Category Archives: Technology

John Deere Invests In Self-Driving Tractors And Smart Crop Sprayers



John Deere is rolling out self-driving tractors that can plow fields by themselves, and sprayers that distinguish weeds from crops. Deere, which helped make satellite-guided tractors ubiquitous in the U.S. Farm Belt over the past 20 years, is investing billions of dollars to develop smarter machines that the company said will make farming faster and more efficient than it ever could be with just farmers behind the wheel, The Wall Street Journal reported.

According to the Wall Street Journal, by the end of the decade, John May, Deere’s chief executive projects that 10% of Deere’s annual revenue will come from fees for using software.

The Wall Street Journal also reported that while farmers have said they are open to test-driving new technology, many are struggling with the cost of necessities including fertilizer and fuel, which have surged in price over the past year.

John Deere generated $44 billion in sales in 2021, and sells around 60% of the high-horsepower tractors used in the U.S. and Canada. Deere has been guiding farmers toward a bigger leap into technology for almost 20 years, starting with an autopilot system on tractors and harvesters that is now a standard feature on nearly all of Deere’s large farm machinery.

That said, not all farmers appear to be enthused about John Deere’s technological choices.

Walter Schweitzer, a farmer new Geyser, Montana, who also serves as president of the Montana Farmers Union, said he worried that further linking farm equipment to software managed by Deere could give the equipment company greater influence over farmers’ operations, while collecting data to benefit Deere’s own technology development.

According to The Wall Street Journal, The Montana Farmers Union has joined other farm groups in pushing Deere to broaden access to the software and tools to repair and work on Deere equipment, so independent repair shops and farmers themselves could do more fixes.

In August of 2022, Gizmodo reported that a hacker named Sick Codes had demonstrated a way to jail-break John Deere tractors, which could allow farmers the opportunity to self-repair their equipment. According to Gizmodo, as farming and agriculture continue to automate, John Deere has found a sneaky digitally gate keep diagnosis of faulty tractor parts to ensure that farmers are forced to turn to the company’s own repair services.

In July of 2021, the U.S Federal Trade Commission unanimously voted to ramp up law enforcement against repair restrictions that prevent small businesses, workers, consumers, and even government entities from fixing their own products. This, essentially, puts the “right to repair” in place.

To me, it sounds like the farmers who are using John Deere’s equipment have the “right to repair” it themselves, without relying on John Deere to do that for them. Personally, I don’t think people who need to use specific equipment to do their jobs should have to be burdened with wondering what a big company will do with the data it collects from them.


Hacker Provided Jailbreak For John Deere Tractors



A hacker named Sick Codes has demonstrated a way to jailbreak John Deere tractors, which could allow farmers the opportunity to self-repair their equipment, Gizmodo reported. According to Gizmodo, as farming and agriculture continue to automate, John Deere has found a sneaky digitally gate keep diagnosis of faulty tractor parts to ensure that farmers are forced to turn to the company’s own repair services.

In July of 2021, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission unanimously voted to ramp up law enforcement against repair restrictions that prevent small businesses, workers, consumers, and even government entities from fixing their own products. This decision essentially puts the “right-to-repair” in place.

The FTC’s statements came days after the White House endorsed similar rules in an executive order on economic competition. That part of the executive order specifically states that the FTC will exercise rule making authority regarding several areas, including “unfair anti competition and surveillance practices on third-party repair or self-repair of items, as imposed by powerful manufacturers that prevent farmers from repairing their own equipment.”

Wired reported that SickCodes is an Australian who lives in Asia who presented at DefCon in 2021 about tractor application programming interfaces and operating system bugs. After he made his research public, tractor companies, including John Deere, started fixing some of the flaws.

In short, when John Deere did that, it caused problems for the farmers who now had even less control over their farm equipment than they had before. It harmed their ability to engage in right-to-repair.

