Deere to Allow Farmers to Repair Their Own Equipment

Re:Deere to Allow Farmers to Repair Their Own Equipment by rkangel on Monday January 09, 2023 @05:55AM (#34308999)

While I philosophically agree, I struggle to reconcile it with some other practicalities. I (mostly) design and build radio systems, and as the manufacturer it is our job to ensure that it is a well behaved radio system - transmits in the frequency bands it's meant to, at the power it's meant to, without leaking and interfering with other things. For a consumer product, where much of the radio implementation is in some form of software, how do I ensure that the system continues to meet the rules?

You could argue that any changes to the software are then the fault of the user, which is a reasonable point of view. But what if someone comes up with a mod that makes your wifi better by breaking transmit power rules (at the expense of others). Lots of people might use it, and then there are resulting widespread interference problems. Difficult to identify culprits, possibly too many to prosecute etc.

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Re:Deere to Allow Farmers to Repair Their Own Equipment by causi on Monday January 09, 2023 @07:20AM (#34309520)

But what if someone comes up with a mod that makes your wifi better by breaking transmit power rules (at the expense of others). Lots of people might use it, and then there are resulting widespread interference problems.

This already exists in multiple forms. It's incredibly easy to import adapters and antennas that give you an order of magnitude more power than you're legally allowed to use. I used one of those setups in high school to run uTorrent over the AP of the McDonald's half a mile away.

Regular folks don't care enough to break the rules.

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Re:Deere to Allow Farmers to Repair Their Own Equipment by kwhitefoot on Monday January 09, 2023 @07:28AM (#34309578)

It wasn't a big problem in the days before manufacturers had the technical capability to prevent tinkering so why would you expect it to be a big problem now?

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Re:Deere to Allow Farmers to Repair Their Own Equipment by rkangel on Monday January 09, 2023 @10:37AM (#34311471)

Because much more is in software than it used to be.

In the past, most of the key aspects of the radio were pretty fixed in the hardware. Whereas now, more and more of the radio is in software (and/or FPGA), or at least configurable from software. Tinkering in that case requires a "per person" level of skill. Whereas tinkering with software requires one person to be able to tinker, and then lots of people can use the result.

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