This first bill allows the state of California to regulate and oversee all 3D prints in the name of public safety.
2D printers are next.
Man what a way to fucking make everything unfun
Jokes on you, my 3D printer is offline
Under the proposal, printers would have to evaluate STL files, CAD files, or other geometric code using a firearm blueprint detection algorithm and block files flagged as capable of producing a firearm or illegal firearm parts, including conversion devices.
California’s Department of Justice, or another relevant state agency, would have until January 1, 2028, to publish performance standards for detection algorithms and software control processes.
This is the problem when lawmakers write technical bills without speaking to technical people. They’re going to publish standards for evaluating if your gcode is a firearm or firearm part? THAT’S FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE
It’s not even that, building a firearm…is legal…this shit going after printers makes no sense at all, it’s fucking legal to print firearm parts.
BANNED
I bet they end up using a fucking llm
Kinda, render a few images from the gcode, use a CV algorithm to identify the object.
On device it’ll be slow or expensive.
Define gun is a lot harder then you think. For example
Your faith in this mystery algorithm is stronger than mine. Here’s a diagram of the parts in an AR-15:
So we need an algorithm that renders the gcode I’m printing, then compares it to… something?
The algos don’t need to deny any or every part of a gun, but the most critical part must not be printable and it’ll already be effective.
I’m neither very experienced with firearms nor printing, maybe such a thing doesn’t exist for a gun, but I suspect there’s a few very important pieces that need to be printed a certain way or the firearm falls apart or is at least a lot less useful.
All that said, I’m generally against such limiting mechanism in any printer or compiler. Try close sourcing all compilers so they can’t create malware? Forget it.
3D printed gun designs these days don’t even use plastic for most of the critical parts. The goal is to print a frame, which you can then assemble into a full gun using durable off-the-shelf parts that are available from any hardware store. No need to 3D print a bolt (and deal with all of the manufacturing issues that entails) when you can just buy a bolt for 5¢ at any hardware store. Especially when that bolt will be more precise and durable than the plastic bolt you would have printed.
It’s the old carpentry idea that if you can’t get precision by hand, you can borrow it from something else. Need to cut a bunch of identical boards, with precision in 64ths of an inch? A #8-32 bolt will have 32 threads per inch. So a half turn on the bolt will advance or retract the bolt 1/64 inches, accurate down to whatever the bolt manufacturer’s clearance is. Probably a few thousands of an inch. Build a jig to hold your boards at the saw, and thread a bolt into the jig to act as the board stop. Now you can turn the bolt to adjust your clearance as needed, and you’ll be accurate down to 1/64 by only making half turns each time.
And 3D printed guns use the same concept. You don’t print a plastic barrel that will explode after two or three shots, you just leave a void for a store-bought pipe to fit into the frame. The pipe will be more durable and more precise than anything you could feasibly print. You don’t need to 3D print a firing pin that will blunt/shatter/jam after a few uses, when you can just use a steel nail that will have better durability and avoid jamming. And all of the parts you need can be bought at a hardware store without raising any suspicions. That’s part of what makes this so dumb. They’re not just requiring printers to scan for potential gun parts. They would require printers to scan for anything that could potentially hold or manipulate gun parts. And that is a much broader spectrum than simply scanning for the shapes of the parts directly.
That makes a lot of sense. If the print just holds the critical parts, forget it.
I’m neither very experienced with firearms nor printing
Unfortunately that’s the crux of the issue. The people who have written and signed this bill aren’t either - and they weren’t as big of a person as you to recognize that.
At the end of the day, 3D printing gcode is telling your printer to spit out a shape. And you simply cannot ban shapes. Am I printing a firing pin or a part for my shoe rack? There’s no way to tell. Any politician that’s telling you there is is either ignorant or lying to you.
Worse still, gcode is literally just telling a machine which motors to move and how much. You need something that can interpret those instructions (thousands of lines of code even for pretty simple prints) correctly and “draw” the shapes it is making. There are a lot of printers out there that do not have the hardware on board to do this.
And that is all ignoring the absurdity of recognizing shapes as “gun parts”… The hardware hurdles pale in comparison to the software ones.
Theres countless gcode use in the world, much of it is offline
Doesn’t matter. Has nothing to do with online.
You can run OpenCV on an RPi, it’s just super slow, and you could probably use a cheap GPU chip to do it faster. You store the pretrained model on the device.
You may even get away with an asic designed for the model, though with that one I’m talking out my ass.
That would makes printers more expensive and my guess is that they’ll prefer to force online connectivity
I suppose my old Prusa just jumped a bit in value.
You can use a 3d printer to build a 3d printer. When they figure that out, will they try to stop those parts from being printed too?
Who did they consult on this, and did that person or persons purposely lead them astray, or were the consultants equally ignorant?
Hell, with modern stepper motors and aluminum box frame, you don’t even need a 3D printer to build a 3D printer. It would certainly make it easier, but it’s not required. You could manufacture an entire 3D printer using off-the-shelf parts and a raspberry pi (or maybe even an Arduino) to control the motors. It wouldn’t be elegant, and it would require a lot of calibration… But it would be doable if someone were so inclined.
