Odd things sometimes pop up in the feed of a Hackaday scribe, not hacks as such, but stories with a meaning in our community. One such that’s come our way from a variety of sources over the last week features Ursa Ag, a small machinery manufacturer based in Alberta, Canada. The reason they’re in the news is because they have gained bulging order books by taking on the likes of John Deere with a tractor more like the one their customers’ parents bought back in the ’80s or ’90s. It’s a basic machine without much in the way of electronics, and certainly without all the DRM lockdown that has made those big manufacturers so unpopular.
It’s clear that Hackaday isn’t in the business of shilling Canadian tractors, but it should be of interest to readers because it represents an alternative route to challenge the DRM lockdowns than the legal and consumer routes we’ve previously reported on. The Ursa Ag tractor may be as niche Albertan as a Corb Lund CD, but it’s not the tractor itself but the idea which matters. We doubt much sweat will be shed by John Deere execs over a tiny company out on the prairies making a basic spec tractor, but given that Ursa Ag customers are reported as buying them because they have no DRM, the prospect of larger upstart competitors taking note and offering machines without it may cause them some sleep loss. The free market is held up to outsiders as perhaps the most American of ideals, and for it to eventually prove to be the means by which something intended to limit it might be defeated, is sweet justice indeed.
We’ve reported extensively on the Deere tractor saga over the years, but perhaps the best illustration of the self-inflicted damage the brand has suffered through DRM comes in their older products being worth considerably more than their newer ones.
Whether it’s a Deere, a Tesla or a Kia, why do people continue to buy vehicles that can be bricked remotely at the whim of the manufacturer, or by anyone else who can gain access to the codes?
Same could be said for any Windows PC, for that matter. We are a couple of disgruntled Microsoft employees away from the end of civilization as we know it, after they remotely brick a billion PCs.
A decade or two ago I might have believed that, now I don’t know folks would even really notice – M$’ OS is no longer used in so many of those important functional areas any more, and when it is it will be the old embedded version of XP still in use despite it being out of support as replacing the hardware is expensive. And most of the rest are regular users that are likely doing almost everything on their phone (something I can’t understand, but appears to be a truth) anyway – so you might just have killed PC gaming, or caused such a spike in demand for SteamOS devices the market seems broken.
Now if Apple and/or Android did the same these days, or you could somehow get all of the Linux communities to do the same so the backbone of the internet is both broken and hard to recover in a sustained way…
Either way though the answer to the question of why we buy these things is in many cases we don’t know that risk exists, as nothing in the shiny product brochure warns us, and the ‘service manual’ if we can even find such a thing likely doesn’t spell it out either, though on that one reading between the lines…
Bull. Airports, hospitals, banks, US military, Police, and Gov all use M$
The actually civilization ending stuff these days just isn’t on M$, and in large part hasn’t been for ages, even the M$ cloud stuff is rather eclipsed to the point you would hardly notice it going away as AWS etc exist.
Yes those disgruntled M$ employee would upset everyone, but it wouldn’t really really matter to civilisation as a whole for long – a disruption that isn’t even that complete as the Android, Apple, and basically the entire Internet that runs mostly on Linux still exists. So ‘oh no I have to get my phone out and solve this problem that way’…
You can claim that as much as you want, but if people can’t get money out of the bank or buy stuff/pay bills, companies can’t get money, people dying because dispatch is down, hospitals cant track medications, people can’t get medications and on and on… No a phone wont help and to think otherwise is very naive assuming phones even work at that point.
Money transfers will 99.999% of the time just work as expected – that isn’t a M$ related service at all – you just need the network connection and a machine that isn’t running Windon’t to make the order and the tills that happen to be Windoze based are almost entirely extinct it seems (around here anyway), and even when they exist separate mechanisms primarily aimed at supporting Apple pay etc tend to exist and most places will have ’em – So paying bills might be slightly delayed, maybe a few business have to shut down/ go cash only for a day or two waiting on the delivery of a new payment collection machine, but it won’t end civilisation.
