- cross-posted to:
- TrueAnon@lemmy.today
- cross-posted to:
- TrueAnon@lemmy.today
California’s new bill requires DOJ-approved 3D printers that report on themselves targeting general-purpose machines.
Assembly Member Bauer-Kahan introduced AB-2047, the “California Firearm Printing Prevention Act,” on February 17th. The bill would ban the sale or transfer of any 3D printer in California unless it appears on a state-maintained roster of approved makes and models… certified by the Department of Justice as equipped with “firearm blocking technology.” Manufacturers would need to submit attestations for every make and model. The DOJ would publish a list. If your printer isn’t on the list by March 1, 2029, it can’t be sold. In addition, knowingly disabling or circumventing the blocking software is a misdemeanor.
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Easy solution. Sell a separate “motion platform” and an “FDM module” as distinct products that basically snap together.
This is true and very underreported.
Land Of The Free^TM
Terms and conditions apply.
How does this “firearm blocking technology” even work? How does a 3d printer id whatever code the slicer sends it as a gun part?
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.
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.
Wait so far these things are relatively trivial pieces of equipment in terms of software, no? Read instructions, move stepper motors/control heating elements.
So realistically what we’re looking at is hash based block lists for known firearm and parts designs, which would be trivial to circumvent by adding the equivalent of noop instructions to the .gcode files 🤷♂️
They’ll do anything but adopt firearm laws that are relevant and sensible.
To be fair, California has some of the strictest gun laws in the US. That’s a low bar though.
And most of those laws are either stupid, out of touch, racist, or multiple of those. In a fair amount of times it’s all three.
No, realistically what we’re looking at is a full ban on 3D printing as a whole because anything the printer does “might” be a gun part.
And then shortly after, a ban on property rights as a whole, because anything you own with a circuit board or a stepper motor in it “might” be modified to create an illegal 3D printer.
HEY CALIFORNIA DO YOU KNOW WHO IS LEADING THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE RIGHT NOW??? WHY ARE YOU COMING UP WITH THIS AT ALL, LET ALONE WITH THIS ADMINISTRATION IN POWER???
Oh wait, Gavin Newsom is the governor, that explains everything. Of course the DINO who’s only mad at Trump for stealing his spotlight would try to push a stupid law like this.
This law is stupid, but it’s coming from some nobody in the bay area trying to get her name out there, not Newsom
Slow down homie. The DOJ in this is the California Department of Justice.
Californians are socially liberal, fiscally conservative.
They don’t want average people to have power.
'Kay. They do know these things are barely capable of being networked, right?
Which unfortunately means the base price for a California-legal 3d printer is going to be exorbitant.
Just build your own with a kit. Hell, call it a CNC filler. This was a DIY hobby from the start. I don’t see how this can be regulated.
I don’t see how this can be regulated.
That’s the neat part: it can’t. Which means attempting to do so anyway basically abolishes all property rights.
And thus the true purpose of the legislation is revealed.
This is stupid.
You easily tell who is 3D printing guns because they have one hand and bits of plastic barrel stuck in their faces.
On the contrary, there was a very interesting video by PSR (pardon the YouTube link) about how the civil war in Myanmar was being fought almost exclusively with 3D printed firearms. Apparently they’re reliable enough to be an actual threat.
“3d printing guns” isn’t about the pressure holding parts, it’s about the traceable serial number holding parts. On most firearms the “lower assembly” or “receiver” (frame, trigger group, feeding assy) is legally considered the firearm and is what bears the serial. Most of those can be printed and use off the shelf hardware to work, albeit with a much lower lifespan.
Pressure containing wear parts that are meant to be exchanged (barrel and breech bolt) typically do not carry serials and are thus not normally traceable. If you eliminate the serialized, traceable part of the firearm, then any collection of parts could be used.That said, eliminating an entire hobby and industry because gun serialization laws haven’t been updated in a hundred years is probably not the right way to do it.
