If they do, are they competitive? Or are they doing the same thing. It could also be like car dealerships in certain states, you’re not allowed to just open one within x miles of another (though that refers to more of the same brand). Wouldn’t surprise me if they can’t have dealerships near each other due to backwards legislation.

Exactly why John Deer should not be allowed to do this. Any threat to the food supply should be considered a national security risk.

The real question is what other options do farms have? Let’s say their tracker breaks down and repair is no longer an option. How many other manufacturers are making the type of equipment they need? And how expensive would it be to enter that market to compete? To me it seems like John Deer has a monopoly and is exploiting it.

Wireguard is good if you don’t want easy access to notifications or location based automations. Otherwise you need to always make sure the VPN is on.

Lots of good info here I’m not going to repeat, but I think if you’re going to open home assistant to the public Internet, you should not use duckdns. It’s better to get your own domain and set up a reverse proxy to use https. Or if it’s too technical, subscribe to nabu casa and let them handle it for you.

There are a few ways you can send encrypted information, but they all boil down to the same concept: Create a problem that is very difficult to solve unless you already know part of the answer. For example, I have a number that when divided by 7(a prime key in this case) has a remainder of 3. It could be 10, 17, 24, etc… We then take that number’s remainder, raise it to a power and multipy it by a large number to create a huge result. I send this result to the other party without sending my prime, along with the number I multiplied. They choose their own prime and do some more math with my result and send back the result. Since I know my prime, its simple for me to get the result but anyone watching would have to do a lot of math to get the answer.

Two excellent videos on the subject: https://youtu.be/NmM9HA2MQGI https://youtu.be/Yjrfm_oRO0w