I’d be shocked if Dispatch went down, as again the core structure of that these days is probably a web style service that doesn’t care at all what OS it is run on, so not really M$, and even running on it now that won’t last long as an interruption. Plus even if you assumed the software really really couldn’t run on anything else but M$’ work it won’t really really matter – as the ability to use the phone lines, internet, and radio doesn’t go away as they have nothing to do with MS at all – So yes some folk might well die while Windoze is purged form those systems and the operators figure out how to work without the system they have gotten used to but that isn’t the end of civilisation. Its just pushing dispatch back to the 90’s and only for however long it takes to restart the system on a Unix based platform, and even if it was ‘forever’ dispatch in societal terms works basically the same in the 60’s as it does now – civilisation will barely notice the change.
Losing MS entirely is probably less impactful in anything but the shortest of short terms than the wars in Ukraine and Iran have been no matter where in the world you are… It would be a few days of confusion and annoyance, in which as everyone’s smartphone still works almost everyone will still be able to just get on with EVERYTHING in their life. “Oh no my only email address was a MS one, I’ll have to get another and update my business cards, Facebook profile or whatever”
To actually end civilisation now you’d really really to break everything on the Unix based side of computers, as then suddenly all the fancy network gear is non-functional, all the web servers don’t exist, the databases almost everyone uses as a back end might well be gone forever (MS is terrible at reading disks not formated NTFS or FAT so even if the data remains on the disks…) – So the entire internet, and almost certainly the phone networks cease to exist and it doesn’t matter what devices or OS you have as no backup device will actually connect to anything! That is Civilisation ending.
If you want to dream worst cases of shutting down an economy out of spite, just be Elon.
You can swarm other satellites, disable mobile internet using geofencing , jam GPS, send waves of autonomous vehicles to or AT a target (remember how effectively a small number of angry truckers shut down the Canadian economy during COVID??), you could bore under anything and breach or collapse or flood it, and you own private ICBM missiles in case those other weapons needed more help.
It’s like someone said, how can I disrupt the world’s weapons PLATFORMS by mass producing them, but just remove the weapons part? Nobody will suspect me, and those things could be easily bolted on later. It could be a Bond villain story except it would copy real life.
Oh, and you own AI and everyone’s federal and IRS records in case a few goals were easier with blackmail.
RE: Gov use M$ – funny has it, the virtual/cloud servers backing up the M$ gardens are all Linux. Everything now is “in the cloud”.
It won’t take long to figure out that M$ is not even needed, and same services/comps/whatnots can just run directly on Linux just the same. All it takes is flip the contract and remove the unnecessary layer.
For cars at least the option of buying a new non-computerized car is basically nil, maybe with the anticipated Slate pickup and at that point consumers will vote with the wallet like we see here for tractors.
As to why buy at all- you need a tractor and the only ones available are these DRM ones. No other choice except used which again the market has spoken. The lead time to develop and build new non-DRM tractors is a real thing and this company in the article did it! I hope they absolutely bring Deere et al to their knees.
I guess Deere could buy them out but you cannot buy someone out that won’t sell. Probably. Even if they do hopefully another one or many manufacturers will respond to the market forces and make more tractors that… consumers want and will pay for.
I want to. e hopful with slate, but when there designers start talking, what they have is a smart car. the OG idea behind the smart was to have a moddifiable car. noble goal. the problem with slate is its actually going to be some app heavy mess of a thing you can 3d print a cup holder for.
I think hackaday should shill canadian tractors or what ever else just gives younthe device you paid for. I have a feeling there going to make some things locked out of the consumers hands when we see slates up and running, but I hope its easy to bypass. (I am filled with hope and doubt when it comes to billionare pet funding projects)
Companies like Deere have been running a frog boiling exercise – as technology has crept in for (originally) good and necessary reasons they’ve seized every opportunity to leverage it to lock people into their system and extract more money from them.
Of course they were building on the back of decades of hard-won brand loyalty so folks initially trust that they know what they are doing and the brand they have always trusted is not screwing them.
It’s only now it’s gotten so bad that people are seriously questioning it and I expect we’ll see more startups with the radical new business model that you buy the thing and then you own the thing.
How about remote bricking when thieves steal your inventory? The first we all know, the second was a bunch of TVs stolen from a warehouse. Supply chain theft will increase and it will not be just chocolate next time.
