Problem was, your mom and pop repair shop would need a special $$$ ‘authorized’ dongle from the manufacturer to be able to diagnose problems beyond what plain OBD-II let you see. This effectively locked out third-party repair shops. People screamed and IIRC, a lot of car manufacturers backed down and just hardened remote access.
What Deere did was even more harsh. They tried to block off not only self repair, but third-party firmware that made the tractors work better, especially older ones that were out of warranty.
That’s straight up a major federal crime in my country. So that should give Americans an idea how balanced their scale of justice is at the moment.
The consumer and supplier ALWAYS get equal and fair protection, lest a business becomes based on ripping people off with product instead of the product itself.
Years ago, folks hacked a Jeep Wrangler remotely, with a WIRED reporter in the car: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/
That freaked the shit out of vehicle manufacturers. It led to encrypted CANBus messages: https://dev.to/living_syn/can-bus-message-security-3h43
Problem was, your mom and pop repair shop would need a special $$$ ‘authorized’ dongle from the manufacturer to be able to diagnose problems beyond what plain OBD-II let you see. This effectively locked out third-party repair shops. People screamed and IIRC, a lot of car manufacturers backed down and just hardened remote access.
What Deere did was even more harsh. They tried to block off not only self repair, but third-party firmware that made the tractors work better, especially older ones that were out of warranty: https://schiller-tuning.com/vehicle-listings/agriculture/john-deere
They’re trying to game copyright laws and click-through terms-of-service agreements to lock out third party repair.
This is a test case. If they lose, it’ll be a BIG win for Right to Repair laws, covering phones, laptops, consoles, etc.
That’s straight up a major federal crime in my country. So that should give Americans an idea how balanced their scale of justice is at the moment.
The consumer and supplier ALWAYS get equal and fair protection, lest a business becomes based on ripping people off with product instead of the product itself.