That doesn’t make much sense as a law against printers, since it’s far easier and just as illegal to grind off the serial numbers on a gun.
Is printing a lower less illegal than removing the serial number? Must be, otherwise what’s the point other than cost?
Yes. In most of the US removing a serial is explicitly illegal, while manufacturing a firearm for personal use (the serialized part is legally the firearm, but most places don’t require you to serialize personally manufactured firearms) is completely legal.
I believe it’s a federal felony to remove the serial.
That’s what I thought, but I wasn’t positive and I didn’t want to provide incorrect information.
Serialized parts have their purchases recorded and restricted, other parts are (usually) unrestricted.
How would they connect a serialized part to a purchase if the serial number is completely gone? I guess 3d printing would also allow those who are unable to legally buy the parts to get them too.
Because to get the serialized part, you still have to be approved for the purchase through background checks, which will go live on the state police database, and then the police can check that database to see recently acquired firearms if something happens. Chances are the list of a specific type of firearm with the serial ground off is going to be pretty short.
And yes, the being able to obtain it with no background checks at all is the other big key.
Because to get the serialized part, you still have to be approved for the purchase through background checks
Unless you get it secondhand. Then you just kinda… Skip all that. Legally.
They can’t definitively pin a particular purchase to a particular serial-defiled firearm, but the fact that the government knows that you purchased a firearm on such and such date is probably enough of a concern for a lot of people. It’s a lot easier to gather a stockpile of parts without drawing much attention.
If there’s a record of you purchasing X gun, and they find you have that same model with the serial filed off, 99% chance you filed the serial off your gun.
Right, which is why I was wondering if printing it w/o serial number is less illegal. Because if it’s not, either way having it found would guarantee arrest
Just when I think California couldn’t possibly come up with dumber laws, they deliver yet again.
There’s genuine concerns they could be addressing but instead go after something that’s going to be near impossible for them to enforce.
Blueprints for homemade 3D printers exist that can be built with a pretty short list of parts from Digikey.
I was going to say, I thought open source 3D Printer designs/kits have been a thing for awhile. My friend just built his own last year using his original 3D printer to help in the process, lol
The entire hobby is built on open source, it’s only very very recently that commercial hobby level printers were worth a damn
…And even then, they’re leveraging the open source under the hood. Even your locked-down Bambu piece of shit uses slicing software based on Slic3r.
It’s not law yet, and may never be.
That’s comforting to hear. Thank you.
If they were smarter, which they are not, they would look to place restrictions on the slicer software. I doubt the printers even have the capability to recognize what is being printed. Most of them are like move left 3 steps, extrude .1mm of filament, move right 1 step…. yada yada yada.
This is just insanely dumb. They are essentially trying to regulate technology they know very little about.
I know I’m not supposed to attribute to malice that which could be attributed to stupidity, but sometimes I think the legislators’ ignorance is actually a front, and their real goal is just even more surveillance.
Stopping terrorists is hard. Pretending to stop terrorists, that’s super easy barely an inconvenience.
This is a lost battle either way but a non-lost opportunity to acquire some power
Slicers are open source so anyone can and will remove surveillance malware from it.
Require printers to check digital signatures on STL files and have only approved slicers add those
So we’re back to placing restrictions on the printers…
Print the parts for a new printer on a cheap one, buy the hardware at a local hardware store or electronics store (or even strip the cheap one for most of the parts), and start printing in your favorite flavor of open source software. Or buy the printed pieces from someone or online and then buy and assemble the rest. That’s what they do with guns to circumvent some of the gun laws, because the not quite finished pieces are not legally considered a gun.
All this would do is make people buy printers the way that they buy guns, ironically. And it still won’t do anything about the so-called “ghost guns” anyway, because those are either legally bought guns with the serial number shaved off, or they’re garage guns like the one used to assassinate Shinzo Abe.