Benjamin Franklin once said: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
The liberty to be a consumer. Score one for our side.
So far the cure is worse than the disease.
Not my problem. My device is in front of me, not in a warehouse.
How about making a non-DRM phone with a secure element and lock it down when it leaves the factory? The rightful owner unlocks it with a proof-of-purchase handed over to her/him at the moment of purchasing.
That proof-of-purchase could be some digital signature, signed by the dealer. From that moment on, it’s all yours.
You would be free to load other OS onto it, but that would void your warranty.
Another interesting topic would be how liability for the manufacturer would turn out in case you swap out the battery for one that causes safety risks.
‘You would be free to load other OS onto it, but that would void your warranty.’
NO. That isn’t even legal now (in the US).
Don’t just let them rip away warranties because I overwrote their ad bloated copy of Android with something clean like GrapheneOS or LineageOS.
Well I don’t know the legality, but when I put CalyxOS on my Motorola G 52 I had to sign away my warranty rights to get the bootloader unlock code. Even if it’s illegal who are you going to sue? The Chinese company that owns “Motorola”? An hour of time of a good lawyer would buy a new phone anyway.
Don’t forget that big corporations have the government in their pocket and can dictate laws that demand measures that make this sort of back-to-the-basics competition non-viable.
Such as demanding tamper resistant emissions controls that require locked down hardware and software. In street cars, it may be speed limiters or mileage based taxation that again demands locked down modules, or high voltage battery systems that can only be serviced by certified personnel…
The drive for these things doesn’t come from the consumers or the general public, but from industry pundits who make up new rules and demands, demand stricter regulations, not to solve any actual social problem but to throw logs under the wheels of their smaller competitors. They’re crying crocodile tears about things like road safety or emissions controls in a situation where things like tire and brake dust has become a bigger problem than tailpipe emissions, because they know that some small company in Canada doesn’t have the R&D budget to solve these issues and so cannot enter their markets.
Or like the Dieselgate: rules for thee, none for me. The auto industry made a big deal about their advanced emissions controls and then cheated the tests, and the government knew it but they ignored it in support of their auto industry versus foreign competitors.
On the bright side if you like these tractors Canada is likely going to do just that to defend their local tractor company against Deere. “Local” being an insanely strong argument with government.
Another part of the problem is people in government on power trips with their own agendas. Fauci’s mind is not unique.
Same reason we still buy IOT and “smart devices” When the server is shut down, device often stop working because you can’t connect to it directly but through their server to change bulb color or update shopping list on your fridge.
If I can’t use it without internet access, I won’t buy.
I used to drive a flatbed truck that delivered farm equipment out of Oklahoma, and delivered all over the plains from the Dakota’s & Nebraska & Kansas to Texas & eastern Colorado & New Mexico and I seen some HUGE junk yards with old tractors from the 1940s through the 1980s and I am sure this John Deere DRM thing has helped them tremendously to sell everything from parts to complete tractors to be overhauled, kudos to this tractor company for building and selling open source tractors
The goal of the EU is that every car can be bricked remotely. They also want to demand camera’s facing the driver that are automatically send over to datacenters and other creepy things. I’m already glad the goal of a maximum age for a car of 15 years is off the table. They wanted to force people to scrap their 15 year old (and older) cars in the entire EU.
Wow! This is great news! Hopefully they won’t have any issues that would have the government makes things difficult for them.
Love that you mentioned Corb Lund. You’re not a niche Albertan yourself, are you?
(also love to see the market responding here. Occasionally, the free market actually works!)
No, but I married one. :)
From the very first comment of your 07 January, 2020, issue on this subject—
“It’s exactly why I will never own a Deere.”
In spades…
John Deere can easily drive them out of business or just buy them long before it becomes real competition. In the meanwhile it’s actually useful for arguing against any monopoly allegations.
Nevertheless, it’s good news that they exist for now.
They can’t be bought (generally) if they’re private and won’t sell, but they can be driven out of business. Lobbyists are a thing, and I can see them being forced out when climate change regulations are used as to make their overhead too high to survive.
But that requires stubborn investors. The usual story is that you need investor money to expand, and the investors mostly care about money so they get lured into selling.
