9 ms·
We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme
- rolph 4mo agoguess what, the state of california on the printer bed, depicted in the article, looks close to the profile of an AR15 pistol grip. im looking forward to the idea that the outline of Ca. may trigger false positives
- throwawaytea 4mo agoI had the same hunch when I saw it, which is either pure genius on the part of the author/publisher or pure lol meme magic.
- NoImmatureAdHom 4mo agoBetter yet, design and popularize an AR grip that is the state of California
- rented_mule 4mo agoIf this becomes law, it will give rise to a fun new form or protest art in this vain. What is the cutest thing you can design that nobody would consider to be related to guns, but which gets flagged? An obvious example... a llama sitting on the ground, legs hidden, and head held high in the air, chewing its cud. Llamas can be really cute! Sell them on Etsy/eBay/etc., printed by an out-of-state 3D printing service. I just used the EFF form to promise my state senator in Sacramento that I'd send her (and reporters that cover her) one of them if the bill passes.
- cluckindan 4mo agoConversely, add cute animal models to gun parts. Maybe it would be possible to just embed a prompt injection into metadata or the STL mesh itself.
- mrheosuper 4mo agoGun is stupidly to make. You just need a robust tube, a small hole in the end to trigger and you are done. Ofc it won't fire good, but still should be considered a gun
- imtringued 4mo agoI think what will happen is that there will be an explosion in the variety of gun designs. People will make banana, cucumber, corn, sausage, etc shaped guns. There will be guns with electronic triggers where the trigger could be a universal TV remote or an RC car remote.
- WillPostForFood 4mo agoIt looks even closer to a California banned "large-capacity" magazine. https://dpmsinc.com/media/catalog/product/cache/7217d38013ee9ef49821b4022a03de75/d/p/dp51655128477_1.jpg https://dpmsinc.com/media/catalog/product/cache/7217d38013ee...
- rolph 4mo agonow that would be a curious looking AR15 with a california pistol grip, and a california magazine
- WillPostForFood 4mo agoLooks even more draconian than the New York law. For example, it seems to mandate proprietary, locked down slicers from the printer manufacturer. -- For integrated preprint software [slicer] design, guidance for how vendors shall demonstrate that printers will accept print jobs exclusively through authorized and validated software systems and will not accept print jobs from unauthorized software pathways, including attempts by users seeking to evade a detection algorithm.
- __natty__ 4mo agoOver the last few years, I’ve felt as though I’ve been living in a feverish dream all the time. Laws, regulations and general changes in the world are so detached from reality and so far removed from the reality they are meant to serve. And this is yet another example.
- Mountain_Skies 4mo ago[flagged]
- jfr6fgjk 4mo agoSo lockdowns are still happening? If not why?
- mindslight 4mo agoIt's six years later, and what happened during a public health emergency is still the most significant impingement upon personal liberty occupying your headspace? If you earnestly care about liberty, get off your simulated hobby horse and come back to reality. It's exactly this kind of disconnected nonsense that has encouraged the authoritarians to run wild.
- MisterMower 4mo agoIs he wrong though? Lots of bad precedents were set during that emergency, the consequences of which were still living with. The Overton window moved in a deeply authoritarian direction during that time period. Politicians across the spectrum have internalized that move and are restricting freedom in far more overt ways than were possible prior to that emergency. If you want to prevent future abuses, understanding how and why past abuses happened seems quite reasonable. I don’t find such an idea nonsense or disconnected from reality at all.
- Barbing 4mo agoThe Take Action link only took 30 seconds: https://www.eff.org/3DPrintCA https://www.eff.org/3DPrintCA (did choose to edit the letter but otherwise really, it autofills and takes no time)
- wyrdcurt 4mo agoAlso, if you have a couple extra minutes to spare, consider handing the letter and the name of your senator to an LLM (I used Deepseek V4 Pro) with instructions to research your representative and tailor the message to them specifically.
- brianleb 4mo agoI share your hopeful optimism, but here's the reality of the mass-email campaigns targeting congress: [email received 6/18/26 from the office of Steve Scalise, majority leader in the house, who is one of my representatives. I have trimmed for brevity.] >> Due to advancements in technology, many third-party organizations use their mailing lists to send advocacy letters like this on your behalf. With the increased volume of third-party letters being sent to my office, I want to be sure that I am able to more appropriately address your thoughts and concerns. I will be sure to consider the views you have sent me, but if you have any additional thoughts on this issue, or need other assistance with a federal agency, please contact my office directly through my website scalise.house.gov or by calling (202) 225-3015 ----------- In case it is not clear to anyone reading, this is kosher political speak for "I am ignoring automated emails. Consider this your notice." Honestly, I am surprised it took this long, although I'm quite certain it has been going on for a lot longer and generally they simply do not provide the courtesy of telling you they are ignoring you.
