Millions of dollars worth of John Deere agricultural machinery stolen from a dealership in Ukraine by Russian Federation forces has been traced to the Chechen Republic and bricked, it is reported.

In this instance, the Moline, Illinois-based Deere & Co.'s penchant for proprietary digital access controls may have worked out well from a public-relations standpoint, if the account is true. The looted tractors and combine harvesters have been remotely disabled, according to an unidentified Ukrainian interviewed by CNN, leaving those responsible looking for ways to bypass the machinery's digital locks.

That task may be all the more challenging given the reported flight of IT talent from Russia and the sanctions-induced shortage of IT equipment in the country.

Two weeks after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, John Deere announced the suspension of shipments of farm machinery to Russia, and later to Belarus, in response to international sanctions.

Whether or not those sanctions have had any effect on farm equipment demand or availability, Russian Federation forces have been documented taking valuable items (not to mention Ukrainian citizens) back to Russian territory.

Since March, Agrotek-Invest, an authorized John Deere dealer in Ukraine, has posted several reports on Facebook accusing Chechen security forces of stealing farm equipment from its showroom in Melitopol, Ukraine.

On March 31, the company said two new John Deere S770 & S760 flagship harvesters, along with Tempo sowers from Swedish agricultural machinery firm Väderstad, worth about $1 million had been stolen from the company showroom.

Then on April 5, the farm equipment dealer said more machines had been stolen.

According to CNN, the total value of equipment seized amounts to more than $5 million.

On April 7, Väderstad responded to Agrotek's posts by noting that it keeps serial number records for each of its machines and has locked them down to prevent them from starting or being repaired.

John Deere has similar capabilities, and at least one individual responding to Agrotek's initial post in March suggested the dealer email the equipment maker to request a remote update to its harvesters based on serial numbers to install ECU firmware to disable the stolen machines. Given the farming machinery is equipped with GPS and can be remotely controlled, it is possible the equipment was locked by one means or another from afar.

Ironically, back in 2017, American farmers were importing cracked John Deere software from Ukraine to hack their US-based tractors to repair and modify them.

Since then, the Right to Repair movement – which aims to require that technology companies provide the public with fair and reasonable access to the tools and software to repair their products – has made considerable progress. There's now widespread support for pro-repair legislation in the US, the UK, and Europe.

Deere & Co. did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company previously told The Register it "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." ®

Opinion Making a call on the quality of a new idea in tech can be hard. But if you ask me, not in the case of Lonestar Data Holdings, whose plan to build datacenters on the Moon is literal lunacy.

Every detail of the roadmap, from tentative tiny proofs of concept to massive underground server farms built and tended by Moon robots, is priceless nonsense. From Apollo onward, every spacecraft has had data storage and network access. We have retrieved data held in New Horizon's 16GB filing system from Kuiper Belt object Arrokoth, 16 thousand times more distant than the Moon. Concept bloody well proved.

As for building bit lairs in lava pipes by robot, nobody's built a datacenter by robot on Earth yet. And nobody seems minded to try.

Who, Me? A reminder of the devastation a simple DROP can do and that backups truly are a DBA's best friend in this morning's "there but for the grace of..." Who, Me?

"Stephen" is the author of today's confession and was faced with what should have been a simple case of applying an update to an Estimating and Invoicing system.

The system ran on a PostgreSQL-database and was, in his words, "Software that I don't touch save when there's an issue, needs rebooting, etc."

The land of the rising sun has fallen to the United States’ supercomputing might. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) newly minted Frontier supercomputer has ousted Japan’s Arm-based Fugaku for the top spot on the Top500 rankings of the world's most-powerful publicly known systems.

Frontier’s lead over Japan’s A64X-based Fujitsu machine is by no means a narrow one either. The cluster achieved peak performance of 1.1 exaflops according to the Linpack benchmark, which has been the standard by which supercomputers have been ranked since the mid-1990s.

Frontier marks the first publicly benchmarked exascale computer by quite a margin. The ORNL system is well ahead of Fugaku’s 442 petaflops of performance, which was a strong enough showing to keep Fugaku in the top spot for two years.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) has backtracked on advice about how best to secure the "Aadhaar" national identity cards that enable access to a range of government and financial serivces.

UIDAI promotes the cards as "a single source offline/online identity verification" for tasks ranging from passport applications, accessing social welfare schemes, opening a bank account, dispersing pensions, filing taxes or buying insurance.

