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Disclaimer: I'm a VP for an IoT software company. I also grew up in farming communities. I'm all for the right to repair, but I'm concerned we're creating a bi

Disclaimer: I'm a VP for an IoT software company. I also grew up in farming communities. I'm all for the right to repair, but I'm concerned we're creating a bit of false hope for famers. As more and more software gets injected into the equipment, "fixing" things requires touching both the physical devices and the software. Obviously, the right to repair for non-software related problems is easy to understand. I'm wondering, however, how the current proposals handle software fixes or mixed use cases (software/hardware fixes)?

impalallama 7y ago
Isn't a large part of this about being able to go to third parties as well?
squish78 7y ago
Less reliance on the tech sector for hardware solutions, and more research in logistics and supply chain. Let farmers farm. They are proving that it can be done with more profitability acre-for-acre with hand tools than tractors https://www.neversinkfarm.com/ https://www.neversinkfarm.com/
- bdamm 7y ago
  That is patently absurd. There is a reason why nearly every corn and wheat farm has a combine.
  - squish78 7y ago
    Explain how what I said is patently absurd. Are we looking at the same USDA data?
    - bdamm 7y ago
      Specific farms may be able to take advantage of their position or specialization and use hand-tools to gain more value per-acre, but that kind of specialization cannot scale up to commercial scale where a farmer with a set of machines can profitably farm dozens of acres or more. They aren't putting as much care into each acre, but in the end it doesn't matter. And, if everyone was doing what the specialized teams are doing, then probably the market that feeds the specialization would collapse because now there's no restriction on supply and prices for the product would go down. This is just basic economics.
      - squish78 7y ago
        You make several outdated assumptions about farming in the USA that are based in 20th century models of agriculture. The entire sector is incredibly fragile in its present form, because every method is unsustainable. Industrial agriculture is depleting soil fertility faster than it can be replaced. Topsoil has been decimated in the past 100 years. This is primarily due to tractor tillage and herbicides. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-... Correlation between monoculture field crops and bee colony collapse https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/honey-bees-and-monoculture-nothing-to-dance-about/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/honey-bees-a... Monoculture field crops are 100% dependent on chemical nitrogen fertilizer, the supply of which is finite https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1247398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1247398/ This is nothing to say about the ethics of undocumented indentured servitude of migrant labor, which floats the entire California farm sector
  - mythrwy 7y ago
    A lot of times agronomic crop farmers don't own harvest machinery at all. They grow the crop then contract the harvest (or alternatively sell the harvest in the field).
    - squish78 7y ago
      This is true. The issue, in my opinion, is that if we complicate the agricultural industry with too many specialized independent operators, it just creates more potential places to fail. Farming is one of those trades where its better to have generalists, for the sake of creating a resilient food supply
celticmusic 7y ago
Many farmers already run their own version of the software needed for the equipment, complete with its own diagnostic setup. They do this specifically because they cannot get that diagnostic information with the official software (because they don't want farmers working on it themselves). The question you have to ask yourself is this: If they're already savvy enough to do that, imagine how much better things will be for them when OSS and/or other 3rd party vendors are able to service the software side for them.
- karmelapple 7y ago
  Imagine the opportunity for a local person to create a business helping farmers troubleshoot and improve their tractor software. Someone interested in software development might feel like they must move away from their rural hometown to have a career in engineering. Supporting farming equipment might be a way to reduce that - not to mention all the remote work opportunities now available.
trenning 7y ago
Look to the automotive industry then. I owned a shop as a mechanic for several years working on euro cars mainly as well as a lot of track cars. The software in cars has gotten insanely advanced, and yet independent shops are still able to service cars because there's support from 3rd parties on diagnostic equipment from companies like Snap-on who make diagnostic equipment. Look at the auto enthusiast market for standalone ECUs that have been common for years. ECUs in modern cars are black boxes that are reverse engineered for aftermarket purposes. Software isn't a wall that can't be breached.
- hathawsh 7y ago
  Is communication with the ECU encrypted in some cars? Will it be in the future? If that happens, it will become much harder to replace components with aftermarket devices.
  - bdamm 7y ago
    It seems to me that it must be, since we're going to have self driving cars depending on all the components in the car working within a tight specification. How can manufacturers assure that the customer's car is still safe and won't randomly kill people or become weaponized? This is presumably a liability issue, and obviously a marketing issue as well. (And instead of "encrypted" I read "authenticated".) Does right to repair also come with feature reduction? By this I mean... go ahead and fix your car and put in whatever components you want, but know that as soon as you put in non-official parts, the car won't drive itself any more.
  - bri3d 7y ago
    Yes, communication is already encrypted or "protected" in almost all modern cars. New interfaces like FlexRay offer true cryptographic protection (albeit usually weak - things like AES with a universally shared key/IV across a whole model line are common), but even older systems have "protection" in the form of obfuscation, XOR and transformation based challenge-response algorithms (the one in VW cars runs a cute bytecode script against the challenge to yield the appropriate response), serial-number validation, and so on. For example, most modern VW AG cars have all of their core modules protected by Component Protection, a system where the identities of the modules are synchronized together as a (somewhat successful, actually) anti-theft measure. If modules are "mixed and matched" (for example, a used head unit is installed in a different car), they don't function. Private shops can subscribe to a service to reprogram this protection (GeKo) at a cost of around $1000 USD/year. By and large these systems are usually reverse engineered over time as the protection is usually not very good, but the overall ability to add additional hardware is, indeed, getting more challenging.
throwaway_tech 7y ago
>Obviously, the right to repair for non-software related problems is easy to understand. Is it though? Rebuilding a carburetor or overhauling a plane engine (things farmers have historically done for their own farm equipment), can you really say it is "easier" than understanding software needs an update? If nothing else hiring a 3rd party becomes an option.
TheRealPomax 7y ago
Let's be clear: if people can reverse engineer entire CPUs, there are plenty of folks who are willing to understand the hardware _and_ software involved if it means keeping an entire industry running despite hardware manufacturer's best efforts. I'd be more surprised if no one figured out how to write custom firmware and OS functionality once the right to repair is a legal right, than someone botching the job. There's good money to be made by folks willing to put in the time to understand the machinery at the digital hardware level. Money that can't be made by John Deere and friends (because they don't have local offices with quick turnarounds), and so they've taken the "if we can't have it, no one can" stance. Which is decided un-American, really. I'll be happy to see them put in their place by RtR laws, and farmers put back in control of their own equipment.
cycloptic 7y ago
If you care about the right to repair the software in devices like that, please don't ship closed-source code on your company's devices. Once your company decides to drop support, the paying customers are faced with a hard choice anyway: reverse-engineer it or throw it out.
novok 7y ago
Software does not physically wear out, mechanical parts do. So theoretically, the reasons why you repair something in the first place is wear and tear or physical breakage. Fixing software bugs is like redesigning a part that has a design flaw, like the porsche's boxster IMS bearing issue. The fix for it is a redesigned part, which nobody expects mechanics to create, so it is out of the scope of the right to repair (vs the right to modify)
asdff 7y ago
Be aware of your own biases, farmers are just as capable of learning about software as anyone else. You study the tools for your job like in any job.