According to Wired, this year, Sick Codes says that while he is primarily concerned about world food security and exposure that comes from vulnerable farming equipment, he also sees the important value in letting farmers control their own equipment.

The 2021 executive order directed the Federal Trade Commission to increase enforcement efforts over practices like voiding warranties for outside repair, Wired reported. That, combined with New York State passing its own right-to-repair law and creative activist pressure has generated unprecedented momentum for the movement.

In March of 2022, John Deere posted a news release titled: “John Deere Expands Access to Self-Repair Resources”. In it, John Deere announced that it will enhance the capabilities of existing diagnostic tools and expand their availability. In 2023, the company will roll out an enhanced customer solution that include a mobile device interface, and the ability to download secure software updates directly to embedded controllers on select John Deere equipment with 4G connections.

In addition, John Deere wrote, that in May it would expand its offerings by giving customers and independent repair shops in the U.S. the ability to purchase Customer Service ADVISOR directly through the JohnDeereStore.com.

Wired reported that this change would, essentially, put the farmers in control of downloads on their equipment themselves, rather than have John Deere unilaterally apply the patches remotely or force farmers to bring products to authorized dealerships.

The FTC has the right to go after companies that are standing in the way of consumers being able to exercise their right-to-repair products that they own and paid for. Perhaps this is a reason why John Deere made some changes.


FTC Will Crack Down on Education Companies That Surveil Children Online



The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it will crack down on education technology companies if they illegally surveil children when they go online to learn. In a policy statement, the Commission made it clear that it is against the law for companies to force parents and schools to surrender their children’s privacy rights in order to do schoolwork online or attend class remotely.

According to the FTC, under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, companies cannot deny children access to educational technologies when their parents or school refuse to sign up for commercial surveillance.

“Students must be able to do their schoolwork without surveillance by companies looking to harvest their data to pad their bottom line,” said Samuel Levine, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Parents should not have to choose between their children’s privacy and their participation in the digital classroom. The FTC will be closely monitoring this market to ensure that parents are not being forced to surrender to surveillance for their kids’ technology to turn on.”

The press release notes that technology in the classroom has grown substantially in recent years, a trend that accelerated during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when many schools had to switch to virtual learning. The FTC states that parents and schools are forced to navigate an industry that is dominated by the commercial surveillance business model. These services have the capacity to collect a trove of personal information and there are serious concerns that this data may be used to build profiles of kids.

As a former teacher, who stopped teaching long before the COVID-19 pandemic began, I never had to worry about educational software gathering data from my students. It feels incredibly concerning to think that some education companies chose to surveil children who engage in online learning. Those companies need to find some other way to make money, without building a database on children. I cannot imagine that any teacher would want that sort of thing to happen to their students.

The FTC notes that Ed Tech providers must comply fully with all provisions of the COPPA (Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act). The FTC is going to vigilantly enforce the law to ensure that companies covered by COPPA are complying with all of the rule’s provisions including:

Prohibitions Against Mandatory Collection: Companies cannot require children to provide more information than is reasonably needed for participation in an activity.

Use Prohibitions: Ed tech providers that collect personal information from a child with the school’s authorization are prohibited from using the information for any other commercial purpose including marketing and advertising.

Retention Limitations: Ed tech providers are prohibited from retaining children’s personal information for longer than is necessary to fulfill the purpose for which it was collected and therefore cannot keep such data just because they might want to use it in the future.

Security Requirements: Ed tech provides must have procedures to maintain the confidentiality, security, and integrity of children’s personal information.

According to Govtech.com, the FTC’s announcement come as student data privacy becomes a growing concern in K-12 schools across the country, where officials have adopted an array of digital learning tools during shifts to and from remote learning in recent years. As of 2019, 40 states had enacted one or more K-12 data privacy laws to protect students from companies monitoring students for advertising purposes, and others are in the process of doing so.


