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Re:The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking by ethbro on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @12:51AM (#13928544)
From that perspective, it does start to look dicey in terms of "offer a lengthy and full service warranty" + "allow the end user to make modifications", so I understand that perspective.

But I do think there's a lot of room for detecting what changes were made and honoring / invalidating the warranty depending on them. Rather than simply saying "something was changed, therefore we invalidate the whole warranty."

Re:The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking by weberc2 on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @02:01AM (#13928782)
The warrantee issue I mentioned was fraud--that is, sinking costs into investigating additional warrantee claims which turn out to be due to user manipulation. I suspect this is less of a concern compared with the legal liability of injury resulting from modification--I imagine it behooves the company to be able to point to the EULA and say, "look, we're doing everything we can to make sure this doesn't happen". This is complicated by the fact that they have to comply with laws in virtually every second and third world country, not just the US. It's just easier to be conservative with a blanket EULA. They could probably devise a more nuanced approach, but it would probably be costly and they probably have better (read: higher customer value) things they could put that money toward.
Re:The thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking by pacificleo11 on Wednesday March 22, 2017 @02:30AM (#13928872)
This is very similar to CPU overclocking. fraudulent warranty replacement claims were rampant untill recently but that intel fixed it .