Frankly it seems more like a mild inconvenience then actual prevention. I don’t really care how smart a software gets, it can’t predict and prevent all possible configurations of prints that could possibly be used to create functioning guns without being so overly restrictive that even perfectly innocent prints would get flagged constantly in which case they simple won’t sell to normal users.
It would be a constant game of whack a mole with new creative designs, using multiple printers or with non-printed parts in the design. But no hardware or software that a smart enough engineer has their hands on is impervious to mods either, especially if they’re motivated like someone seeking to produce firearms would be.
It’s an overreaching law that will likely solve little to nothing, but might make 3d printers in general a bit more annoying to work with. “Sorry, you can’t make your dice tower because there’s a 16 percent change that it could be capable of firing an RPG out of the dragon’s mouth. Please make your design at least 12 percent less gun-ish and try again.”
The only way these things could be implemented is if they phone home to some “AI” model. Printers themselves do not have anywhere near enough power to do any kind of analysis like that. Mine crashes if my microsteps are too high.
So its pretty obvious that the goal of this is to invade people’s privacy and will likely try to use it to block copyrighted material if it built. It’s the age verification BS all over.
Wow. I hadn’t even thought about some of these ways around this. Excellent points!!
This is why politicians should be automatically retired at 65. We shouldn’t be allowing people who grew up without seatbelts to make any decisions involving technology.
FWIW, the person that proposed this legislation is 47: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Bauer-Kahan
They are essentially trying to regulate technology they know very little about.
You’re surprised that law makers are trying to regulate things they know nothing about? Oh…oh I have like 2000 years worth of news for you…
Not surprised. Just frustrated.
Laws are much older than 2000 years. To be more specific, at least about double that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Ur-Nammu
They are essentially trying to regulate technology they know very little about.
That’s not surprising, that’s just what politicians do. Especially politicians who are 65+ years old and completely out of touch with technology.
The only thing they are in touch with is little kids. The Epstein Class !
I am reminded of a senator from Alaska trying to describe the internet as a series of tubes.
I mean…replace the word “tubes” with “cables” and it’s apparent it’s not completely wrong. he’s reasonably correct on an ELI5 level I would say.
Except the tubes he was talking about could get clogged. He wasn’t really correct. He had no idea what he was talking about.
That was way more accurate and intelligent than this. Like orders of magnitude.
Sen Ted Stevens, rest in piss.
“The internet would be a series of tubes if we rolled out fiber, but as the literal chairman of the Senate committee regulating the internet I’m somehow against that.”
Isn’t most fiber optics solid glass? So more a series of rods.
Well, tubes from light’s perspective.
I mean, not to defend that idiot because he was voting against net neutrality and obviously had no idea how technology works…
… But we do call some connections “tunnels”.
And the inside of a fiber optic cable is sort of a bunch of tubes, if you’re feeling a bit loose about descriptions.
So in other words, what else is new?
The danger if this passes isn’t that someone will be able to successfully implement some manner of system for identifying gun parts which will, apparently, rely on pixie dust and magic. In reality this will effectively prohibit 3D printer sales in California entirely because compliance is literally impossible. And it’ll and give overreaching cops and prosecutors yet another nonsense charge they can arbitrarily slap people with over “circumventing” this mystical technology which does not in fact exist if they, ye gods forbid, build their own printer.
It’s the same horseshit rationale as the spent casing “microstamping” fantasy that legislators have been salivating about for decades. It doesn’t work, it’ll never work, but that’s not going to stop them from wishing it does and therefore turning it into a defacto ban.
Keep in mind, California also has the precedent of their infamous approved handguns list, which notoriously does things like arbitrarily declaring that the black version of some model of gun is legal, but possession of the stainless version of the exact same gun is a felony. We’re not dealing with people in possession of any type of rationality, here.