U.S. Treasury Sanctioned Cryptocurrency Mixer Blender.io



The U.S. Department of Treasury tweeted: “For the first time ever, Treasury has sanctioned a virtual currency mixer. Blender.io is used by the DPRK to support malicious cyber activities & money-laundering of stolen virtual currency”. The tweet included an image that has been labeled as Blender.io Cryptocurrency Mixing Process. It includes a simplified graphic of the process.

The U.S. Department of Treasury website provided more detailed information (on May 6, 2022):

“Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned virtual currency mixer blender.io (Blender), which is used by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to support its malicious cyber activities and money-laundering of stolen virtual currency.

“On March 23, 2022, Lazarus Group, a DPRK state-sponsored cyber hacking group, carried out the largest virtual currency heist to date, with almost $620 million, from a blockchain project linked to the online game Axis Infinity; Blender was used in processing over $20.5 million of the elicit proceeds.

“Under the pressure of robust U.S. and UN sanctions, the DPRK has restored to elicit activities, including cyber-enabled heists from cryptocurrency exchanges and financial institutions, to generate revenue for its unlawful weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ballistic missile programs.”

Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, Brian E. Nelson said: “Today, for the first time ever, Treasury is sanctioning a virtual currency mixer. Virtual currency mixers that assist illicit transactions pose a threat to U.S. national security interests. We are taking action against illicit financial activity by the DPRK and will not allow state-sponsored thievery and its money-laundering enablers to go unanswered.”

In addition, OFAC is identifying four additional virtual currency wallet addresses used by the Lazarus Group to launder the remainder of stolen proceeds from the March 2022 Axie Infinity heist. This builds on OFAC’s April 14, 2022, attribution of DPRK’s Lazarus Group as the perpetrators of the Axie Infinity heist and identification of the original getaway wallet address. Treasury is committed to tracing illicit virtual currency and blocking associated addresses wherever found.

The Record reported that the U.S. Department of Treasury takes a dim view of cryptocurrency mixers, with are often touted as a way for coin owners to protect their privacy.

CoinDesk reported that LootRush, a Steam-like platform for blockchain games, has raised $12 million in a seed round led by Paradigm with participation from Andreessen Horowitz.

LootRush offers a quick-start platform for blockchain games, which typically have a more complicated onboarding process than traditional video games. According to CoinDesk, Axie Infinity is currently the only game available to play LootRush. The platform plans to roll out additional titles throughout the year, including CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot.

Based on all of this, it seems to me that cryptocurrency and the blockchain aren’t very well protected. This isn’t the first time a situation occurred that involved stealing cryptocurrency from wallets that are on the blockchain.


MLB Approves PitchCom For The 2022 Baseball Season



Major League Baseball (MLB) has approved a piece of technology that was tested out in experimental usage at the Single-A level last year and in big league camps during Spring Training this year.

The device is called PitchCom, and it was created by ProMystic, which typically caters to mentalists and magicians. ProMystic approached MLB with its idea for a signal communication device in 2020.

PitchCom is a wearable device that transmits signals from catcher to pitcher. The catcher wears the device on a forearm sleeve that has the device attached to it. This makes it easy for the catcher to press any of the nine buttons on the device to communicate to the pitcher. The pitcher has a receiver in his cap and the catcher has one in his helmet. In addition, PitchCom uses an encrypted channel in multiple languages.

The Associated Press reported that MLB is providing each team with three transmitters, 10 receivers and a charging case for each of the PitchCom devices. It is available in English and Spanish.

According to the Associated Press, PitchCom gives the catcher nine choices on his wristband device: “four seam high inside, curve hi middle, slider hi outside, change mid inside, sinker middle, cutter mid out, splitter low inside, knuckle lo middle, two seam low outside”.

PitchCom receivers and transmitters can only be used on the field and may not be operated during games in clubhouses, dugouts or bullpens.

The MLB is not requiring teams to use PitchCom, but it has some really great benefits. It makes the communication between pitcher and catcher more seamless and straightforward. The device makes it easier for the pitcher to “see” what the catcher is recommending. The clarity can make the game go faster.

