Do they not understand how this works? People will just stop buying printers and switch to building them.
Then they’ll make owning an unregistered 3D printer a felony.
The same way having an unregistered firearm already is?
Lmao no they fucking won’t. I mean maybe like 0.5% of consumers, or less, will. Some number that pales in comparison to the amount that just buy a bambu because “it’s just easier, FOSS needs to get on usability and make it so that it just works 🤷♀️” while failing to see that their utter laziness and incompetence to solve even the mildest of problems and expecting everything to “just work” in exchange for money always means trading their rights and privacy away.
Look at the people that complain about jellyfin but then also complain about plex becoming increasingly hostile. Look at the people complaining about Linux but also whining about windows descent into madness. Etc etc. and in cases like this the buy in cost is nothing but your time! You think the average consumer, who openly invites corporations to fuck them, is gonna be like “hmm I’m gonna spend money to build a solution.”
No goddamn way. They’re gonna bitch about the legislation, they’re gonna bitch about how things got this way, then they’re gonna give bambu and anycubic and Microsoft and openai and Google and apple etc etc all their money. They’ll probably sign up for subscriptions with each company
Everything is about surveillance nowadays. Doesn’t anyone worry about being vexed anymore? Are there nanobots in my Snickers bar checking out my duodenum?
O just love that true one single product bthat allows you to replicate itself in an open non spy way now must have spyware.
Politicians are idiots
So Amazon can buy the data, know what we’re printing, steal the designs and make a product for it, capturing the market they only know existed by spying on us. Knowledge is power and I’d rather not further empower the psychopaths who are primarily responsible for the widespread reduction of our qol. But the idiot masses won’t give a fuck because they’re foolish and never think anything they want to do is bad.
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That’s something highly specific that was carefully designed to only activate on currency. They added highly unique dot patterns to currency that scanners could detect. And the printer doesn’t (at least by law) spy on everything you do. The printer will just refuse to copy a dollar bill. The printer doesn’t refuse to operate unless it has an open communications line to the FBI.
If they wanted to do something similar with 3D printers, I would have no objections. Others have pointed out the technical problems with preventing any form of 3D print, but I’ll speak conceptually here. There are 3D printers that print metal. Countries with high-denomination coins might find it useful to bar 3D metal printers from printing those coins. You could assumedly create some sort of 3D version of the dot patterns used on paper currency. Then you pass a law stating that any 3D scanner must refuse to scan an object if it detects those very unique dot patterns on it. Then countries with high-value coins could mint them with these unique dot patterns or other features. If anyone tries to scan a coin to reproduce it, the scanner just refuses or outputs only noise. No need to phone home. No need for mass surveillance. Just a simply refusal that would only be active in this very specific case.
If someone wanted to implement a feature like that into 3D printers, technical problems aside, I would have no objections. That would be directly analogous to the 2d printer example, and it would represent no escalation in spying or restrictions on freedom of use.
Tell me how many handmade 2D printers are out there with this restriction?
How many 2D printer building kits have you seen online?
Ever seen open source sold with censorship built in? How would that work?
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There is no algorithm for that. That’s just technobabble. In order to detect if somebody is trying to print any specific shape you’re going to need software that can look for that shape in an arbitrary cloud of point data. That software does not exist.
No one has developed that kind of software and in order to develop it would require a tremendous amount of research and development. Who pays for that?
Now let’s say you were the company who did that research and development Do you build the cost of developing this anti-product into a line of products that you will sell? What’s the market for that product? If you sold the printer with no chip at all are you exempt from that requirement?
Will a device that has to include the additional cost that comes with all of the additional needed computer hardware, software development, and anticircumvention technology be in any way competitive on the market against models that don’t include these additional unnecessary expenses?
How long will people be allowed to make aftermarket modifications to their 3D printer if the aftermarket modifications don’t also include the additional computer hardware needed to run software that could arbitrarily detect gun parts in 3D printed designs?
I don’t think you understand how completely insane and unworkable a plan like this is because you’re comparing 3D printers to 2D printers. That’s a little bit like comparing paint by numbers to scratch and sniff.
There’s a much simpler and more horrifying solution here, that would actually be technically possible. All 3D printers sold must have a sort of cryptographic lock on them. Only safety-verified prints are allowed to be printed on them. The code running on the printers themselves will still be dirt stupid, but there will be a software lock on the thing preventing uncertified prints from being printed. Every 3D printer sold is locked down tighter than a John Deere tractor.
Every 3D print company would offer a large number of pre-verified prints. (AFAIK many already have libraries of print files.) But you as a user wouldn’t be able to just print anything you wanted. At best, maybe 3rd-party verification services would exist. Model what you want, then pay 20 bucks to some company for a print verification. You send them the file, they screen it for any contraband, and they send you a cryptographic key that lets you print that file and only that file. Long term they would hope AI can do the screening. For now it will be someone’s job to just stare at 3D models all day and to figure out if it’s a gun or not. It would start with screening for guns, but it would inevitably expand to things like intellectual property protections.
They won’t have to change the fundamental deep logic and operation of the printer itself. Just like the fundamental mechanisms inside a tractor haven’t changed. They’ll just make it a felony to sell a 3D printer that isn’t locked down to Hell and back.
And?
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Will building your own regular printer (making you the manufacturer of the device) and loading your own modified firmware on it make you a criminal?
