Well, here’s an issue I never would have predicted:
Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware
In short: John Deere has made it so that if your brand new tractor breaks down, the only people who can repair it are officially sanctioned dealers. The problem is, farmers are often hours or days away from repair that way, and are of course used to doing their own repairs. So, what to do? Farmers are learning to hack their tractors.
I’m kinda torn. on the one hand… you sign the license agreement when you buy new stuff. You made an agreement.
But on the other hand… these agreements are kinda forced upon you. A new tractor is something that a farmer often can’t really see as anything other than a requirement, so a farmer is being forced to sign under duress. And Ambassador G’Kar pretty much nailed the legitimacy of an agreement signed under duress.
So… the free enterprise system is taking over. Small-time repair shops are figuring out how to game the system, how to bypass security systems, override or replace software. Three cheers for entrepreneurialism.
In a way, this system reminds me of the War On Some Drugs. Without drug prohibition, there’d be far fewer people learning the ways of criminality. Without these anti-repair systems, there’d be far fewer people learning how to hack systems. So, good jorb, John Deere… you’re setting things in place to make sure there will be a thriving system in place to hack self-driving cars and drones. You’ve doomed us all.
Who would have expected that the proximate cause of the robot apocalypse would be John Deere?