Updated Twelve farm labor, advocacy, and repair groups filed a complaint last week with the US Federal Trade Commission claiming that agricultural equipment maker Deere & Company has unlawfully refused to provide the software and technical data necessary to repair its machinery.

The groups include National Farmers Union, Iowa Farmers Union, Missouri Farmers Union, Montana Farmers Union, Nebraska Farmers Union, Ohio Farmers Union, Wisconsin Farmers Union, Farm Action, the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, the Illinois Public Interest Research Group, the Digital Right to Repair Coalition, and iFixit.

They contend that Deere & Company owns over 50 per cent of the agricultural machinery market in the US and has deliberately restricted access to its diagnostic software and other information necessary to repair its products in violation of the Sherman Act and statutes covering unfair and deceptive trade practice. And they're asking the FTC to intervene by putting an end to these practices.

"Deere is the dominant force in the $68 billion US agricultural equipment market, controlling over 50 per cent of the market for large tractors and combines," said Jamie Crooks, attorney from Fairmark Partners, which represents the farm and repair groups, in a preface to the complaint [PDF].

"For many farmers and ranchers, they effectively have no choice but to purchase their equipment from Deere. Not satisfied with dominating just the market for equipment, Deere has sought to leverage its power in that market to monopolize the market for repairs of that equipment, to the detriment of farmers, ranchers, and independent repair providers."

Objections to Deere & Company's practices, part of a broader pushback against digital lock protections built into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, go back many years. Initially the province of cyber liberties activists like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, digital repair concerns have come to the attention of lawmakers in the US, the UK and Europe.

In January, Deere & Company was hit with two lawsuits, one in Illinois and the other in Alabama, over the company's repair restrictions, and US President Joe Biden voiced support for repair rights. Then in February, US lawmakers in the House of Representatives and in the Senate introduced separate bills to guarantee the right to repair.

When states began to consider right to repair legislation in 2018, Deere & Company, through an affiliated trade organization, said by January 1, 2021 it would provide tools through authorized dealers "to empower farmers and ranchers to perform basic service, maintenance and repairs on their equipment."

Crooks observes that 2021 has come and gone without this commitment being met. Instead, Deere & Company provides repair information only if farmers and ranchers pay thousands of dollars up front for a service called Customer Service Advisor, which still does not enable them to perform common repairs on their own. Citing this misrepresentation, the complaint asks the FTC to intervene.

The legal filing cites several examples of the impact Deere & Company's practices have had on farmers. It recounts how Jared Wilson, a farmer near Butler, Missouri, experienced a mechanical valve failure on a Deere fertilizer spreader that sent the machinery into "limp mode" until the software error code could be resolved by a Deere-authorized technician. Wilson had to take his equipment to the dealer and wait 32 days for a repair, resulting in an estimated loss of $30,000 to $60,000 because he could not use the machinery.

What's more, the complaint says it appears that Deere & Company is gathering data from farmers and using that information to provide optimization techniques to other farmers, eroding potential points of competitive differentiation among its customers.

"These are techniques farmers have developed and keep secret for a competitive advantage over their rivals," the complaint says. "But if they use a Deere machine with JDLink, farmers are revealing those techniques for Deere to profit off of."

The FTC filing also suggests a rationale for Deere & Company's behavior: It alleges that the repair business is three to six times more profitable than the agricultural machinery sales business.

Deere & Company did not respond to a request for comment. ®

"John Deere supports a customer's right to safely maintain, diagnose, and repair their own equipment. To facilitate this, Deere provides the tools, parts, information guides, training videos and manuals needed for farmers to work on their machines, including remote access for technicians to provide long-distance support," the agri-giant told The Register.

"John Deere does not support the right to modify embedded software due to the risks associated with the safe operation of equipment, emissions compliance, and engine performance. We remain committed to providing innovative solutions that support our customers' needs."

The OpenZFS Project has released version 2.1.3 of what the project calls its "open-source storage platform" for Linux and FreeBSD.

The terminology reflects that ZFS is not just a filesystem; it also subsumes the functionality of partitioning and logical volume management. This makes creating and managing what ZFS refers to as "pools" of storage simpler than most of its rivals, such as Btrfs or XFS, which work alongside existing partitioning and LVM tools.

This leads to some overlap. For instance, Btrfs includes its own RAID tools, but so do both the Linux kernel and LVM2. Red Hat is also working on a new storage manager called Stratis, which aims to rival ZFS's functionality.

The Cloud Security Alliance is trying to cut through the myriad zero-trust approaches and solutions out there and attempt to offer some practical info for corporate network admins.

Zero-trust security continues to be one of the hottest marketing phrases in an industry that loves its buzzwords. But despite so many so-called zero trust products from virtually every vendor, there's still a lot of confusion about what a zero-trust architecture looks like and how to deploy its key elements across an organization.

A new Cloud Security Alliance project called the Zero Trust Advancement Center aims to cut through the clutter. Launched this week with vendors CrowdStrike, Okta, and Zscaler, the initiative aims to advance standards, certifications, and best practices to help folks build zero-trust environments.

Singapore's Cyber Security Group, an agency charged with securing the nation's cyberspace, has uncovered four critical flaws in code from network software company Riverbed.