Although Bill Gates has lauded Aadhaar cards for improving access to services, the scheme has been the subject of many security-related scares as inappropriate access to personal information has sometimes been possible, UIDAI's infosec has sometimes been lax, and the biometrics captured to create citizens' records have sometimes been used for multiple individuals. Privacy concerns have also been raised over whether biometric data is properly secured stored and secured, if surveillance of individuals is made possible through Aadhaar, and and possible data mining of the schemes' massive data store.

China’s largest city, Shanghai, will this week all-but end its COVID-19 lockdowns on Wednesday, and by doing so may smooth some of the kinks in the world’s technology supply chains.

Limited lockdowns commenced in Shanghai during mid-March, before April escalations imposed city-wide restrictions that have remained in place ever since.

Shanghai is a major manufacturing hub, so the lockdowns have caused considerable pain. Cisco, for example, Cisco warned of disruption to supplies of parts it needs for power supplies. The likes of Foxconn, Tesla, and Toyota, have all ceased or slowed production. Chinese chipmaker SMIC kept production ticking over by having staff move either into its plants, or into a COVID-free zone around its plants.

Eleven significant tech-aligned industry associations from around the world have reportedly written to India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) to call for revision of the nation’s new infosec reporting and data retention rules, which they criticise as inconsistent, onerous, unlikely to improve security within India, and possibly harmful to the nations economy.

The rules were introduced in late April and are extraordinarily broad. For example, operators of datacenters, clouds, and VPNs, are required to register customers’ names, dates on which services were used, and even customer IP addresses, and store that data for five years.

Another requirement is to report over 20 types of infosec incident, even port scanning or attempted phishing, within six hours of detection. Among the reportable incidents are “malicious/suspicious activities” directed towards almost any type of IT infrastructure or equipment, without explanation of where to draw the line between malicious and suspicious activity.

In brief Somerset County, New Jersey, was hit by a ransomware attack this week that hobbled its ability to conduct business, and also cut off access to essential data.

"Services that depend on access to county databases are temporarily unavailable, such as land records, vital statistics, and probate records. Title searches are possible only on paper records dated before 1977," the county said in a statement.

The attack, which happened on Tuesday, took down email services for county government departments as well as leaving the county clerk's office "unable to provide most services which are reliant on internet access." Somerset County residents were asked to contact government offices via Gmail addresses set up for various departments, or via phone. 

Researchers in the Netherlands have shown they can transmit quantum information via an intermediary node, a feature necessary to make the so-called quantum internet possible.

In recent years, scientists have argued that the quantum internet presents a more desirable network for transferring secure data, in addition to being necessary when connecting multiple quantum systems. All of this has been attracting investment from the US government, among others.

Despite the promise, there are still vital elements missing for the creation of a functional quantum internet.

Chinese academics have christened an ocean research vessel that has a twist: it will sail the seas with a complement of aerial and ocean-going drones and no human crew.

The Zhu Hai Yun, or Zhuhai Cloud, launched in Guangzhou after a year of construction. The 290-foot-long mothership can hit a top speed of 18 knots (about 20 miles per hour) and will carry 50 flying, surface, and submersible drones that launch and self-recover autonomously. 

According to this blurb from the shipbuilder behind its construction, the Cloud will also be equipped with a variety of additional observational instruments "which can be deployed in batches in the target sea area, and carry out task-oriented adaptive networking to achieve three-dimensional view of specific targets." Most of the ship is an open deck where flying drones can land and be stored. The ship is also equipped with launch and recovery equipment for its aquatic craft. 

In-brief Governments around the world should pass intellectual property laws that grant rights to AI systems, two academics at the University of New South Wales in Australia argued.

Alexandra George, and Toby Walsh, professors of law and AI, respectively, believe failing to recognize machines as inventors could have long-lasting impacts on economies and societies. 

"If courts and governments decide that AI-made inventions cannot be patented, the implications could be huge," they wrote in a comment article published in Nature. "Funders and businesses would be less incentivized to pursue useful research using AI inventors when a return on their investment could be limited. Society could miss out on the development of worthwhile and life-saving inventions."

More papers describing the orders and messages the US President can issue in the event of apocalyptic crises, such as a devastating nuclear attack, have been declassified and released for all to see.

These government files are part of a larger collection of records that discuss the nature, reach, and use of secret Presidential Emergency Action Documents: these are executive orders, announcements, and statements to Congress that are all ready to sign and send out as soon as a doomsday scenario occurs. PEADs are supposed to give America's commander-in-chief immediate extraordinary powers to overcome extraordinary events.

PEADs have never been declassified or revealed before. They remain hush-hush, and their exact details are not publicly known.

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