It is a shame that the good tech is paired with the awful DRM. Things like the automated driving tied to GPS coordinates is a great advancement in farming. But if the only way to have it is for JD to be allowed to nuke my tractor from orbit because I failed some automated DRM check I would rather use a shovel.
From Ursa Ag‘s website; main page:
“Our tractors are built without computer controls—by design. This intentional simplicity delivers reliability.”
(Think there’s a reason this is on their homepage, folks?)
When automobile manufacturers stop building only rolling smartphones and get back to the basics, I will quit looking for replacements which that industry stopped building in the 2019 time-frame.
Knowing nothing about tractors but having seen what happened to the 3d printer market, I suppose that Chinese tractors will be making inroads anywhere they are not tariffed? If you are a self-repair person with fear of cloud tie-in then it is really hard to refuse Chinese hardware which is often the clone of an older model but running open source firmware, for 1/4th the price.
If that is how it works out absolutely. But if we take smartphones as an example the Chinese ones are often not even close to as open as they “should” be for compliance, and not even close to really open – So while it might well be 1/4 the price if you are exchanging “John Deere me isn’t that expensive” for “John O’Dearno” – the same service but poorly translated from a language you don’t speak with a support based in a timezone about as shifted from your own as possible…
Though I do think the 3d printer market may be a good example, as you have the Prusa that is good ‘local’ support and designs you can fix easily at one end, and all the cheaper ones some with lots of anti-features as far longevity and right to repair, while others are just lower quality control, cheaper materials etc more initial sticker shock budget friendly options. So your tractor could perhaps be that repairable, modifiable import.
Chinese tractors may not be DRM’d and requiring subscriptions but if the average Chinese tech is anything to go by, they’ll be reporting all kinds of crap back to Chinese servers, and the service software will have a virus. And the firmware will be a rip-off of an open source project.
Is Deere the only tractor company with DRM? They seem to be the only one I hear about. Kubota has an excellent reputation in small to medium tractors. Seems like they would be in a good place to expand into larger tractors and cause Deere some serious hurt.
Kubota and Agco have both signed on to ‘right-to-repair’. But they still have several gotchas in their electronics and supply chain.
You can have my 93 IH when you pry my cold, dead hands from its PTO.
I’m concerned that people are accepting the idea that “without DRM” is synonymous with “without computerized features” far to easily.
Regardless if it is tractors, cars or whatever sort of machine.. there is nothing wrong with building a more manual, non-computerized product for those who want it. But there is also no reason that someone cannot produce a machine that has all the bells and whistles but none of the DRM, none of the vendor lockdown.
If the market never starts to demand that then it will never exist.
Indeed, but you can be much much more certain you will retain that real ownership and ability to repair if there is no computer at all – one OTA update later and that DRM free machine could become the locked down parts signed or I won’t turn on nightmare that needs a subscription for the AC to work…
I have difficulty with “I want a car without computers.” So, what, you want one with a carburetor and mechanical linkage and a stick transmission? That puts you squarely in a minority of stuck-in-last-century eejits.
To get fuel injection (smooth running, starts in any weather, decent fuel economy) and an automatic transmission, you basically have to have electronics. Which, oddly enough, in this day and age, mean microprocessors. Which is in fact a computer.
Now, may modern vehicles have eleventy-thousand control modules, not just for the fuel injection but for the power windows and locks and the infotainment and probably coffee makers for all I know.
Even for farm implements like this GPS is handy, and while you could use your phone, if you’re in an area with little/no cell signal its nav goes wonky. So you want some computers, but not others, but somebody else wants some other computer, do you see the problem?
Where do you draw the line from truly, Luddite, that’s not possible, to a reasonable midpoint? The Slate idea might be it, have to wait and see.
Personally, I draw the line at networking. My car’s computers can talk to each other all they like, but if they ever try to talk to the outside world, out comes the fireaxe.
There were fuel injected airplanes in 1940, and fuel injected cars in the 1950’s.
