Episode Transcript

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Morgan Sung: If you’ve ever tried to order a McFlurry at McDonald’s and couldn’t get one, you’re not alone.

Jason Koebler:There’s this kind of meme where if you want a McFlurry, you have maybe like a 50% chance of trying to order it and the cashier saying that the machine is broken.

Morgan Sung: Jason Kabler is a tech journalist and co-founder of 404Media. That’s the worker-owned independent tech publication.

Jason Koebler: And so it became this kind of like nationwide phenomenon where people were trying to order McFlurries and basically half the time they couldn’t get them. There was this guy who created a McFlurry tracker that would track like the thousands of McDonald’s locations that didn’t have McFlurries at any given moment. 

Morgan Sung: It’s called McBroken.com, and it shows up as an interactive map of McDonald’s locations all over the world. If a store has a working ice cream machine, it gets a green dot. If its machine is down, that’s a red dot. When the McFlurry tracker launched in 2020, the US was scattered with red dots. 

Jason Koebler:And sort of like as this cult item, people got like really frustrated with this state of affairs.

Morgan Sung: Conspiracy theories started spreading about why the McFlurry machines were always broken.

[Clip from TikTok user@filspixel]
You are not ready for how diabolical the McFlurry conspiracy rabbit hole really is.

[Clip from TikTok user@iancarrollshow]
I am talking about the McDonald’s ice cream conspiracy, and oh boy is it bigger and more sinister than you might think.

[Clip from TikTok user@mariannenafsu]
Rumor has it that the machine isn’t always broke. It just needs cleaning.

Morgan Sung:  That last one is actually the closest to the truth.

Jason Koebler:The franchises that I spoke to, they were like, we know how to clean the machine. We just don’t know how to reset it so that it actually works again.

Morgan Sung: You see, only an authorized repair tech from the company that made the machines could get them running again.

Jason Koebler:Essentially what was happening was you just needed to reset the McFlurry machine. Like there was a series of buttons that you needed to hit, uh, like a code that you need to enter and it would go into this, like refresh mode. And it’s not that it was like so difficult to repair the McFlurry machines. It’s just that the franchises didn’t have this code.

Morgan Sung: Only the authorized repair techs had the code, but there weren’t nearly enough of them to repair all of the machines. So the employees were stuck.

Jason Koebler:They would have to wait a long time to actually get their machines repaired. And then you multiply that by all the McDonald’s in the United States and you get a situation where like McFlurry machines are broken all the time.

Morgan Sung: Then something happened that was kind of surprising.

Jason Koebler:So what happened was folks in the right to repair movement, they basically argued to the federal government that it should be legal to bypass this artificial password slash code that was preventing McDonald’s franchises from fixing and resetting their machines.

Morgan Sung: The Right to Repair is a consumer rights movement that advocates for people’s ability to repair and maintain their own things.

Jason Koebler:And they actually won, and now it’s legal to hack your McFlurry machine in order to repair it. I think they’re still broken more often than people would like, but for the most part, it’s like a better state of affairs.

Morgan Sung: At the time of writing this narration, McBroken.com reports that roughly 9% of the world’s McFlurry machines are broken. Still a lot of red dots, but way down from before. Okay, but this episode isn’t just about McFlurries. McDonald’s employees getting the ability to maintain their own equipment is part of a much bigger story, the Right-to-Repair movement. We’ve been diving into this movement over the last few weeks. We’ve looked into DIY vape modders and the legal fights over electronic repairs, like fixing laptops. And here’s the interesting part. Jason says that a lot of the Right-to-Repair protection we have now exists because of farmers who’ve been fighting for this for more than a decade.

Jason Koebler:It’s actually a pretty direct line, like basically the problem that McDonald’s franchises have had fixing McFlurry machines, farmers have had fixing their John Deere tractors, their combines, their harvesters, like all sorts of different farm equipment. And farmers got very pissed and they essentially joined the Right-to-Repair movement where they were basically saying like, it’s a political movement to essentially like, free the tractors from this tyranny.

Morgan Sung: Today, we’re getting into a relatively unknown piece of Right-to-Repair history: the world of farmers, gray market tractor hacking, and an unlikely alliance with DIY repair nerds, a partnership responsible for many of the right to prepare protections we have today.

This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.

As usual, we’re starting with a new tab, Farmers and the Right-to-Repair. Jason has been covering the right to repair for almost a decade. And like many who get interested in the movement, his story begins with a mishap.

