Repair Roundup Week August 14 Doom Tractors iFixit News
Repair Roundup Week August 14: Doom Tractors iFixit News Ana içeriğe geç Eşyalarını Tamir Et Topluluk Mağaza Tech News
– This took months
– CPU is NXP imx6
– OS is Wind River Linux 8
– Model John Deere 4240
– The weird graphical artifacts are just Yocto/QT quirks n 3D transparency stuff
– John Deere’s X window display server is g6wm
– Everything runs as root- Sick.Codes (@sickcodes) August 14, 2022 As radical as that sounds, isn’t that what we’ve been doing with PCs and laptops for decades? I might buy a Dell Latitude laptop with Microsoft Windows installed on it, but nothing prevents me from wiping Windows away and installing Ubuntu Linux, Chromium, or some other operating system of my choice. Why should tractors, harvesters, or planters be any different? The short answer is: “it shouldn’t.” Put aside all the memes and DEF CON chest thumping, and that’s the real message of Sick Codes’s presentation. Mind you, running Doom on a Deere 4240 monitor is a long way from flashing an open source operating system on an S780 combine and watching it putter off into the field. As the folks at Hackaday noted, Sick Codes’s work was performed on console modules separated from the hardware and run in the lab—not in the field on a real piece of Deere hardware. Significant and complex work needs to be done before we will see the latter. By comparison, the celebrated 2015 remote takeover of the Jeep Cherokee by researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek was the culmination of more than a year of intensive research and testing on an actual Jeep Cherokee. All that just to bypass internal security features, not develop an entirely new, bespoke software to run the vehicle. But the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, as the saying goes. And that’s what Sick Codes has accomplished: taking that momentous first step down a very long road that will end with farms and farmers liberated from an exploitive and Orwellian system of corporate surveillance and control. For that, he deserves our thanks and gratitude.
Playing Doom on a John Deere And Why It Matters Repair Roundup Week of August 14
Article by: Paul Roberts @repairnews August 22, 2022 Filed under: Right to Repair, Roundups, Tech News Yorum Ekle Facebook Twitter Reddit Linkedin Email Copy Link ShareBig News
Doom on a Deere a Repair Story
The demonstration last week at the DEF CON hacking conference of the Doom video game running on a touch screen monitor manufactured by John Deere set off a flurry of media coverage, with publications ranging from Wired and Vice to Jalopnik with a healthy smattering of gaming websites in between. The presentation, by the independent security researcher Sick Codes, was a sure bet to go viral. First, it took place at one of the most prominent hacking conferences on the planet—a venue that has seen everything from demonstrations of “Jackpotted” ATMs barfing out currency to remote, software-based attacks that took control of a Jeep Cherokee. Doom on a Deere slotted right into a long, proud tradition of DEF CON “mic drop” demonstrations. Sick Codes responding to questions from the audience following his presentation at DEF CON. (Photo courtesy of Paul Roberts.) Then there’s the “Doom” bit. Sick Codes’s choice of that classic, 90s-era game—which created the “first person shooter” genre—was no accident. “But will it run Doom?” is simultaneously a throw down to the technically adept, an Internet subculture of hardware hackers, and a long-running meme, with its own subreddit devoted to celebrating the exploits of folks who get the Doom FPS to run on all manner of odd devices: Nook e-readers, Canon EOS SLR cameras, retail store price scanners, and more. Running Doom on a Deere was a technical feat and message to the broader hardware hacking community that, at the end of the day, the six- and seven-figure agricultural hardware manufactured by Deere was just hardware running software (Wind River Linux 8, to be precise). And, as such, it is open for exploration, modding, and tinkering. It’s that last bit that’s the most important. Whatever else he accomplished, Sick Codes used his DEF CON presentation to underscore a critical point: that farming equipment is just another piece of hardware that farmers own—like their laptop computer or the washing machine that washes their clothes. And, as property owners, it ultimately falls to the farmers to use and maintain it as they choose. If that means running John Deere software and connected services like MyJohnDeere.com, JDLink, CombineAdvisor, and more (surrendering your proprietary farm data to the company in the process), so be it. But farmers need not be constrained to one choice or one ecosystem. Why shouldn’t a farmer be able to take their new Deere S780 Combine home from the dealership and flash a new operating system and applications onto it? Why not an open source combine OS that, while it may lack some of the bells and whistles that John Deere’s official wares provide, gives the farmer greater choice of software and apps, while freeing them from Deere’s expensive and exclusive licensing agreement whereby simple software updates cost hundreds of dollars a pop and a (costly) visit from a John Deere authorized service provider is required for even basic maintenance and repair? For anyone who wants the technicals:– This took months
– CPU is NXP imx6
– OS is Wind River Linux 8
– Model John Deere 4240
– The weird graphical artifacts are just Yocto/QT quirks n 3D transparency stuff
– John Deere’s X window display server is g6wm
– Everything runs as root- Sick.Codes (@sickcodes) August 14, 2022 As radical as that sounds, isn’t that what we’ve been doing with PCs and laptops for decades? I might buy a Dell Latitude laptop with Microsoft Windows installed on it, but nothing prevents me from wiping Windows away and installing Ubuntu Linux, Chromium, or some other operating system of my choice. Why should tractors, harvesters, or planters be any different? The short answer is: “it shouldn’t.” Put aside all the memes and DEF CON chest thumping, and that’s the real message of Sick Codes’s presentation. Mind you, running Doom on a Deere 4240 monitor is a long way from flashing an open source operating system on an S780 combine and watching it putter off into the field. As the folks at Hackaday noted, Sick Codes’s work was performed on console modules separated from the hardware and run in the lab—not in the field on a real piece of Deere hardware. Significant and complex work needs to be done before we will see the latter. By comparison, the celebrated 2015 remote takeover of the Jeep Cherokee by researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek was the culmination of more than a year of intensive research and testing on an actual Jeep Cherokee. All that just to bypass internal security features, not develop an entirely new, bespoke software to run the vehicle. But the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, as the saying goes. And that’s what Sick Codes has accomplished: taking that momentous first step down a very long road that will end with farms and farmers liberated from an exploitive and Orwellian system of corporate surveillance and control. For that, he deserves our thanks and gratitude.