impalallama 7y ago

Isn't a large part of this about being able to go to third parties as well?

squish78 7y ago

Less reliance on the tech sector for hardware solutions, and more research in logistics and supply chain. Let farmers farm. They are proving that it can be done with more profitability acre-for-acre with hand tools than tractors https://www.neversinkfarm.com/ https://www.neversinkfarm.com/

bdamm 7y ago
That is patently absurd. There is a reason why nearly every corn and wheat farm has a combine.
- squish78 7y ago
  Explain how what I said is patently absurd. Are we looking at the same USDA data?
  - bdamm 7y ago
    Specific farms may be able to take advantage of their position or specialization and use hand-tools to gain more value per-acre, but that kind of specialization cannot scale up to commercial scale where a farmer with a set of machines can profitably farm dozens of acres or more. They aren't putting as much care into each acre, but in the end it doesn't matter. And, if everyone was doing what the specialized teams are doing, then probably the market that feeds the specialization would collapse because now there's no restriction on supply and prices for the product would go down. This is just basic economics.
    - squish78 7y ago
      You make several outdated assumptions about farming in the USA that are based in 20th century models of agriculture. The entire sector is incredibly fragile in its present form, because every method is unsustainable. Industrial agriculture is depleting soil fertility faster than it can be replaced. Topsoil has been decimated in the past 100 years. This is primarily due to tractor tillage and herbicides. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-... Correlation between monoculture field crops and bee colony collapse https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/honey-bees-and-monoculture-nothing-to-dance-about/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/honey-bees-a... Monoculture field crops are 100% dependent on chemical nitrogen fertilizer, the supply of which is finite https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1247398/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1247398/ This is nothing to say about the ethics of undocumented indentured servitude of migrant labor, which floats the entire California farm sector
- mythrwy 7y ago
  A lot of times agronomic crop farmers don't own harvest machinery at all. They grow the crop then contract the harvest (or alternatively sell the harvest in the field).
  - squish78 7y ago
    This is true. The issue, in my opinion, is that if we complicate the agricultural industry with too many specialized independent operators, it just creates more potential places to fail. Farming is one of those trades where its better to have generalists, for the sake of creating a resilient food supply

celticmusic 7y ago

Many farmers already run their own version of the software needed for the equipment, complete with its own diagnostic setup. They do this specifically because they cannot get that diagnostic information with the official software (because they don't want farmers working on it themselves). The question you have to ask yourself is this: If they're already savvy enough to do that, imagine how much better things will be for them when OSS and/or other 3rd party vendors are able to service the software side for them.

