Hacker jailbreaks control unit that stops farmers repairing their tractors, then runs Doom on it

pcgamer.com:

A recent thread in tech news has been BMW's move towards nickel-and-diming owners of its cars with microtransactions, a move so popular that BMW software hacks are now available. This is a shard of a wider debate about modern technology which, from cars to iPhones, has in many cases been trending towards locking the user out of the internals of something they apparently own. This is most relevant when it comes to the right to repair old equipment without having to involve the original manufacturer (and of course pay an inflated fee for the privilege).

While the mainstream reacted with disgust to the BMW stuff, anyone who's ever been near a farm probably wasn't so surprised: farming equipment has been screwing them like this for decades. The biggest firm in the agricultural manufacturing field is John Deere, which makes all kinds of machinery that runs on the company's proprietary software: which both monitors farmers extremely closely and force them to involve John Deere whenever there's a problem. These tractors are designed so that farmers can't fix problems themselves.

This is on one level a nasty monopoly practice, but the implications of it are much wider. There's the simple fact that a huge amount of the world's food supply depends on John Deere equipment, and so any large-scale software problems could be catastrophic. John Deere itself might not have any plans to do such a thing, but then again it did recently show it could 'brick' Ukrainian farming equipment stolen by the Russians. The scarier prospect is that so much of the farming industry depends on John Deere keeping its systems secure from bad actors.

Most farmers, meanwhile, would probably much prefer a world where they could maintain their own machinery