Jason Koebler:I had a MacBook and I got drunk one night. I was watching a comedy special or something and I fell asleep. And I woke up and I kicked the laptop off of my bed. It landed like face down on the screen and the LCD broke. Like actual glass didn’t break but the LCD behind it broke. And I was, I don’t know, like 21 years old. I didn’t have a lot of money. I had kind of just bought this MacBook and I needed to get it fixed. It had like, you know, a rainbow screen. I couldn’t see anything on it.

Morgan Sung: So Jason took his broken MacBook to the Apple Store, and guess what they quoted him to fix this $1,000 laptop,  $800!

Jason Koebler:I didn’t have $800 at the time, so I just started Googling, like, how to fix MacBook. And I came across this website called iFixit, which is this community of people who create repair guides. And I saw that with a simple, like 65-step process or something, like a really long process that it was possible to fix the problem that I had, and I just needed to find the part. And so, I went on eBay. And I found the LCD screen for my MacBook and I’ve found one for $50.

Morgan Sung: He ordered the part and a couple tools and spent a long night painstakingly replacing the screen.

Jason Koebler: Disconnecting little tiny wires and like unscrewing tiny little screws and losing the screws and then finding them again By the end I had fully fixed my computer and I used that computer for like six more years and it worked, no problem. And the total cost to me was like, I don’t know 70 bucks with the parts in the, you know, the screen.

Morgan Sung: and the sleepless night.

Jason Koebler:The sleepless night for sure. It awakened something in me where I was like, huh, why did Apple want $800 to do this? Maybe because it was so hard for me to fix it, but I did fix it nonetheless. And so I started looking into this and started learning that this is actually like the business model of a lot of electronics companies where they’ll sell you the gadget, but then when it breaks, the repair cost is so high or so inaccessible that you’ll either just buy a new one or you’ll pay them to repair it.

Morgan Sung: This is a common theme. A lot of people we spoke to described a moment when they started asking why things were so hard to repair. And once they noticed, they couldn’t unsee it. So Jason started reporting on the Right-to-Repair, mostly covering the obstacles in fixing consumer tech, iPhones, laptops, that kind of thing. He also went to repair conventions and profiled some of the leaders of the movement. He became the reporter on the Repair Beat at Vice, where he worked at the time. And then one day, a few years in, he got an email from a farmer.

Jason Koebler:Saying, hey, like, you’re writing about this problem of fixing MacBooks, but we are facing the exact same problem in agriculture. And it’s pretty crazy because tractors cost upwards of $100,000, sometimes they cost like half a million dollars. Like we’re not talking about a $1,000 MacBook. We’re talking about something that is core to someone’s livelihood, is really time sensitive because if a tractor breaks while you’re trying to plant during these really tight planting windows, or if you’re tryin’ to harvest during these tight harvest windows, the crops will just over-ripen and die. And so they were like, this is really critical, but we’re facing the exact same thing. Like, John Deere is controlling all of the repairs. We can’t get the parts. It’s really expensive. We have to wait sometimes for days or weeks, depending on how busy the repair people are. You should come to Nebraska and see what we do.

Morgan Sung: And so he did. And it was there that Jason learned about the underground community of farmers trading pirated software so they could hack their tractors. Not for any crazy mods, but just to get them to run. Next, we head to Nebraska after this break.

Morgan Sung: Welcome back. Ready for a quick trip to the Corn Belt? Let’s open a new tab: The tractor hacking problem. So Jason Kepler was reporting for Vice at the time, covering the right to repair movement when a farmer reached out and invited him to Nebraska. He spent a few days there and met with multiple farmers who all had the same issue with their tractors.

Jason Koebler:What has happened is for decades and decades and decades, farmers have considered themselves to be incredibly self-sufficient. When something breaks, like they know how to change the oil, they know to change different sensors, they know change different parts on their tractors. That hasn’t necessarily changed, but what changed is that John Deere, which is the most popular tractor manufacturer in the country, has started adding these technical protection measures to tractors So it’s not that there’s like, anything wrong with the replacement parts, or that it’s now that the farmers don’t know how to do these repairs. It’s that there is just like an artificial code that they need in order to make it talk to the tractor that they have.

Morgan Sung: Sound familiar? It’s the McFlurry machine debacle all over again. These protection measures are like digital locks put in place by copyright holders. They’re used in digital games, or ebooks, or tractor software. Getting around them could be considered copyright infringement.

