5 ms·

I can't help but wonder how could, Bambulabs or the Chinese government, actually mine that data? In my mind, 3D models fail into two categories: artistic and ut

by dsign 5mo ago

I can't help but wonder how could, Bambulabs or the Chinese government, actually mine that data? In my mind, 3D models fail into two categories: artistic and utilitarian, though there's a continuum between those two. With the artistic side, the Chinese government could find itself in possession of tons and tons of Western miniatures. With the utilitarian side, they will find themselves in possession of lots and lots of random parts with no way to know what they are for. Of course, there's no telling if the next step of boiling the frog is to require users to attach metadata to their models before the printer prints them...

parker-3461 5mo ago
I was curious about this as well. Hypothetically, if they are really trying to extract insight, they could be: - Industrial trend pattern: even if only people accidentally leave the Cloud Feature on initially, there could be some that slip through. It could be product categories way before the public knows about it. - Defence and aerospace: obviously less likely, but if people use Strava in odd locations, and people share classified defence info on War Thunder, then it wouldn’t surprise me if someone slipped something through. It wouldn’t surprise me if such automated analysis is setup somewhere in China.
- Joel_Mckay 5mo ago
  In general, the PRC government will install local politically connected members into advisor roles in almost all large companies. It is something a lot of businesses simply have no control over in that country, or in the US for that matter. The locked ecosystem posture is simply because with a billion people a firm of any size always has irrational competitors/cloners. Sometimes the governments national policy aligns with a firm, but the support always comes at a price for every business owner. Communism is certainly different with subsidized labor pools, and worker support obligations. Both China and the US governments engage in trade policy/intelligence shenanigans to try to position themselves for whats more than fair. Global businesses must learn there is no difference between feigned incompetence, and real negligence. As a small firm most simply can't afford to defend themselves legally if targeted, and vastly undervalue why QA checkpoint roles are important. =3 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/26184-h/26184-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/26184-h/26184-h.htm China is a big place, having both good and bad businesses... just like the US. =3
  - le-mark 5mo ago
    > It is something a lot of businesses simply have no control over in that country, or in the US for that matter. Can you expand on instances where the US government has installed overseers in large US companies? This sounds preposterous.
    - Joel_Mckay 5mo ago
      Some agencies literally had their own room 641A at telecom companies. People need to accept folks as they are, and not as we would like them to be. =3
      - throw10920 5mo ago
        "Some agencies" covertly installing equipment at, what, 3 companies (at most) out of the millions in the country is categorically different than overt and widespread installation of party members into high-ranking roles in hundreds/thousands of companies. Claiming that these are remotely comparable is either pure ignorance or blatant propaganda. Any sane person can see that these aren't in the same universe of things.
        Joel_Mckay 5mo ago
        >Any sane person can see that these aren't in the same universe of things. "When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm" (Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe ) https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/dp/0593081870 https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/d... ad hominem rhetoric means one has chosen to be part of the despotism problem. Best of luck =)
        throw10920 5mo ago
        Yeah, that link isn't relevant to anything. You're just throwing out random garbage because your argument is invalid and you know it. You're a propagandist. Fortunately, the vast majority of people that I've talked to don't fall for this line of fallacy - I'm just making sure your lies don't fool those that happen to overlook them. > means one has chosen to be part of the despotism problem Yeah, this is unhinged. You need to up your propaganda training and/or change the LLM you're using to generate comments - this generally discredits your account extremely quickly.