Repraps were controlled with Arduino Megas for a very long time. Up until the MK4 series, Prusa’s Rambo or Einsy boards still ran on the ATMEGA2560 microcontroller.
All of this work is done.
Fyi, I can make a gun from schedule 40 pipe, a few rubber bands, a weldable hing, and some brazing rods.
“Uhoh, can’t 3d print a gun. Guess I’ll just go to Walmart.”
More like “Guess I’ll just print this file labeled ‘hyper realistic movie prop lazer blaster’.”
Jokes aside it’s to prevent having one that’s not registered
Not all legal firearms are registered anyway already. Not to mention it is completely legal to build your own gun in the US. So long as you aren’t building something NFA regulated (full auto, over .50 caliber, short barrel shotgun, silencer, etc.) and you are not distributing them to anyone, you are allowed to just build a gun. There are places online that sell “receiver blanks” with plans for how to finish them with very basic machining, and then you can buy all the rest of the parts off the shelf at any gun store without any registration at all because only the receivers are regulated even a little bit.
This has nothing to do with gun control. The entire concept of “ghost guns” has been a scare tactic to get enough public on-side to pass draconian surveillance and manufacturing control laws like this. The goal of this is to monitor “at-home manufacturing” (of anything, nothing to do with guns anymore than it has to do with warhammer compatible miniatures) and restrict the practice.
For reference of just how easy this is, most AR-15s that I’ve seen have been units built from individual parts, my own included. That’s kinda the AR-15’s whole schtick, is that it’s super modular and customizable, so much that a lotta people joke that it’s “LEGOs for adults.” It makes good sense, if company A makes a good upper, but Company B makes good triggers, so why not mix and match for the best of both worlds?
I doubt you can do that in California
Guess I’ll go to Nevada.
This guy gets it.
Register as a manufacturer of 3D printers
Government gives you an updated, comprehensive archive of STL files your firmware must reject
???
Profit
If only the government were that incompetent. But even I have my doubts they would distribute anything more than hashes.
Still, changing a hash is ridiculously simple.
True haha. But yeah, a file hash is actually uniquely useless in this case, any gcode spun out of a slicer is going to be hardware and user specific.
Just seems like there would be opportunities for hacking and reverse engineering this measure. At it’s root, it’s a measure that builds firearm information into the firmware, surely that could be exploited by a person who wanted to do that sort of thing.
This is fucking insane.
- Buy a kit.
- Buy a mechanical kit and an electronics package.
- Build from scratch
- Buy out of state
- Buy an open source machine and flash the firmware
- Buy your fucking gun in an alley (way easier, and maybe cheaper.)
- Design and distribute stls that have parts that may be interpreted by whatever brain dead software is going to watch out for files, and print in two batches, say, something that may look like a lower, and then an upper, for a a nerf gun, for example, to glut the system.
The list goes on…
Safety…sure…someone wants to see and steal your potential IP by looking at the AUTOCAD server or your printer server.
Supporters say the measure tackles the problem before a downloadable file becomes an untraceable weapon. Everytown for Gun Safety says recoveries of 3D-printed crime guns across 20 cities have risen nearly 1,000% over the past five years, and argues that cheaper, more capable printers are already being used in illegal ghost gun operations.
Ooooh, that’s two large red flags for me (disregarding the litany of red flags the concept in general has). Every town being involved makes me question the data on its face, given the number of times I saw gang violence near a school out of school hours listed as a school shooting in their database, as does a large percentage increase with no hard numbers. If they recovered 1 gun last year and 11 this year, that’s a 1000% increase, but the percentage sounds so much worse than the real number.
Good luck. Tough to pick a more DIY-oriented bunch of hobbyists who would rather build their own hardware and compile their own software over allowing their printer to narc on them to the government.
RepRap 2: Countersurveillance Boogaloo, launching soon.
I am feeling bad for all the people that bought Bambu.
Us digital hippies just believe in free data and world peace, man.
in the name of public safety
In the name of gutting small manufacturing and the ability to repair your own devices. This has never had anything to do with safety, as they can’t even do the thing the bill demands. Fucking asinine
Next steps I’m sure. Then they ban you from printing anything that resembles a patented device, anything that looks like a medical device (can’t skip certification), and anything that looks like a toy (SAVE THE CHILDREN!).
I’m I missing something? This can’t be the actual intent of the law, the actual intent for laws are rarely what they state. What are they really trying to do here? Or, are they really this fucking ignorant?
The goal is likely to regulate prints via intellectual property laws and seeing all the prints is the purpose of this law. Then come fines and lawsuits over prints.
Basically they want to open the door for patent and copyright abuse in the 3D printing world while expanding the government surveillance network for themselves and large manufacturers.
What are they really trying to do here?
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Prevent people from printing trademarked objects, like figures, characters, etc. that’s where this is going.
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Steal IP on new designs. 'Cause AI theft of IP is so hawt right now.
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this is not about gun control in a country that has almost no gun control.
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