I think an obvious line to draw is electronics are okay but having the electronics tied to a bidirectional radio of any sort isn’t.
mechanicaly injected. I had a diesel w123 Mercedes, and folks with cummins have them too. Electronic stuff really came into the game through bosh in the 70s and got gud in the 80s before diffrent styles came up. GM hung on to single port injected to keep pumping out small block v8s with the tooling and know how they always used, while every other eco car that was switching from carbs begain using MPI or multiport injection, which uses some electronics but not nessarly a computer, though usually an EPROM if it was one of the early computers. Then proper port injection and can bus systems in the late 80s early 90s really upped the fule ecomomy and emission goals. we took a solid step back going into direct injection, but some mfgs now use direct and port at the same time. getting clean ports from the Port injection rail and better millage from the direct injection.
Indeed. But my fuel injector doesn’t need to have the permission of the manufacturing company through an open internet connection in order to function.
Many very drivable automatic transmissions without a single transistor or vacuum tube have been produced, relying on vacuum signal and hydraulics to decide when to shift gears. It is technically computation, but not in the way that people mean when they say “I want a car with no computers in it” any more than a car with a differential or or hydraulic servo power steering or a carburetor (all analog computers of varying complexity) is.
Yeah, electronics that can run fuel injection and other engine management functions surely don’t have to be microcontroller/digital computer. Could be digital without a central processor, or even analog.
Analog circuitry and analog computers can be screaming fast and do some impressive things, but can tend to be fiddly, drifty and require a lot of tuning and babysitting, as I’ve heard it from some old timers. But, I can’t begin to guess what the state of the art analog control would look like if digital hadn’t progressed the way it has. Anybody making ultra-nerdy “Sliders” fan fiction?
theres nothing wrong with microcontrollers, digital computers, and central processors. The problem is black boxes, black blobs, and dealer/authorized repair access only operating systems.
If these control systems were more user/operator/shadetree mechanic friendly their presence and the enhanced functionality/efficiency they bring to the table would be well appreciated.
We dont need to roll the clock back three quarters of a century. We just need to do away with the moats and drawbridges that stand in the way of effective and reasonable maintenance and repair.
FALSE ADVERTISING – NOT MADE IN CANADA – These are simply chinesium imports with some finished assembly done in Canada. From goggle AI
Ursa Ag, based in central Alberta, Canada, offers affordable, low-tech tractors (150–260 HP) assembled in Bowden, which utilize global components including Cummins engines and are imported/rebadged from Chinese manufacturers. They focus on mechanical, user-repairable, non-electronic machines aimed at countering high, tech-heavy tractor prices.
Key Details regarding Ursa Ag and China:
Manufacturing/Sourcing: While assembled in Alberta, the tractors are reported to be imported from China.
Engines: The tractors feature 5.9L and 8.3L Cummins engines, with reports suggesting these are 12-valve/24-valve engines produced for export in China.
Components: The equipment utilizes mechanical, non-electronic parts similar to 1990s technology, allowing for easier, owner-based repairs.
Company Background: The founder has experience importing attachments, loaders, and mini dumpers from China.
Market Position: Marketed as a low-cost alternative (“half the price”) to major brand tractors, aimed at farmers looking for durable, “no-tech” machines.
I still want one, even if it’s Chinese.
Ah that is why it looks just like the one I have here in Australia, that I know for a fact is a Chinese knockoff of an old european design.
What about Mahindras? US assembly plants, parts made in India. I don’t know how big they make them, though.
Try that in a small town, urban DRM gang banger!
I have a tractor very similar to that, a Chinese knockoff of an older european design with new features bolted on. No DRM, you have to put a mechanical control to even get the engine to stop. It is not a bad machine for such a low price but the old design with new stuff added causes some engineering design incoherences that a designed from scratch machine would not have. No show stoppers so long as you remember to get out a brush and clear the radiator periodically when slashing grass with fine fluffy flowerheads that fill the radiator and make the engine overheat on a hot subtropical summer day. The insane bit is that the original design had removable mesh screens to make this a very quick job but the add on cabin’s air conditioning radiator was placed such that you can no longer do that.
I will be Red-baited for this, but small towns just need to have old, community tractors, that serve as emergency generators.
On the farm I worked at, farmer had an old generator gathering dust in the barn that mounted on a three-point and utilized the PTO. I thought that was brilliant; very “Swiss Army knife”.
Also, the You Ba$t*rd Tractor Company
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNgc7ILAMoU