Jason Koebler:And a lot of them are sort of legacy farmers where their dad was a farmer, their grandma was a farmer on that same land. And for decades, it was like, well, my dad fixed the tractor, like, why can’t I fix the tractor anymore? And I think that not being able to do that makes them feel disempowered and like they don’t own their farm anymore. Like, the success of their farm has been outsourced to John Deere or like a major ag tech company.

Morgan Sung: Not getting a McFlurry because McDonald’s employees don’t have the digital key to reset the machines, annoying. But not having the key for farm equipment during the peak of harvesting season, financially devastating.

Jason Koebler:They used to do this repair all the time before tractors were so computerized. It’s the same general process. They do it, it won’t turn on. They have to call a John Deere dealer or authorized repair person. They’re told to wait a day or two days or a week. And all that time, they’re losing money. And these farms run on such small margins already. So they’re mad and they’re like, my crops are dying, what can I do? And so they just start Googling around. And one farmer told me basically that he learned that because of some European Union law, the Ukrainian version of this software was available and also could work with the American version of a John Deere tractor. And so we pulled up to this farm and he met us with a laptop, like a really old like, ThinkPad and he had this…he had like a USB dongle that was like a USB dongle to like, a tractor port dongle…

Morgan Sung: What?!

Jason Koebler:…that basically is like connected to the computer of the tractor.

Morgan Sung: Jason wanted to see it himself. The farmer told him that you could download the software from a torrent site, aptly named the Pirate Bay. Or you could try to join a web forum, which on its surface was about car repair and modification. Jason did the latter. He found one and after he requested entry, he got an email with a link to a third party website. On that website, he had to buy a $25 car diagnostic tool. But they didn’t ship him the tool he purchased. Instead, they sent him a password to join the forum.

Jason Koebler:And then on there, there was like all of these threads about different versions of John Deere software that you could download and how to use it and like all these guides and things like that. And so it was just like a few farmers who were really fed up and they like learned that this was possible. They went into these modification forums, like, it’s really affiliated with people who like modify their cars to, you know, make them run faster or like overclock the engine, like that sort of thing. It’s like, that was some of the other stuff that was happening on this forum. And then there was like a whole separate section where it was like agricultural equipment. It was like how to like make your Mustang go faster or like how to replace an air intake sensor in your John Deere tractor.

Morgan Sung: The forums had all this software that you could download and sold the cables, that dongle that Jason mentioned, to connect a tractor to a computer. The farmer showed Jason how it worked.

Jason Koebler:He, like, opened his laptop, connected the laptop to his tractor, and he ran the program and then was able to like activate the part that he was showing me, which was some sort of like, emission sensor or something like that. And it was really crazy because I had actually just spent a day with another farmer who didn’t have this dongle and didn’t have this software and he was trying to fix the exact same thing. And he’s like, look, I can’t, like I’ve put the new part in, but I can activate it. It just, now my tractor won’t turn on, it doesn’t work. It was like, well, this guy has figured it out somehow.

Morgan Sung: Tractor hacking was full of legal landmines. The software was technically pirated, which raised all these questions around copyright and licensing agreements. Farmers started speaking out and connecting with people from totally different industries facing similar issues. And so, an unlikely alliance was born between legacy farmers and tech repair DIYers.

Morgan Sung: Time for a new tab: Big tractor versus farmers and tech nerds? So farmers had actually found a way to keep their equipment running, but it wasn’t exactly on the up and up. And there was always the chance that John Deere would implement a fix to foil these hacking attempts, and the farmers would be back at square one. To find a permanent solution, they needed help.

Jason Koebler:They eventually got connected to groups like iFixit and some of these other electronics repair people who had already been talking about this problem in electronics and realizing that it was the same problem for farmers as well.

Morgan Sung: One of the most outspoken advocates for farmers actually has roots in the tech world, Kyle Wiens, the co-founder and CEO of the repair community, iFixit. Kyle’s background is in computer programming, but then a friend asked him for help bypassing his tractor’s sensor issue. Both Kyle, a software engineer and repair expert, and his farmer friend, a pretty adept DIYer, were stumped. They started lurking in agriculture forums and realized that this was actually a very common issue in the tech world and in farming. Kyle wrote about this whole experience in Wired in 2015, advocating for a copyright exemption for farmers to fix their equipment.

Okay, buckle up. We’re about to dive into copyright law. So, in 1998, the US passed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. It basically modernized copyright law for the digital age. There’s one part of the DMCA that matters for our story, section 1201. It governs technical access to all kinds of machines, like the McFlurry machine or tractors. The software lock on McFlurry machines is allowed to exist because of section 1201. But there are also exemptions to this law, rules that decide who gets to bypass these software locks and how.

