacturer. If you are as committed to user freedom and well-being as you are to safety, then I urge you to modularize your vehicle design so that the safety-critical software you describe, such as auto-guidance, is completely separate from software used to, e.g., diagnose and repair mechanical problems. Then you can keep restrictions around the first kind but not the second. It sounds like, based on frustration with John Deere, you may be rewarded by the marketplace.
  • emcrazyone 9y ago
    I actually agree with this statement and to your credit, a lot of the design work I do follows some of this. Keep in mind that these are factories on wheels which means not only do we consume a tremendous amount of data, we also generate it. For example, 3D maps are built on the fly to show the customer where product has been sprayed, seeds planted, etc... On these vehicles, it's quite typical to see 1GB Data/hour generated which for an embedded device with no traditional hard drive, that's a lot. Flash memory is susceptible to extreme heat/cold so we have to be creative in this regard too (I can't talk much about this but suffice to say it's challenging). That being a case of many, there is always a trade-off between performance and what you can reasonable keep separated either within the same PCB or between separate modules. Thus, as much as I would like to keep separated, you simply can't sometimes. Current state of the art only allows for so much.