gonzalohm 5mo ago
There are companies that run lots of machines in parallel and use them to print their products. They could steal these designs and use them to create copycats
Renaud 5mo ago
Not everything that a Chinese company does is for nefarious reason or under the hidden agenda of the Chinese government. The reality is much more mundane: many Chinese companies do not understand the expectations around open source. There isn’t anything really equivalent in China. The closest mindset is that things that are available to use, are available to take. The notion of copyright -while not inexistent- is not really a basic cultural notion. Even more so, not caring about ownership, and not enforcing the legalities of it, is partly what allowed innovation at such rapid pace in China. After all, the Chinese government mandated for decades that all foreign companies setting up shop in China had to have a 51% majority local partner, and technology transfer was mandatory. Basically a government-mandated mandatory transfer of knowledge, to be freely used by the local recipients of it. So the intricacies of Open Source licenses are a bit lost. Many understand the benefit of it, but not the expectations put on them for this benefit. In the case of Bambulabs, I suspect that, in their mind, they just want to control their platform. They show their misunderstanding of Open Source rights and expectations and I’m pretty sure they are baffled by the reaction. It not necessarily malevolent or malicious, though it looks that way from a Western perspective, but more of a cultural impedance mismatch. They are not idiots, but not everyone at that company will actually understand the duties that come with these licenses. This reminds me of the fights Naomi Wu used to have a few years ago, going to other 3D printer manufacturers in ShenZhen who were using GPL software but would not release their modifications for their equipment. She had a hard time making them understand and see the duties and benefits that came with using these types of licenses.
- Joel_Mckay 5mo ago
  There are cultural differences in attitudes toward individual ownership of IP under communism. It is a recent change for China firms to bother getting international patents and trademarks. Naomi Wu made herself notable in media, and in China "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". Unfortunate, as she seemed like a real entrepreneurial leader with skill. =3
  - sschueller 5mo ago
    And who was it that put her in that situation? An American Journalist that didn't respect boundaries even after it was made clear to them that this would cause issues for her in China. > Vice published a profile on Wu that included personal details regarding her sexual orientation, which she had explicitly asked them to keep off the record out of fear of state censorship and government retaliation in China.
microtonal 5mo ago
I think you are underestimating how many companies use 3D printing for prototyping. It's not just hobbyists printing miniatures. To give an example, I had RSI and use a high-end, expensive ergonomic keyboard. The company that makes these keyboards does not go immediately from design idea to an expensive mold. There are many design iterations and prototypes and they are all 3D prints. The same is probably true for air humidifiers, drones, or whatever other object you can come up with. If you have access to everyone's STLs, you basically have access to all the design prototypes and something close to the final product. It's like industrial espionage, except companies are willingly giving you the data, because they do not want to spend the extra money for a farm of Prusa printers. It's a brilliant play of the Chinese government. Exploiting that we prefer short-term savings over long-term strategy. This pattern repeats over and over again, from 3D printers to people buying Chinese fitness watches because they are cheaper than EU and US counterparts.
- lnenad 5mo ago
