This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Jokes on them. I already block my printer from talking outside the LAN.
firearm blocking technology.
grep -r "gun"
It's very funny that people think they need a 3D printer to make a tube, a stock, and a trigger.
If you can make a rubber band gun, you're 70% of the way to a working firearm. And it'll be sturdier then extruded plastic.
Fallout plays a comedic take on it, but I can very much see a gun being made out of iron pipe and a shovel handle.
It seems like that should be invalidated as a law? Like it would be if the feds pre-empted it.
But the courts have previously ruled that you can't illegalize dual use devices that have legitimate legal uses and possible illegal ones, as they tried to do with CD burners back in the day for the record companies, may they burn in hell.
Not sure that would apply?
If it involves firearms then the law, constitution and existing precedent mean nothing to the 9th Circuit of Appeals. When it comes to guns, no right is too important to not invalidate to prevent guns.
How does this "firearm blocking technology" even work? How does a 3d printer id whatever code the slicer sends it as a gun part?
From what I've heard, it's like inkjet printers and a signature. Add a squiggle along the inevitable seam that is on the print. Each squiggle is different, and it may even skip every three layers or so.
But it's not about signing the weapons but about blocking the weapon even being printed. Also, 3d printers are a lot more prone to failures and not holding the exact line.
They upload the following meme to everyone's printer and call it a day:
The only possible way I can think of to make this work is require the firmware to only be able to print G-code files that have a cryptographic signature from some central slicing authority that users submit models to, which then analyzes the STL file with AI or some shit for approval. The only technology that can remotely go "is this STL file a piece of a gun?" is machine learning. You're outright not going to get that done on the 3D printer locally; you'd have to increase the processing power of a 3D printer control board from "microcontroller" to "GPU" entirely for this dumbass tech. Maybe you'd run that on the user's PC but PCs aren't for sale to the public anymore so it will be done in the cloud.
It occurs to me that these initiatives are all popping up on the West coast where Microsoft, Google and OpenAI are based. The other day the CEO of Microsoft came out and said "We're going to have to figure out something for our bullshit tech to actually do before the unwashed masses riot." and what do you know, a couple states that are home to large AI firms start proposing legislation that can practically only be answered by AI out of the blue.
Yeah it seems like this is an excuse to implement complete surveillance of these machines under the guise of preventing guns, just like child abuse is used to justify age checks and chatcontrol to id everyone with id and biometrics and connect them to everything they say or do, in person and online, and make secret social scores, Palantir making those scores at that, the one that wants to use drones to spray people he doesn't like, like his critics, with fentanyl, by his own words.
Every addition of spying by the government is accompanied by giving more spying power, and commercial value, to tech companies as well. They are co conspirators.
Banning guns is so easy. But dealing with the systemic problems that lead people to guns who definitely should t have them seems impossible to grasp.
Banning anything is easy. Enforcement is hard.
When you're next door to Arizona - regularly in the top five more prodigious gun manufacturing states - it seems absurd to worry about weapons made out of extruded plastic. Ruger & Company is going to do a better job than anything a printer can churn out.
Sooooo you want to stop gun violence in the US so your first instinct is to fuck over 3D printers because gun violence is okay as long as the guns are bought from the normal vendors?
This paw isn't about lowering gun violence, this is something pushed to protect the gun manufacturers
The 3D printing lobby isn't as big as the NRA.
I don't think it has anything to do with gun manufacturers, or gun violence. Someone who wants to shoot something is going to find a way.
I'm betting it's pressure from AI companies. "We need to find a use for this product soon or we'll lose social permission" or whatever Mr. Microsoft said the other day. And suddenly a couple of states that have big AI companies in them propose legislation that could only be answered by large amounts of machine learning power.
This isn't in reaction to some shooting with a 3D printed gun, is it? I'd have heard about that, the America Bad crowd here on Lemmy wouldn't have passed up a chance to blast that from the rooftops if it had happened. School shootings have faded into the background; that's not "newsworthy" anymore because it's become normal. A shooting with a 3D printed gun would have made headlines, and it hasn't. Until we all got used to it and moved our attention elsewhere, there would be a shooting, the 24 hour tabloids would broadcast a liberal arts major's understanding of the firearms used, the bleeding heart left would call for a ban on those specific kinds of guns, the childrape right would call them retards for getting the technical details extremely wrong, a governor 3 states away would sign a ban on bayonet lugs and collapsible stocks on rifles, in time for someone to shoot up an army base with a pistol. If a 3D printed gun shooting had happened, you could get another round of that cycle going.
That's not what happened though. So what did?
Because it's not about stopping gun violence, it's about ensuring the state has the final say over who gets a firearm, and keeps them out of the hands of people who might genuinely need them for self and community defense by any means possible
They know they can't take the gun industry head on, so they chip at the margins. They figure hobbyists aren't numerous enough to fight back, while the real gun owners shrug.
I honestly wonder if this might be held unconstitutional if challenged.
printers can literally be built with dumb electronics, some pieces of metal and an arduino.
juat saying.
Funny enough, guns can be made from a handful of hardware store parts.
there it is. yes, and you guys have a constitutional right to bear arms, with an infinity of them already in circulation.
That didn't work well for that doctor that was murdered by ICE.
Very frustrating to see people confuse Gun Ownership with Being Bulletproof.
As though you're going to quick draw on the entire LASD, at which point they'll all just tip their hats and proclaim "this person has constitutional rights, we will leave peacefully and not bother you again".
hardware store parts didn't work out so well for Shinzo Abe too.
Not personally. But Sanae Takaichi was Abe's ideological successor. Now she's right back in the PM with an enormous majority.
You can doohickey the man, but you can't doohickey the movement.
that's because usians have the illusion they live in a democracy and that weapons are a right instead of a duty.
the fact they can have a weapon doesn't mean the regime will take lightly to dissidents, just that they can in fact have them for now. fascists certainly have them, that's for sure.
and historical figures or whatever said this was gonna happen and shit.
My main printer up until last month was powered by an Arduino Mega. Like not even an "Arduino-compatible ATMEGA 2560-based 3D printer control board" an Arduino Mega, with the infinity +- logo. Reprap style.
my current printer is powered by an arduino mega, and it's staying that way while i can. the best appliances are the ones you can control and replace yourself if you need to. 😉
all parts you can find at a hardware store + some 3d printed pieces. repraps and foss printers are the best period.
I am the owner of a brand new Prusa MK4S. A lot of its components aren't open source, but it's an i3, I can keep it running, and I can hit its wifi module with a hammer if I want to.
Are you suggesting ghost printers? Lol
i'm suggesting regular, non-enshitified printers.
Until they make that illegal.
oh, i would bet on it.
i wanna see them try to enforce it though.
Someone more eloquent than I am needs to craft a compelling argument that this violates the 2nd amendment.
this violates the 2nd amendment
It also violates the first and fourth. And it does nothing about gun violence.
It's also impossible to actually implement and is no more than one more privacy violation to add to the pile.
Any proper printer should work offline.
Any normal printer doesn't have nearly enough processing power to run analysis on bgcode/instruction files (it's nor needed for normal operation).
Good luck idiot lawmakers
This is going to make life hard for hobbyists not criminals.