karmelapple 7y ago
Imagine the opportunity for a local person to create a business helping farmers troubleshoot and improve their tractor software. Someone interested in software development might feel like they must move away from their rural hometown to have a career in engineering. Supporting farming equipment might be a way to reduce that - not to mention all the remote work opportunities now available.

trenning 7y ago

Look to the automotive industry then. I owned a shop as a mechanic for several years working on euro cars mainly as well as a lot of track cars. The software in cars has gotten insanely advanced, and yet independent shops are still able to service cars because there's support from 3rd parties on diagnostic equipment from companies like Snap-on who make diagnostic equipment. Look at the auto enthusiast market for standalone ECUs that have been common for years. ECUs in modern cars are black boxes that are reverse engineered for aftermarket purposes. Software isn't a wall that can't be breached.

hathawsh 7y ago
Is communication with the ECU encrypted in some cars? Will it be in the future? If that happens, it will become much harder to replace components with aftermarket devices.
- bdamm 7y ago
  It seems to me that it must be, since we're going to have self driving cars depending on all the components in the car working within a tight specification. How can manufacturers assure that the customer's car is still safe and won't randomly kill people or become weaponized? This is presumably a liability issue, and obviously a marketing issue as well. (And instead of "encrypted" I read "authenticated".) Does right to repair also come with feature reduction? By this I mean... go ahead and fix your car and put in whatever components you want, but know that as soon as you put in non-official parts, the car won't drive itself any more.
- bri3d 7y ago
  Yes, communication is already encrypted or "protected" in almost all modern cars. New interfaces like FlexRay offer true cryptographic protection (albeit usually weak - things like AES with a universally shared key/IV across a whole model line are common), but even older systems have "protection" in the form of obfuscation, XOR and transformation based challenge-response algorithms (the one in VW cars runs a cute bytecode script against the challenge to yield the appropriate response), serial-number validation, and so on. For example, most modern VW AG cars have all of their core modules protected by Component Protection, a system where the identities of the modules are synchronized together as a (somewhat successful, actually) anti-theft measure. If modules are "mixed and matched" (for example, a used head unit is installed in a different car), they don't function. Private shops can subscribe to a service to reprogram this protection (GeKo) at a cost of around $1000 USD/year. By and large these systems are usually reverse engineered over time as the protection is usually not very good, but the overall ability to add additional hardware is, indeed, getting more challenging.

throwaway_tech 7y ago

>Obviously, the right to repair for non-software related problems is easy to understand. Is it though? Rebuilding a carburetor or overhauling a plane engine (things farmers have historically done for their own farm equipment), can you really say it is "easier" than understanding software needs an update? If nothing else hiring a 3rd party becomes an option.

TheRealPomax 7y ago

Let's be clear: if people can reverse engineer entire CPUs, there are plenty of folks who are willing to understand the hardware _and_ software involved if it means keeping an entire industry running despite hardware manufacturer's best efforts. I'd be more surprised if no one figured out how to write custom firmware and OS functionality once the right to repair is a legal right, than someone botching the job. There's good money to be made by folks willing to put in the time to understand the machinery at the digital hardware level. Money that can't be made by John Deere and friends (because they don't have local offices with quick turnarounds), and so they've taken the "if we can't have it, no one can" stance. Which is decided un-American, really. I'll be happy to see them put in their place by RtR laws, and farmers put back in control of their own equipment.

cycloptic 7y ago

If you care about the right to repair the software in devices like that, please don't ship closed-source code on your company's devices. Once your company decides to drop support, the paying customers are faced with a hard choice anyway: reverse-engineer it or throw it out.

novok 7y ago

Software does not physically wear out, mechanical parts do. So theoretically, the reasons why you repair something in the first place is wear and tear or physical breakage. Fixing software bugs is like redesigning a part that has a design flaw, like the porsche's boxster IMS bearing issue. The fix for it is a redesigned part, which nobody expects mechanics to create, so it is out of the scope of the right to repair (vs the right to modify)

asdff 7y ago

Be aware of your own biases, farmers are just as capable of learning about software as anyone else. You study the tools for your job like in any job.