  I think you're overestimate the value of these prototypes. The print itself is either a plastic render of the final product without any value, or it's a shell without any actual useful parts/machinery. If we imagine we're talking about the 1% of 1% of 1% which could end up as useful IP stuff, but which might be very hard/impossible to find/understand/do anything with it, for which cases don't use bambu.
  - bix6 5mo ago
    You’re severely underestimating the value of prototypes.
  - firesteelrain 5mo ago
    Chinese have made it part of their economy to steal the IP of US and Europe. It’s not unfathomable.
  - avianlyric 5mo ago
    You’re making the assumption that customer product prototypes are the only prototypes produced by 3D printers. There’s plenty of other more valuable things that are prototyped using 3D printers, such as high end commercial machines, or components that go into those machines. I suspect that getting hold of STLs from US defence manufacturers would be extremely valuable. Why bother trying to capture a copy of your enemies technology, when they’ll happy just send you all the prototype STLs. Even if it’s not defence, don’t you think access to prototype components from EUV machines from ASML would be crazy valuable to Chinese companies trying to close the gap between Chinese and Western chip fabrication technologies?
rasz 5mo ago
https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2022/03/31/putting-3d-printers-to-work-in-ukraines-war-zone/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2022/03/31/putting-3... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-13/backyard-3d-printed-bomb-parts-helping-ukraine-war-effort/106529090 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-13/backyard-3d-printed-b... https://www.voxelmatters.com/how-ukraine-and-russia-are-increasingly-turning-to-3d-printing-to-win-the-drone-war/ https://www.voxelmatters.com/how-ukraine-and-russia-are-incr... https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/ukraine-deploys-3d-printed-drones-to-combat-russian-shahed-swarms-242362/ https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/ukraine-deploys-3d-print...
giancarlostoro 5mo ago
> Of course, there's no telling if the next step of boiling the frog is to require users to attach metadata to their models before the printer prints them... Custom firmware is always a thing for these printers.
- eqvinox 5mo ago
  You can still lock things in the microcontrollers with future updates, sadly. Those fuses can be burned at any time. Unburning them, not so much…
Aurornis 5mo ago
In every Bambu thread lately the assumption is that these battles are about regaining local access, but this whole battle started over trying to get Bambu Network cloud access back into OrcaSlicer. This is the first three lines of the FULU fork of OrcaSlicer from Louis Rossmann: > This version of OrcaSlicer restores full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers. > You are not limited to LAN only. > It works over the internet just like before, through BambuNetwork, with full functionality for normal use and printing. Reading the comment sections are confusing because so many people without Bambu printers have assumed the battle is going the other way, with users fighting to not use Bambu’s cloud servers. Your comment is close to getting to the root of why the arguments are getting weird: The Chinese government isn’t interested in scooping up all of the trinkets being printed. Anyone using a Bambu printer for anything sensitive was already using LAN mode or SD card for printing. The users fighting for this wanted to go back to sending their prints through the cloud for convenience.
- false-mirror 5mo ago
  > Anyone using a Bambu printer for anything sensitive was already using LAN mode or SD card for printing I'd like to just highlight that this may soon no longer be (legally) possible thanks to state legislation. At least in California, see: https://eff.org/3DPrintCA https://eff.org/3DPrintCA I encourage folks to share this and the NY campaigns (eff.org/3DPrintNY), as this new surveillance does put people/industries relying on 3D printers at risk
greatgib 5mo ago
At a grand minimum, they can still your wifi password and intrude your network from the street any day they want.
ridgeguy 5mo ago
This is an issue for me and my company. I'm building a prototype chemical vapor deposition system in a space with strong Chinese interest and activity. I picked Prusa 3D machines over Bambu because of the potential for losing critical proprietary IP with Bambu. Can't take the chance.