- wyrdcurt 4mo agoThis is exactly why I had an LLM customize the letter as I said in my other comment; I've had a similar response from another of my representatives. It might not help much if they're filtering based on where the email is coming from, but on the off chance that they are filtering based on identical content, changing the content might make a difference. With LLMs, the effort needed to customize the content has gone down significantly (otherwise, I would agree with the more cynical commentators that such letters are a waste of time and energy).
- mickelsen 4mo agoHope sanity prevails and printers stay free, don't give Europe ideas.
- hananova 4mo agoLeave us out of this. Americans can deal with their own gun issues.
- LanceH 4mo agoAt some point between this, age verification for the OS, and everything else, it starts to seem like a coordinated attack on computing.
- akersten 4mo agoThey've been at it since 2011: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg
- deet 4mo agoImagine if you couldn't buy a lathe unless it refused to make a baseball bat (which could be used for hitting people). Or if you couldn't buy scissors (because they could cut brake lines). Or if you couldn't buy a car (because it could be used to run someone over). And if all of those checked with the government before functioning. It's almost like maybe instead you should just ban the undesirable end action, enforce that law, and create societal conditions that don't nudge or force people into doing undesirable things.
- morkalork 4mo agohttps://xcancel.com/MPSRegentsPark/status/974645778558980096 https://xcancel.com/MPSRegentsPark/status/974645778558980096
- userbinator 4mo agoenforce that law Califoria would not be a sanctuary state if they actually cared about enforcing laws.
- wat10000 4mo agoWhy would a state enforce federal law?
- WillPostForFood 4mo ago[flagged]
- wat10000 4mo agoLawsuits are part of the law, not thwarting the law. Refusing notifications and holds is inaction, the opposite of “actively.”
- WillPostForFood 4mo agopedantic. You can use lawsuits, within the law, to thwart the law. You can do it knowing you will lose, just to cause delays, like Califorinia and the 9th circuit are ACTIVELY doing to slowdown gun control cases from reaching the supreme court where they 100% will be struck down. Refusing notification is an action.
- encom 4mo ago[flagged]
- xp84 4mo agoWe just reeeeeally want to believe, more than other states, that our government is The Good Guys and we can Fix The Problems if we only added more laws and more taxes. Every two years we are presented with 20 earnest-seeming ballot measures that each have roughly this message: > "We have a major problem in California -- ____ is not as ____ as it should be. Prop 1234 authorizes the state to sell $__,000,000,000 in bonds[1] to be repaid over the next 30 years. This will completely fix the ____ problem. By the way, it looks like a lot, but it's actually a good investment that will SAVE TAXPAYERS MONEY in the future." Then we get another almost identical one in 3 years saying that ____ is worse than ever and this new round of $__,000,000,000 will finally fix it once and for all. Voters approve like three quarters of these, and usually don't even remember we just gave them billions of dollars to fix the same thing a few years ago. I've heard plenty of people in my social circle who basically vote by reading the supposed purpose from the title ("Anti-Homelessness", "Schools", "High-speed rail", "Animal welfare") and they vote based entirely on the assumption that this proposition is the only and best way to help the homeless, improve schools, etc. They don't even entertain the idea that the prop might be a pork-filled piece of trash written by lobbyists that might even make the problems worse while costing eleven figures and still not be paid for in 20 years. We just trust Sacramento so blindly. [1] That, or the other alternative funding: A tax raise "on big corporations" which will 100% definitely not affect you, dear voter.
- hagbard_c 4mo agoYes, that has been clear for a long time, about as long as CA has been a one-party state. The real question is why you supposedly smart Californians keep on falling for the... same... old... lie... every... damn... time. It is not as if the pie-in-the-sky people haven't promised a chicken in every pot and a cow in every shed and a car on every driveway - replace these with whatever modern equivalents you like - a thousand times before without delivering even a single chick, calf or push bike. Why do you keep on falling for the same old tired this-time-it-will-work lies? This is not limited to CA and might even become more prevalent in NY now that the DSA has seriously started to hollow out the remains of what used to be the Democratic party but it has been going on for much longer in the formerly Golden, now somehow tarnished state. Why? California Dreaming used to be a thing, not a nightmare.
- leptons 4mo agoIf some people want to make their own gun, then some people will also make their own 3D printer. This joke of a law isn't going to stop any 3D printed handguns from getting made, it will only add one more relatively easy step. Then what, ban stepper motors?
- tjohns 4mo ago> Then what, ban stepper motors? Don't give them ideas. But seriously, given that the 3D printer movement started out with people building their own printers from scratch and there continues to be a healthy open-source hardware ecosystem within the community, I can't see this stopping anyone. Unless you also make it illegal for 3D printers to print 3D printer parts...
- w4der 4mo agoBut how was the first 3D printer made? Are they gonna ban CNC machines next?
- bitwize 4mo agoWorking on it
- SauciestGNU 4mo agoThese laws also apply to subtractive manufacturing methods like CNC machines. They just aren't as common in households so they don't get the headline space to grab our attention.
- samatman 4mo agoVorons are great! https://www.vorondesign.com https://www.vorondesign.com You've come a long way, RepRap.