Every three years, the Librarian of Congress revisits these exemptions. And every three years, Right-to-Repair advocates have pushed to expand them. In 2015, iFixit and other digital rights groups successfully won an exemption for land vehicles. That exemption allows owners to modify their vehicles’ computer programs, as long as it’s for legal repair, this includes tractors. And though that sounds promising, the reality was still extremely thorny. For instance, was it legal to pirate software for repair? Unclear. Plus, third party hacking, AKA taking the tractor to a local repair shop, was still super illegal.

Then there is this other sneaky part of it, licensing agreements. Around the time the copyright office approved the land vehicle exemption, John Deere started requiring farmers to sign contracts promising that they wouldn’t modify their tractor software. So hacking your own tractor, even to fix it, could get you sued for breach of contract. Hacking someone else’s, even as a repair tech, could get your arrested for copyright infringement.

Jason Koebler: I’ve watched many hearings at state houses where a farmer will go up and they’ll talk about this problem and then a lobbyist for John Deere or for an industry group will say, okay, but if you give farmers access to this stuff, they might modify their tractors in a way that makes them unsafe. They might modify them in a way that causes them to fail emissions tests. And for the first few years, this argument was really persuasive to lawmakers who didn’t really understand the problem.

But then there was just so much, kind of, momentum behind this problem. Like, it became worse and worse and worse over the years as older tractors started getting phased out and farmers started buying more computerized tractors and more people started having this problem. It became like a much stronger political movement and over the last few years there’s been quite a lot of gains for farmers, both through negotiated agreements with John Deere, but then also through state-level legislation that has passed that does enshrine some of these Right-to-Repair ideals.

Morgan Sung: So each exemption cycle, the Right-to-Repair movement makes some progress and the impact snowballed. The 2018 exemptions allow third-party repair technicians to bypass the digital locks for land vehicles, like tractors, which means that repair techs are also allowed to hack tractors now, for repair, of course. In 2021, the land vehicle exemption was expanded to cover all consumer electronics, like smartphones and TVs. And then in 2024, it expanded again, this time for food preparation equipment. That’s right, I’m talking about the McFlurry machine.

 [News clip fron FOX4 Dallas-Fort Worth]
 For the first time ever McDonald’s store operators are now allowed to fix their own ice cream machines! Can you believe it?

Morgan Sung: But when it comes to tractors, it’s still very much illegal to make and distribute the software that breaks these digital locks. And it’s also still technically illegal to buy the tools that you need for tractor hacking.

Jason Koebler:I mean, it’s like really complicated. It’s like the concept is so simple. It’s, like, the farmers just want to be able to fix their tractors. But then the actual details of it are incredibly complicated in terms of what they can fix, when they can fix it, how they can fix it which software they need, where they can get that software, which parts.

Morgan Sung: John Deere hasn’t made it any easier either. Let’s get into that in one last tab: can farmers finally fix their tractors?

Jason Koebler:The answer is that they can do more than they could do when I first started covering this. But what’s happened is John Deere has made some repairs accessible and some parts accessible, but some parts are still not. And as farming gets more high tech, it’s called precision agriculture. Like, a lot of tractors now essentially drive themselves. They’re guided by like GPS and cameras and all these sensors. There are increasingly things that are still not able to be fixed by the average farmer. But by and large, the situation is better now. It is legal to hack a tractor now. And when I say it’s legal to track a tractor, it is legal to hack your own tractor to fix your own tracker. It’s not legal to like, hack your tractor and make it drive a hundred miles an hour.

Right now it’s a situation where, kind of like, the devil is in the details where farmers still want more. And I think they also want better protections because a lot of what’s happening right now is John Deere is, kind of, voluntarily saying, okay, you can fix these things and we can decide what you can fix. And the farmers want it enshrined in law saying, no, anything that your dealer can fix, we should also be able to fix essentially.

A lot of farmers also, I’ve heard from, they’ll go to buy a part that they need to fix their tractor and it just won’t be in stock. And so the dealer that sells them will not say like, you can’t have this part. They’ll just say, oh, we don’t have it and it’s on backorder. And maybe it’s backorder for months. And so like functionally, they are not able to access the parts that they should be able to access just because there’s not anything in the legislation that says these companies have to sell you parts and they also have to have them in stock at all times. And so compliance is a really big problem. And then also just like what’s the enforcement gonna be because very often the penalties are like a slap on the wrist if that.