by dsign 5mo ago

parker-3461 5mo ago

I was curious about this as well. Hypothetically, if they are really trying to extract insight, they could be: - Industrial trend pattern: even if only people accidentally leave the Cloud Feature on initially, there could be some that slip through. It could be product categories way before the public knows about it. - Defence and aerospace: obviously less likely, but if people use Strava in odd locations, and people share classified defence info on War Thunder, then it wouldn’t surprise me if someone slipped something through. It wouldn’t surprise me if such automated analysis is setup somewhere in China.

Joel_Mckay 5mo ago
In general, the PRC government will install local politically connected members into advisor roles in almost all large companies. It is something a lot of businesses simply have no control over in that country, or in the US for that matter. The locked ecosystem posture is simply because with a billion people a firm of any size always has irrational competitors/cloners. Sometimes the governments national policy aligns with a firm, but the support always comes at a price for every business owner. Communism is certainly different with subsidized labor pools, and worker support obligations. Both China and the US governments engage in trade policy/intelligence shenanigans to try to position themselves for whats more than fair. Global businesses must learn there is no difference between feigned incompetence, and real negligence. As a small firm most simply can't afford to defend themselves legally if targeted, and vastly undervalue why QA checkpoint roles are important. =3 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/26184-h/26184-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/26184-h/26184-h.htm China is a big place, having both good and bad businesses... just like the US. =3
- le-mark 5mo ago
  > It is something a lot of businesses simply have no control over in that country, or in the US for that matter. Can you expand on instances where the US government has installed overseers in large US companies? This sounds preposterous.
  - Joel_Mckay 5mo ago
    Some agencies literally had their own room 641A at telecom companies. People need to accept folks as they are, and not as we would like them to be. =3
    - throw10920 5mo ago
      "Some agencies" covertly installing equipment at, what, 3 companies (at most) out of the millions in the country is categorically different than overt and widespread installation of party members into high-ranking roles in hundreds/thousands of companies. Claiming that these are remotely comparable is either pure ignorance or blatant propaganda. Any sane person can see that these aren't in the same universe of things.
      - Joel_Mckay 5mo ago
        >Any sane person can see that these aren't in the same universe of things. "When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm" (Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe ) https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/dp/0593081870 https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/d... ad hominem rhetoric means one has chosen to be part of the despotism problem. Best of luck =)
        throw10920 5mo ago
        Yeah, that link isn't relevant to anything. You're just throwing out random garbage because your argument is invalid and you know it. You're a propagandist. Fortunately, the vast majority of people that I've talked to don't fall for this line of fallacy - I'm just making sure your lies don't fool those that happen to overlook them. > means one has chosen to be part of the despotism problem Yeah, this is unhinged. You need to up your propaganda training and/or change the LLM you're using to generate comments - this generally discredits your account extremely quickly.

gonzalohm 5mo ago

There are companies that run lots of machines in parallel and use them to print their products. They could steal these designs and use them to create copycats

Renaud 5mo ago

Not everything that a Chinese company does is for nefarious reason or under the hidden agenda of the Chinese government. The reality is much more mundane: many Chinese companies do not understand the expectations around open source. There isn’t anything really equivalent in China. The closest mindset is that things that are available to use, are available to take. The notion of copyright -while not inexistent- is not really a basic cultural notion. Even more so, not caring about ownership, and not enforcing the legalities of it, is partly what allowed innovation at such rapid pace in China. After all, the Chinese government mandated for decades that all foreign companies setting up shop in China had to have a 51% majority local partner, and technology transfer was mandatory. Basically a government-mandated mandatory transfer of knowledge, to be freely used by the local recipients of it. So the intricacies of Open Source licenses are a bit lost. Many understand the benefit of it, but not the expectations put on them for this benefit. In the case of Bambulabs, I suspect that, in their mind, they just want to control their platform. They show their misunderstanding of Open Source rights and expectations and I’m pretty sure they are baffled by the reaction. It not necessarily malevolent or malicious, though it looks that way from a Western perspective, but more of a cultural impedance mismatch. They are not idiots, but not everyone at that company will actually understand the duties that come with these licenses. This reminds me of the fights Naomi Wu used to have a few years ago, going to other 3D printer manufacturers in ShenZhen who were using GPL software but would not release their modifications for their equipment. She had a hard time making them understand and see the duties and benefits that came with using these types of licenses.

Joel_Mckay 5mo ago
There are cultural differences in attitudes toward individual ownership of IP under communism. It is a recent change for China firms to bother getting international patents and trademarks. Naomi Wu made herself notable in media, and in China "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". Unfortunate, as she seemed like a real entrepreneurial leader with skill. =3
- sschueller 5mo ago
  And who was it that put her in that situation? An American Journalist that didn't respect boundaries even after it was made clear to them that this would cause issues for her in China. > Vice published a profile on Wu that included personal details regarding her sexual orientation, which she had explicitly asked them to keep off the record out of fear of state censorship and government retaliation in China.

microtonal 5mo ago

I think you are underestimating how many companies use 3D printing for prototyping. It's not just hobbyists printing miniatures. To give an example, I had RSI and use a high-end, expensive ergonomic keyboard. The company that makes these keyboards does not go immediately from design idea to an expensive mold. There are many design iterations and prototypes and they are all 3D prints. The same is probably true for air humidifiers, drones, or whatever other object you can come up with. If you have access to everyone's STLs, you basically have access to all the design prototypes and something close to the final product. It's like industrial espionage, except companies are willingly giving you the data, because they do not want to spend the extra money for a farm of Prusa printers. It's a brilliant play of the Chinese government. Exploiting that we prefer short-term savings over long-term strategy. This pattern repeats over and over again, from 3D printers to people buying Chinese fitness watches because they are cheaper than EU and US counterparts.