Those who love baseball will likely remember a scandal where a team is accused of “stealing signs”. PitchCom makes it incredibly hard to “steal signs” because the information shared between the catcher and pitcher is not only on an encrypted channel, but also has tiny buttons that will be difficult to see from second base (and way too small to see from the stands).


Huawei Allegedly Created “Back Door” in Pakistan Project



A dispute between Huawei Technologies Co. and a small U.S.-based contractor has escalated to a federal court, with the contractor alleging Huawei stole its technology and pressured it to build a “back door” into a sensitive law-enforcement project in Pakistan, The Wall Street Journal reported.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the contractor is based on Buena Park, California, and is called Business Efficiency Solution LLC or BES. The company says in a lawsuit that it filed in a California district court that Huawei required it to set up a system in China that gives Huawei access to sensitive information about citizens and government officials from a safe-cities surveillance project in Pakistan’s second-largest city of Lahore.

The Wall Street Journal also reported that chief operating office of the Punjab Safe Cities Authority, Muhammad Kamran Khan, which oversees the Lahore project, said the authority has begun looking into BES’s allegations.

A copy of the lawsuit shows that the case has been filed in the United States District Court Central District of California. Here are some interesting allegations made by BES in the lawsuit:

…After Huawei’s successful bid for the Lahore Project, Huawei gained possession of BES’s most commercially viable trade secrets and other confidential information. Specifically, Huawei obtained BES’s complete software systems, including BES’s proprietary, trade secret “low-level designs” (“LLDs”). Meanwhile, Huawei began to contest its obligations to pay BES for the Lahore project and disputed its obligations to BES in connection with additional Safe City projects under the contract…

Some of the things that BES is asking the court for include “damages in the amount of BES’s actual losses and Huawei’s unjust enrichment; exemplary and punitive damages amounting to twice the sum of actual losses and unjust enrichment for willful and malicious misappropriation’ injunctive relief enjoining Huawei from continued misappropriation of BES’s trade secrets, including LLDs, or a reasonably royalty’ and specific performance requiring Huawei to return all of BES’s proprietary information, including the LLDs, and destroying copies made by, for, and on behalf of Huawei.”

It is unclear when (or if) BES’s legal action against Huawei will make it to a courtroom.


Art Museum in Italy Records How People Look at Paintings



The art museums and galleries are opening up again in Italy. That’s great for the museums and galleries, who may have lost revenue during the pandemic. However, as CityLab reported, at least one Italian art museum has installed technology that will gather data from the people who come in to view the art. It bothers me when the physical world wants to mimic Instagram.

A device called ShareArt was developed by a research team at Italy’s new-technologies agency ENEA. The team developed a system based on devices that can calculate how long and how closely museum and gallery visitors observe a particular work of art.

“Thanks to simple data elaboration, an observer’s gaze can be translated into a graphic,” ENEA researcher Stefano Ferriani said in an interview. “We can detect where most of the people’s attention is concentrated.”

According to CityLab, there are fourteen ShareArt devices being used in a joint project with the Instiuzione Bologna Musei. The devices, which look like a small black box with a camera in it, includes a tag that presumably explains what it does.

Using cameras that are located near the artwork, the ShareArt system soaks up data on the number of observers and their behavior as they look at a painting, sculpture or artifact, including time elapsed and distance of observation. It troubles me that the President of Bologna Musei appears to be excited to see what data the devices obtain after the mask mandate drops and people’s facial expressions can be recorded.

The purpose of the ShareArt devices is to help the museum define “attraction value” for specific works of art. The results could influence the museum to make changes in the layout and exhibit scheduling. It may also reveal situations where the museum could make some artworks more accessible than they currently are.

Personally, I don’t like the ShareArt devices. They are only being used in one museum in Italy. But, that could change. The value of art in a museum should not be defined by the number and length of views it receives as though it were an Instagram post.