A New Jailbreak for John Deere Tractors Rides the Right-to-Repair Wave
14th August 2022
FARMERS AROUND THE world have turned to tractor hacking so they can bypass the digital locks that manufacturers impose on their vehicles. Like insulin pump “looping” and iPhone jailbreaking, this allows farmers to modify and repair the expensive equipment that’s vital to their work, the way they could with analog tractors. At the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas on Saturday, the hacker known as Sick Codes is presenting a new jailbreak for John Deere & Co. tractors that allows him to take control of multiple models through their touchscreens.
The only way to make money farming with the few people willing to work the land is by using very expensive computerized equipment (a combine will run you the price of a Range Rover), and that locks you into the eco-system of a single manufacturer (watch Apple turn green with envy). Farmers wouldn’t mind that so much if they could only get manufacturers to provide repair services in a timely manner – if there’s a crop to get in and a storm on the horizon, a two-week backlog of parts doesn’t really help a great deal.
“Farmers prefer the older equipment simply because they want reliability. They don’t want stuff to go wrong at the most important part of the year when they have to pull stuff out of the ground,” Sick Codes says. “So that’s what we should all want too. We want farmers to be able to repair their stuff for when things go wrong, and now that means being able to repair or make decisions about the software in their tractors.”
A perfectly reasonable position.
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 that it will release an “enhanced customer solution” next year so customers and mechanics can download and apply official software updates for Deere equipment themselves, rather than having John Deere unilaterally apply the patches remotely or force farmers to bring products to authorized dealerships.
An illustration of what frustrated farmers have to put up with.
John Deere did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment about the research.
Gee, I wonder why?