Sick Codes told Wired that he experimented across several months with the touchscreen consoles of different John Deere tractor models to develop his jailbreak. The hack involved Sick Codes finding a way to bypass the tractor’s dealer authentication requirements, meaning that the tractor would think it was being accessed by a John Deere dealer. Here, Sick Codes found that he had access to over 1.5 gigabytes of logs that dealers could use to assess problems with the tractor—logs that a layman would never even be able to see.
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The hack brings more attention to the right-to-repair movement, which is founded on the idea that the owners of commercial electronic goods should have access to cheap repair opportunities if they can’t repair something themselves. New York state passed a right-to-repair law in June that will force digital electronics manufacturers in the state to provide customers with access to tools and instructions to repair their products.