Crepuscular Marsh @Marsh@queer.party

Republished from: https://twitter.com/hourlyFox/status/1527846657924255745

The gender of the day is a soft jean jacket.

Kill-switches and VIN-locking go hand-in-hand and they're both security nightmares. In the automotive context, VIN-locking is key to the subprime car lending industry, where trillions of dollars' worth of loans are backed up with ignition immobilizers to make it easier to repo cars when the owner misses a payment.

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Manufacturers love the ability to control repair. Not only does being the only game in town mean that you charge a fortune for parts and service - it also means that you can declare something "beyond repair" and insist that the customer throw away their product and buy a new one.

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These VIN-locks are protected by the DMCA. Providing a tool to bypass them, which would allow independent mechanics to swap in the part and then initialize it, carries a potential prison sentence of 5 years and a $500K fine for a first offense. Thus, the act of fixing a car without manufacturer authorization becomes a crime.

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VINs are the unique identifiers inscribed on cars' engine-blocks, and, these days, indelibly associated with cars' on-board computers. VIN-locking is when new engine parts have to be initialized with a cryptographically signed code that says, "This part is now associated with this engine."

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Remember this the next time you hear, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Deere doesn't give away ad-supported tractors. Farmers pay six- and seven-figure sums for Deere equipment - and they're still the product. The thing that determines whether a company can treat you like "product" isn't whether you're paying - it's whether they can get away with it.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/22/mesmer-2-point-oh/#thanks-obama

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In Deere's case, this started with a data-play: as a top Deere exec boasted to me at a conference some years ago, the company uses the sensors on farmers' tractors to build a centimeter-accurate grid of soil humidity and density. The locks on Deere tractors prevent farmers from accessing this data directly - rather, they are reliant on whatever plans Deere cooks up.

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The kill-switches in Deere tractors weren't designed to thwart Russian looters - they were designed to thwart *American farmers.* Deere's industrial strategy takes its cues from other industries - mobile phones, cars, med-tech, etc: they use tech to lock in their customers, harvest and sell their data, and extract fees from them.

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Which raises the question: why are there kill-switches in Deere tractors? This is a good question to ask about *any* kill-switch. As a sf writer, I just *hate* those sci-fi movies where someone accidentally hits the self-destruct button on the bridge of a spaceship. I always think, "You know, I'm no aerospace engineer, but wouldn't this be a better spaceship if it wasn't designed to explode?"

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for sale: gross ape, never funged

It's important to be able to know when you're wrong about a reading, first so you remember that divination has absolutely fuck all to do with telling the future, that's bullshit, and second so that you can calibrate your readings so that you can do a better job of telling the future

an adult female body is scary because it implies at least a certain degree of agency and a degree of difference that makes it unknowable to the normatively male agent; but simultaneously desirable as a sex object. the strange hybrid bodies (a character is textually pubescent but has dd-cup tits) that result from this are i think a clear parallel for the conflicting demands of simultaneous hypercompetence and complete helplessness patriarchy passes on women. finally, the sexual objectification of women is naturalised by denying girls a pre-sexual stage (and, hence, also any notion of female personhood separate from sexual access)