The vulnerable application is SteelCentral AppInternals, formerly referred to as AppInternals Xpert, provided by Riverbed's Aternity division. AppInternals provides application performance monitoring and diagnostics, and is part of SteelCentral. Customers usually deploying this in their datacenter and on their cloud servers to collect information about performance, transaction traces, and more, so it can all be monitored from a centralized UI.

Specifically, the insecure code is in Dynamic Sampling Agent, which is the collection component of AppInternals. Versions affected, according to a CVE record, include 10.x, versions prior to 12.13.0, and versions prior to 11.8.8. Aternity's advisory about the security holes is locked behind a customer login page. We've asked the vendor for more information.

Analysts warned Russia's invasion of Ukraine could derail the supply chains of semiconductor fabs. Now those concerns are playing out with the apparent shuttering of two major neon gas suppliers in Ukraine.

For a report today Reuters calculated that the two neon suppliers, Ingas and Cryoin, produce 45 to 54 percent of the world's neon for chip fabrication, based on information provided by the companies and electronics materials research firm Techcet.

The Ukrainian duo told the news agency they have shuttered in the face of continued attacks on cities in Ukraine by Russian military. Ingas is based in Mariupol, which is being hit hard by Russian troops, while Cryoin is in Odessa, which is also under threat. Their neon gas is needed for lasers used during the chip fabrication process.

Analysis Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger lately said he wants to grow his company's software business "rapidly" with new software-as-a-service products and software platforms that will help the chipmaker better compete against rivals.

With more than $100m in software revenue last year, this is a natural next step.

During Intel's investor meeting last month, the semiconductor giant, which has ambitions similar to Nvidia's in software, revealed for the first time how much it's made from slinging code. Greg Lavender, the head of Intel's new software group, told shareholders software is a "great opportunity," and that he expects to grow the business to $150m this year.

Benchmarking organization SPEC has formed a committee to oversee the development of vendor-agnostic benchmarks for machine-learning training and inference tasks.

SPEC, the non-profit Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation, produces a range of benchmarks that are widely used to evaluate the performance of computer systems, especially in the high performance computing (HPC) industry.

According to SPEC, the newly formed Machine Learning Committee will develop practical methodologies for benchmarking artificial intelligence and machine learning performance in the context of real-world platforms and environments.

US government auditors want to save taxpayers' money by bolstering the capability and efficiency of Uncle Sam's far-flung stable of datacenters. Each federal agency's sites have a host of problems, unsurprisingly.

The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) kicked off its Datacenter Optimization Initiative (DCOI) in 2016 with the goal of reducing the massive financial and energy waste being generated by these warehouses of computers. We're not talking small change, either: in 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated the annual electricity bill for federal government datacenters and servers was $450 million, and the Dept of Energy said each facility can use 100 to 200 times as much energy as a commercial building. 

Despite all that energy and monetary expenditure, two years later the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) found that government server utilization rates were as low as five percent.

Revenge and inflation are key drivers behind an 800 percent increase in cyberattacks seen by a managed services provider since the days before the onset of Russia's invasion of Ukraine last month, according to the company's top executive.

The attacks are coming not only from groups inside of Russia but also from within the region as well from Russia allies like North Korea and Iran, historically sources of global cyber-threats, Emil Sayegh, president and CEO of Ntirety, an MSP that focuses on security, told The Register.

The US-headquartered biz, which was formed in 2019 after the merger of web hosting companies Hostway and Hosting.com, serves about 2,400 companies around the world, most of them small businesses and midsize enterprises and most in North America. Sayegh said Ntirety has seen the spike in cyberattacks throughout its customer base.

Thousands of developers are fleeing the war in Ukraine, while thousands more in Russia have been sanctioned out of being able to work in the West. There are two ways out, and one is to automate those jobs.

This is according to Jennifer Thomson, IDC research lead for accelerated application delivery, cloud, and services, who says Russia's war against Ukraine will have a massive impact on companies that look abroad for developers, if for no other reason than the sheer numbers of tech professionals in the country.

"Look at the [Ukrainian government's] website, and it just tells you 130,000 engineering graduates and 16,000 IT graduates [emerge] yearly. That's actually twice as many as countries like the UK or Poland are able to churn out," Thomson said. 

Microsoft has published its annual sustainability report for 2021 [PDF], claiming to have reduced its own CO2 emissions by about 17 percent year-on-year, but with a bigger carbon footprint overall than it had last year, showing that "progress won't always be linear".

In 2021, Microsoft generated 14.072 million metric tons of CO2e, by its own estimation. That's up from 11.58 million metric tons of CO2e the year before – an overall 21.4 percent increase.

Announcing the report, Microsoft president and vice chair Brad Smith said that the past year had provided the company with critical experience for its stated goal of becoming carbon negative by 2030.

Back in October, reports surfaced that China had achieved exascale-level supercomputing capabilities on two separate machines, one of which is its Sunway "Oceanlite" system, which is built with entirely Chinese components, from CPU to network.

While there have been few architectural details to date, a paper [PDF], published today, outlines the compute, memory, and other aspects, in addition to showing off the capabilities via a system-spanning AI workload for a pre-trained language model with 14.5 trillion parameters with mixed precision performance of over one exaflop.

The system has "as many as 96,000 nodes" the paper reveals, based on the Sunway SW26010-PRO compute units (manycore with built-in custom accelerators) with custom memory configuration and a homegrown network fabric.

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