So reading the commentary in the first link, if you flash your printer with new GPL firmware that bypasses these restrictions, you’re now in violation.
And what if I move (back) to WA with my printer purchased out of state that I’ve already modded?
I see what they’re trying to do, make ghost gun production illegal, but turning makers into criminals for flashing their printers with new firmware seems the wrong way.
It always is. Always blanket laws that cover so many legal things to get normal law abiding citizens in a bind.
Or if I have a printer now and don’t update it.
it is, and they don’t understand that the hardware on a 3d printer isn’t capable of analyzing what it’s about to print like that, it’s not even close. People average laptop couldn’t even analyze a random part and give a reasonable estimate of how likely it is a gun part unless it’s an exact match, but if you tweak 1 thing it would be lost.
I don’t think these lawmakers have any clue how anything works. 3d modeling, slicing, and firmware would all have to have spyware in it and be uploading data to the cloud to be analyzed for this to be remotely possible. Not only is that financially impractical, it’s logistically impossible.
Heeeeeyyyyyy. I have a k1c with cfs, is there open source support? I’m dumb, I like the printer, and the cfs is alright. Not thrilled about the opaque software and definitely not thrilled with ‘cloud intrgration’
I have a Prusa XL, and the reason is, Prusa is (still) mostly open-source. And quite frankly it’s the only reason why I stick with Prusa, because technically they’re behind the curve.
I don’t get why they insist on sticking to their own somewhat inferior software platform when a good, 100% open source, and better performing alternative exists with klipper.
🩷🩷🩷I’ll check it out! Thanks so much!
Helper script (2nd link) is easier to use. simple AF (first link) is fully open source, but requires you to use another bed leveling probe - no open source „driver” for prtouch- the built in one (which is slow and not terribly accurate anyway).
Creality Helper Script is a must have. My K1C has run it through the very first second. Getting as much open source (for a reasonable budget) and control on my marines is the main decision factor for my purchases.
You’ll have people selling custom eproms and/or firmware to bypass it.
That’s Washington state, not DC.
Surveillance capitalism and the fascists always find a way to debase everything good that people like.
Until they can wrong money out of
Uncommon Washington State L
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Obviously you are not at all familiar with how 3d printers work, how that currency counterfeit prevention works or how the limits of it mean that they had to put tracking dots into the machine as a backup, but here’s a dirty secret about it:
The reason printers are so expensive, you have limited options for brands, no one has an alternative open source version and they can’t be built at home is because of laws that make it a requirement to have this technology that restricts their use.
It’s dramatically easier to prevent a two-dimensional printer that requires proprietary software from your computer to prepare the prints to send to the printer. For starters, that proprietary software is only available from The printer manufacturer and it weighs hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of megs. The printer also has on it a pretty powerful chip to receive all that information and instructions and pretty powerful DRM to make sure that you can’t access it without jumping through their hoops.
Most 3D printers are made from components that can all be taken out and replaced individually. They run software that is custom built and available open source. By their very nature nearly every model of 3D printer is much more customizable and It is widely understood how to build one from scratch.
Making a law like this is a kin to making a law that says it’s illegal to sell a notebook that people could use to plan a crime. It’s unworkably restrictive and in order to pull it off you’re going to have to violate a whole lot of rights.
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Good thing I didn’t bring up spying at all or you might have a point that somehow speaks to a thing I said.
What the bill does include is a wish list of stupid things you could only want if you didn’t understand the technology.
It’s also the thin end of the wedge meant to create a context for an excuse to further restrict these devices.
Most 3D printers run software that is smaller than most 3D prints.
I’m going to say that another couple of different ways in case you didn’t understand it, The software that runs on these devices is measured in the hundreds of kilobytes. A 2-in wide Batman symbol with no flourishes or extra details is going to be 10 to 30 times that size. There’s not even enough memory on the device to hold the entire print so it reads the instructions on how to make it one line at a time.
Those instructions are written in G-Code and g code is older than even the concept of most computer peripherals. G-Code can be written by hand, and is a technology older than computer monitors, digital audio, the mouse, or The indicator light.
So you want to add more computer to a device than the device normally costs so that it can run software that no one has written or knows how to write so it can detect shapes based on their future intended usage to prevent people from using their highly customizable home manufacturing device to Make single use firearms in a country that already has more guns than people…
From TFA:
Manufacturers may comply through three methods specified in Section 6(2) of the bill: integration of the algorithm in the printer’s firmware, integration in preprint software, or a handshake authentication design between software and printer.
Nobody’s going to do this in the printer itself; the spyware will be built into the slicer.
Ultimately this will be trivially easy to defeat no matter what moronic legislators who possess no technical knowledge think. The real dangers are more subtle, not least of which being the chilling effect if this passes effectively instructing all 3D printer manufacturers not to sell anything in Washington state since total compliance as the bill proposes is indeed effectively impossible, and the penalties for presumed lack of compliance are high. The most realistic outcome for a private individual vis-a-vis potentially printing a ghost gun is not necessarily having their printer tattle on them, but the state having yet another byzantine felony they can charge people with if they get caught after the fact with whatever-it-is they have. Never mind the 1st and 2nd amendments, the only realistic avenue for enforcement of this on private individuals will run afoul of the 4th.