I haven’t read the bill, but from the description I think you could actually get around this by building your own. They can’t sell a printer that doesn’t have this, and you can disable it, but it doesn’t say here that you can’t build your own that never had the software. In that case, I assume we’ll see kits that are totally not meant to be assembled into printers with all their parts you need, and then unrelated documentation online somewhere on how to assemble it.
I was just talking with a friend about the microstamping idea. I’d never heard of it before.
We’re not dealing with people in possession of any type of rationality, here.
It seems they are rationally putting pressure upon those willing to own guns or 3d printers.
Like most of rifle shots fired in WWI didn’t kill anyone and were meant for suppression.
Making you afraid of everything that can be a legal trap. Thus possibly dropping the thought of even owning this or that thing.
Except for the fact that this doesn’t put any pressure on anyone who wants a gun (those are still really easy to get in California, just not as easy as most other states). But those who benefit the most from this law are gun manufacturers, and not long after when this bill is extended to printing replacement parts for anything, all companies that charge inflated prices for repair parts or design their products to be unrepairable entirely.
What people who print “guns” are actually printing is gun furniture. Custom grips and the like, either for comfort/aesthetics or so they can take cheaper gun parts and use them to build a clone of a similar gun from a company that charges more. They still use legally purchased gun internals.
The gun that Luigi Mangione supposedly used was a Glock, legally purchased and one of the most ubiquitous pistols in the world, with a 3d printed grip on it. Every other part of that gun came from the manufacturer.
The gun used to kill Shinzo Abe, however, was made entirely out of simple materials readily available at any hardware store and is completely legal in all 50 states. Because a gun like that is considered a “garage gun” and those are legal under federal law because it’s essentially impossible to stop somebody from gluing together a pipe and a nail to strike the bullet with and fire it down the pipe barrel. But 3d printed gun parts don’t fall under the same regulations and those who stand to lose the most from people 3d printing are those who charge unreasonable prices.
You know who else would benefit from this law? Games Workshop, who sells many miniature figures for $40+ each, and a few for over one thousand dollars.
Because a gun like that is considered a “garage gun” and those are legal under federal law because it’s essentially impossible to stop somebody from gluing together a pipe and a nail to strike the bullet with and fire it down the pipe barrel
I live in Russia and here this is very illegal. It can suddenly become where you live too.
This would be impossible. Orca is rhe most widely used, and many printers don’t ship woth a slicer. Since Orca is FOSS, and there is no sale, there is no way to regulate that.
Firmware on the other hand, is different. The catch is just about every printer can have Klipper installed on it (most just have a modified Klipper already), which, means the law is pointless since it is also FOSS.
Fuuuq gotta buy a printer before this shit
Just avoid Bambu. Everything you do goes through their servers.
Jokes on them. I already block my printer from talking outside the LAN.
Just messaged my assembly member asking to vote against it. I suggest those who live in the state to do the same thing too.
Messaging your representatives is a waste of time and only exists to make you feel good about yourself.
The only way to fix problems like this is to vote for better reps, but we’re too stupid to do that so the problem doesn’t get solved.
I imagine it wouldn’t really be too difficult to design parts in a way that they would be completely inconspicuous until trimmed and assembled
I bet the code is cracked within the hour of every update from now until eternity. It’s like the shit physical locks we put on everything. Nothing but a display of safety.
Even if this could actually be enforced you have the issue that if they go too far you suddenly have it blocking a cylinder because it thinks you are trying to print a gun barrel.
Not that I don’t think they would care about that, but it would certainly cause even more of a backlash.
You wouldn’t do the barrel anyway. You’d use tube stock instead
The plastic would be too fragile to handle the heat and pressure that it’d likely be worse than a barrel-less design.
This is the lie, that a complete gun is printed, as in Sci fi movies.
It’s just the parts that are typically wood or plastic on factory made guns.
or a 3D printer that doesn’t call the FBI
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Private workshop are next on the chopping block, then. Totally feasible. /s
Wasn’t there a guy who built an AK-47 out of a shovel?
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