"The Zug farmer Bircher was lucky that certain parts of his milking systems were disconnected from the computer. He was able to continue milking his livestock despite the hacker attack."
Don't connect important machines to the internet... all these hacker stories comes down to the same fundamental mistake.
If not as a privacy and rent seeking nightmare. You are in reach of every hooligan in the world.
So - how did the malware get in?
And those machines are always running a purpose built program made by the lowest bidder and have TRIVIAL flaws to exploit.
The malware got in the same way malware got into Windows 2000 back in the day: the code exposed to the network is trash and is full of holes you can drive a truck through.
"Rent seeking" is an "I hate everything" buzzphrase that people use without understanding, like "gaslighting" and "third spaces".
It is useless to try and correct the error.
But according to Wikipedia, I think the "classic example" fits many SaaS vendors:
The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of a property owner who installs a chain across a river that flows through their land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee to lower the chain. There is nothing productive about the chain or the collector, nor do passing boats get anything in return. The owner has made no improvements to the river and is not adding value in any way, directly or indirectly, except for themselves. *All they are doing is finding a way to obtain money from something that used to be free*.That sounds like your personal narrower definition. Where did you get that from?
The wider use is both historically and semantically accurate and I believe people familiar with the term will still recognize its intended meaning today.
Needlessly making a physical product unusable without the continued subscription to an associated service, and designing the product in such a way that only the manufacturer can/may provide that service (aka vendor-lock-in) is pretty much rent-seeking, yeah.
In reality a local version on a standalone system would probably be better as most farmers may not need anything more than a local system with a soft and hard copy backup for safetly.
The cloud data is probably being sold to hedge funds to make bets on yields/futures.