Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Sick Codes takes on John Deere!”.
Let’S talk about john deere, i want to get into that. This is really exciting because you know yes, john deere, i’m happy this community is getting behind this. It’S a good thing. Yeah um this weekend, australian hacker sick codes showed off doom running on the touchscreen of a john deere 4240 universal display, not not the 4240 tractor, the 4240 universal display to the crowds of defcon 30 in las vegas. The monolithic tractor monolithic tractor behemoth, okay, known for their green and yellow color scheme and putting anti-repair software on their machines, have been releasing touch screen farming equipment for over a decade, sick codes mentioned he was working on right to repair hacks for farming equipment.
During a presentation at last year’s def con about tractor application, programming bugs and exploits which is fantastic, because what john deere is doing is complete. Bs farmers were not happy with the farmers were not happy with the talk publicly revealing so many vulnerabilities, because some brands, like john deere, don’t allow diy firmware updates yeah. But you need to do that so they fix it yeah because otherwise they won’t fix it. And someone somewhere knows about the vulnerability so get ready for that.
Uh sick code says in quotes. I heard from some farmers one guy emailed me saying uh, where is it you’re up all of our stuff? So i figured i would put my money where my mouth is and actually prove to farmers that they can root the devices. That’S awesome, what an amazing response: chad, that’s fantastic! Sigma, sigma energy yeah, call themselves chad codes um. This all comes after john deere facing mounting pressures announced in march that it would make more of its repair software available to equipment, owners and finally, allow them to update their tractor firmware themselves.
This isn’t going to happen until next year, though, and honestly, i suspect it will happen with many caveats. I’M adding that little bit in myself, vulnerabilities will remain on tractors, not serviced directly by john deere, approved technicians and touchscreens, like the run. One running doom are designed to be remotely accessed to manage features like geofencing and curfews. Discussion question: is there a more anti-user company right now than john deere um? I mean i would say that you could easily find other companies that are very anti-consumer, but what makes it particularly offensive when it comes to john deere is that this is essential. This is food, it’s essentially it’s food and these machines are expensive. Yeah and a lot of the expense is like people, farmers taking these like massive loans out, so they can keep doing their jobs, yeah and they’re they’re. Relying on these machines for very long periods of time. Like you buy one of these things and you lose, you use it for like extreme amounts of time, and you maintain it.
You you wrench on it and you work on it yourself, like so by taking that away from them. That’S like super messed up apple pulls a lot of extreme moves for sure. But realistically you don’t need an um, so you know, i would say, in terms of of the of the destructive the destructive nature of what john deere is doing. Um they they’re they’re much closer to you, know the the the mega the mega corporations that are buying up residential properties, for example, and pushing home ownership out of reach of an entire generation.
That’S a little bit different than what the question has, though, because it specifically says anti-user not like anti people. People are users, users are people, i mean. What’S the difference from my point of view, use the i would say the user of a rental property is a user fair enough like i just i i just mean like it’s it’s just extremely when when we talk about how horrible what someone is doing is uh, You know we could talk about uh. We could talk about like uh, okay, the the pop bottling companies that are taking all the water, while mexico is facing an enormous like life-threatening drought or what is it like, nestle buying like absolutely insane amounts of water from canada? For like ascent, have you heard about that stuff, just absolutely absurd um? So so you know when, when we yeah, so it’s not necessarily how egregious what they’re doing is, but the fact that it affects our ability to eat uh eat, get shelter, uh, that’s where it becomes just i’ve. Also just never understood like. Why are you messing with farmers? Like i don’t know just they seem like the just this very like hearty gritty type of people that just want to get stuff done.
You’Re selling them a machine that they for an extremely long period of time, have been buying these types of machines and maintaining them for huge amounts of time. There’S like massive customer loyalty, john deere has got to be one of the highest like customer loyalty brands ever especially before all this started happening. Well, the reason you do it is because of this you want to sell your service stuff.
Well, not just that right, but there’s this perception that in a capitalist society, unless you are growing, you are failing um and i mean you’ll like i i remember especially when i was younger and i didn’t really understand the dynamics of the stock market right. I would. I would see a company post that they earned 3.2 billion dollars this quarter and boy that was way off what analysts were expecting, so their shares plummeted today and i’m looking at it going 3.4 billion seems like a lot of money to me yeah.
That’S i. I consider that a win um and so there’s this pressure on a company like john deere, to continue ramping up their revenues, but you can only sell so many tractors, so they start turning to increasingly evil schemes to extract more revenue from this finite number of customers. Right so it’s it’s a systemic problem, but that doesn’t absolve john deere of any of the responsibility that they have to take for participating in it.
They could just say nope. Our our tractors are. Are our users serviceable because that just matters a lot and we’re gon na we’re gon na build out uh like a servicing branch, we’ll have a revenue stream from that, but we’re not going to hold a gun to our users heads and tell them they absolutely have To use it, they absolutely had that option and their shareholders might not have liked it, but at the end of the day they don’t have a ton of competition, so they would have been fine, maybe just less fine, because the reason that the share price going up Matters so much is not actually much to do with the day-to-day functioning of the company. All it really affects is how much you can borrow essentially and if you’re running a profitable business, there’s an argument to be made that you don’t really like apple, doesn’t need to borrow money um, they have a ton of cash and if they do borrow money, it’s Only because they are doing so strategically they it’s it’s it’s cheaper to borrow that money than to to use their own money it all it’s. It’S all a whole way above my pay grade game that we don’t really play here um, but if they’re they’re, a prof uh forget where i was going with this right yeah, so it doesn’t.
The share price doesn’t actually affect the day-to-day operation of the company. But what it does affect is executive bonuses right. So when executives are paid in shares and the share goes up, then they make a lot more money, so it basically just comes down to executive greed. Yeah.
Someone pointed out too that they said in the u.s, but this is true basically everywhere. As far as my understanding goes, uh farmers have a lot of gov government subsidies so that they can cheat so they can keep the prices of groceries at grocery stores down, because if they didn’t, the prices of groceries or grocery stores would be much higher um. So in doing that, john deere doing this hurts all of us, so you should care but yeah. That’S it.
Uh, je realize asks. Didn’T lance once say that if a publicly traded company doesn’t make money, it’s shareholders can sue uh, it’s more. If the company misleads their shareholders and it turns out, they weren’t doing what they were doing or if that publicly traded company does not act in the interest of its shareholders, john deere could easily make the argument that it is in the interest of the long-term um Positivity positive sentiment around their brand that they not engage in these anti-consumer anti-right to repair practices and they’d be very unlikely, even if they could have made an extra 10 million dollars or 100 million dollars. This quarter, they could have made a strong argument, for that would be very difficult to sue them over, not screwing their users. .