Morgan Sung: So although seven states now have right to repair laws, only two of them have laws that cover farm equipment. So how does that complicate the issue for farmers who started this movement? What is the state of fixing their tractors like for them?

Jason Koebler:The fact that only some states have passed this legislation actually complicates things for everyone, not just farmers. It complicates things for John Deere as well, because you’re a big company, like, companies generally don’t like regulations. But if there are gonna be regulations, they want the regulations to be the same everywhere so that they don’t have to comply with 50 different laws in 50 different states. And if you’re farmer, it’s like, well, you want the same rights that someone in another state might have. And so it has created a bit of a patchwork system. That said, the fact that there is right to repair legislation in some states has made things better for all farmers because it’s not like John Deere can sell a part in one state and prevent that part from traveling to another state. And it can’t like, release a repair guide in one state and not have that repair guide be shared over the internet. And so what’s happened is like the fact that some of these states have passed laws has made the situation a lot better for everyone.

Morgan Sung: The right to repair is an issue internationally, but these roadblocks are especially prevalent in the U.S. Jason said that other countries either have stronger consumer protection laws, a more widespread culture of DIY repair, or they don’t enforce copyright laws as strictly. That’s why farmers depended on pirated Ukrainian software for tractor hacking. So the Right-to-Repair movement isn’t uniquely American. But what is unique about it, for Americans, is that it’s a political movement that both sides can agree on.

Jason Koebler: Right-to-Repair is one of the few things that I’ve ever covered as a journalist where there is like very broad bipartisan support. Like this is not a Republican issue, it’s not a Democratic issue. It is like, everyone is pissed about this. It’s like, a lot of the farmers I spoke to are like, you know, pretty like, very conservative, not all, but a lot of them are very conservative. A lot of the electronics repair people are very liberal. They’re facing the exact same issue. And this is something that they’ve been able to find common ground on. And there’s only been like a few polls about Right-to Repair that I’ve seen, but it’s an issue where like 90% of Americans agree that this is an ideal worth fighting for.

Morgan Sung: In the last few days of Joe Biden’s presidency, former FTC chair Lena Kahn filed an antitrust lawsuit against John Deere. When Trump took office, the second time, his administration dismantled a lot of Lena Kahan’s antitrust efforts. But they decided to keep pursuing the lawsuit against John Deere. That’s how bipartisan this is. This is an issue that affects everyone, legacy farmers and tech DIYers alike.

I, for one, am beefing with the company that makes my fridge. The sensor on the ice dispenser is broken, but the company doesn’t sell that. They have to replace the entire fridge door. The door is backordered and hasn’t been in stock all year. And once it is in stock, I’ll probably have to wait for an authorized repair tech to come by and install it. So now I have this fridge that has all these cool app controlled features, but I’m still manually filling the ice tray.

I didn’t even want a smart fridge in the first place, but I didn’t have a choice because my apartment building already had an exclusive contract with the company that makes it. According to Reddit and the many repair guides I found online, I could probably replace the sensor myself. However, doing that might violate my lease. So I’m back to using old-fashioned ice trays.

The Right-to-Repair is a constant fight. Companies love malicious compliance. You know, doing things that are technically legal but still unproductive. Some advocates are pushing to repeal Section 1201 of the DMCA altogether, or at least reform it so that the exemption process for software locks is less cumbersome. At least things are starting to look up for farmers. John Deere had argued that the FTC lawsuit should be thrown out, but last year, a judge ruled that it can and should move forward. Equipment manufacturers, like John Deere, have long argued that they limit independent repair to comply with emissions regulations in the Clean Air Act.

Last month, the EPA issued new guidance that said that, actually, they aren’t allowed to do that. The Clean Air Act can’t be used to stop farmers from fixing their own stuff. And then, also last month, lawmakers in Iowa voted to advance a bill that would allow farmers to repair their equipment, including tractors. The big tractor lobby isn’t as strong as it used to be. And every day, people gain a little more of the right to repair tractors and McFlurry machines and everything in between. Okay, now let’s close all these tabs.

Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All Tabs team also includes editor, Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our director of podcasts and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor in chief.

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco Northern California Local.

This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi-75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.

Do you like these deep dives? Are you closing your tabs? Then don’t forget to rate and review us on Spotify, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. Maybe drop a comment too. And if you really like Close All Tabs and want to support public media, go to donate.kqed.org slash podcasts. Thanks for listening.