lnenad 5mo ago
I think you're overestimate the value of these prototypes. The print itself is either a plastic render of the final product without any value, or it's a shell without any actual useful parts/machinery. If we imagine we're talking about the 1% of 1% of 1% which could end up as useful IP stuff, but which might be very hard/impossible to find/understand/do anything with it, for which cases don't use bambu.
- bix6 5mo ago
  You’re severely underestimating the value of prototypes.
- firesteelrain 5mo ago
  Chinese have made it part of their economy to steal the IP of US and Europe. It’s not unfathomable.
- avianlyric 5mo ago
  You’re making the assumption that customer product prototypes are the only prototypes produced by 3D printers. There’s plenty of other more valuable things that are prototyped using 3D printers, such as high end commercial machines, or components that go into those machines. I suspect that getting hold of STLs from US defence manufacturers would be extremely valuable. Why bother trying to capture a copy of your enemies technology, when they’ll happy just send you all the prototype STLs. Even if it’s not defence, don’t you think access to prototype components from EUV machines from ASML would be crazy valuable to Chinese companies trying to close the gap between Chinese and Western chip fabrication technologies?

rasz 5mo ago

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2022/03/31/putting-3d-printers-to-work-in-ukraines-war-zone/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2022/03/31/putting-3... https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-13/backyard-3d-printed-bomb-parts-helping-ukraine-war-effort/106529090 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-13/backyard-3d-printed-b... https://www.voxelmatters.com/how-ukraine-and-russia-are-increasingly-turning-to-3d-printing-to-win-the-drone-war/ https://www.voxelmatters.com/how-ukraine-and-russia-are-incr... https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/ukraine-deploys-3d-printed-drones-to-combat-russian-shahed-swarms-242362/ https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/ukraine-deploys-3d-print...

giancarlostoro 5mo ago

> Of course, there's no telling if the next step of boiling the frog is to require users to attach metadata to their models before the printer prints them... Custom firmware is always a thing for these printers.

eqvinox 5mo ago
You can still lock things in the microcontrollers with future updates, sadly. Those fuses can be burned at any time. Unburning them, not so much…

Aurornis 5mo ago

In every Bambu thread lately the assumption is that these battles are about regaining local access, but this whole battle started over trying to get Bambu Network cloud access back into OrcaSlicer. This is the first three lines of the FULU fork of OrcaSlicer from Louis Rossmann: > This version of OrcaSlicer restores full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers. > You are not limited to LAN only. > It works over the internet just like before, through BambuNetwork, with full functionality for normal use and printing. Reading the comment sections are confusing because so many people without Bambu printers have assumed the battle is going the other way, with users fighting to not use Bambu’s cloud servers. Your comment is close to getting to the root of why the arguments are getting weird: The Chinese government isn’t interested in scooping up all of the trinkets being printed. Anyone using a Bambu printer for anything sensitive was already using LAN mode or SD card for printing. The users fighting for this wanted to go back to sending their prints through the cloud for convenience.

false-mirror 5mo ago
> Anyone using a Bambu printer for anything sensitive was already using LAN mode or SD card for printing I'd like to just highlight that this may soon no longer be (legally) possible thanks to state legislation. At least in California, see: https://eff.org/3DPrintCA https://eff.org/3DPrintCA I encourage folks to share this and the NY campaigns (eff.org/3DPrintNY), as this new surveillance does put people/industries relying on 3D printers at risk

greatgib 5mo ago

At a grand minimum, they can still your wifi password and intrude your network from the street any day they want.

ridgeguy 5mo ago

This is an issue for me and my company. I'm building a prototype chemical vapor deposition system in a space with strong Chinese interest and activity. I picked Prusa 3D machines over Bambu because of the potential for losing critical proprietary IP with Bambu. Can't take the chance.