this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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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.
Unfortunately consoles and phones tend to be exempt. For what reason other than lobbying I do not know.
Then only thing that is exempt is the customer. Fuuuuuuuuuuck this company and any one like it.
In other words, they deliberately learned exactly the wrong thing from that: they could have taken it as a lesson to not have a fucking transceiver in the damn thing so it couldn't receive remote messages in the first place, but instead they used it as an self-serving excuse to implement anti-consumer and anti-third-party-repair bullshit.
As somebody that works on a lot of Chryslers I can tell you I 100% despise theirb"security gateway" nonsense. Scanner has to be connected to vehicle and connected to wifi. You need a monthly subscription to access the security gateway otherwise it locks you out of the vehicle you can't clear codes nevermind run bidirectional functions or program modules. If everybody had their own nonsense gateway like this, no shops would be able to stay in business everybody would have to go to their respective dealers. How many subscriptions can you expect a shop to hold? It's pretty ridiculous. It also means if ur off roading in a wrangler and a fluke puts the PCM in limp mode, your not getting out of limp mode in the woods as you don't in have wifi connection to security gateway. Undoing terminals doesn't reset these issues anymore. Yes I have seen it happen where new JL wranglers have to lug out of the woods in limp mode over a fluke thing that just needed a computer reset. Yea ill stick to my 87 YJ when I go wheeling.