- dmfdmf 4mo agoI am old enough to remember when the fax machine first became ubiquitous in the 80's and read about how the Soviets were threatened by it. Unauthorized use was a crime and they stationed guards at fax machines to prevent mis-use. Perhaps I naively fell for CIA propaganda at the time but if true we can hope/estimate that California Commies will fall in less than 10 years since things are moving much faster in today's world.
- sfRattan 4mo agoIt wasn't just fax machines. Throughout the Eastern bloc, typewriters were strictly controlled and registered. There's a great scene in The Lives of Others [1], a German movie about a Stasi agent and a dissident writer, in which the Stasi (East German secret police) have recovered a typed manuscript that was smuggled to the West, and are interviewing a forensic expert to determine the make/model of typewriter used, in an attempt to cross reference against anyone who owns that typewriter. We still do similar things now, though for ostensibly different reasons. Inkjet and laser printers have long had various signatures they add to every printed page, barely noticeable to the naked eye, that can lead back to the specific printer used. The stated motivation is to prevent counterfeitting. Similarly, there is a pattern of "O" symbols called the EURion constellation that, if present in an image file, most commercial image editing software will refuse to print [2]. It's not surprising that politicians are trying these sorts of strategies with 3D printing, because they've already tried and used them often in the past. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation#Counterfeit_Deterrence_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation#Counterfe...
- dguest 4mo agoIf you have a photocopier and a few currencies you can have a lot of fun with EURion: - look up your local laws! usually you can photocopy money as long as it's shrunken / enlarged by a specific amount - you can cover up everything but the EURion and see what it does to the rest of the copy - you can cover up the EURion part of the bill and print out the rest Again, particularly in the last point, be sure to look up local laws and set the printer scaling accordingly
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- asveikau 4mo agoCalifornia voters, write to your state senator. I'm in San Francisco, and I wrote to Scott Wiener, who recently voted to pass this out of committee. Before that when it was still in the assembly, I wrote to Matt Haney, which didn't do much good because he voted for it both in committee and for passage. But, I feel like bay area legislators need to know many of their constituents know this bill is misguided and are paying attention. The tech capital of the world shouldn't have artificially impaired tools.
- jatora 4mo ago[flagged]
- asveikau 4mo agoFrom what I know about legislators (I am a longtime SF resident but I am also a DC native and have known some congressional staff over the years), it is pretty rare that informed constituents write to them in a cogent and authentic voice about specific legislation, and they do pay attention to this. Calls may work even more. It won't work all the time and how much they do will depend on the issue and why they are supporting it etc. But it's worth a shot. Remember I said: they should know you're paying attention. This can cause them to also pay attention.
- trinsic2 4mo agoAlright, you won me over. I emailed my congressman from the EFF website with my own message. That's the best I can do right now. I just feel like politics is a losing battle. If its taken over by special interests and there doesn't seem like there is any end in sight, as it gets easier and easier for them to sway the people that are actually suppose to be working for us. What is the point? When we are combating legislation that no sane person should have to deal with there comes a time where the whole thing is unlawful and it we should stop investing our power into it.
- derwiki 4mo ago
- RossBencina 4mo agoLet me get this straight. The USA has no gun control laws but legislators want to prevent people from making guns with 3D printers?
- jatora 4mo agoThe USA has plenty of gun control laws
- WillPostForFood 4mo agoSome states, like California, and New York (which recently passed the first 3d printer ban), have restrictive gun control. These laws are in conflict with Supreme Court rulings supporting the 2nd Amendment, but the litigation and appeal process is very slow. It is 9 years into the Duncan case in California challenging magazine capacity limits, 7 years into the Miller case challenging California's Assault rifle ban.
- xbar 4mo agoUnlike the downvoters, I'm genuinely curious: do you believe a narrative that the US has no gun control laws? Sometimes I wonder if that is what people outside the US think.
- Ancapistani 4mo agoIt’s what approximately half of US voters think.
- derwiki 4mo agoI think that half thinks gun laws are for the bad guys, and they’re the good guy with the gun
- IshKebab 4mo agoNah you're not talking about the same thing. When you say it has gun control laws you're thinking "you have to wait 10 days to buy a pistol". When he says it has no gun control laws he's thinking "after 10 days you can buy a pistol". Poor choice of words on his part perhaps, but I think it was pretty obvious what he meant if you're not nitpicking.
- narrator 4mo agoWe're bombing Iran to suppress technology form the 40s. We're suppressing advanced AI. We're suppressing 3d printer technology. Then there are the encryption wars. Control of advanced technology, not just weapons, is a larger and larger battle every year. When the robots get here, you'll need the governments ok to do anything at all with a robot. Mark Andreessen's comments that government regulators told him that they've suppressed whole branches of physics is ominous in that regard. Technology suppression is a whole separate narrative of history practically.
- DropkickM16 4mo ago[flagged]
- knowaveragejoe 4mo agoAnd he wouldn't stop and reflect on why it's happening, either. That's like, weak or slow or something.
- derwiki 4mo agoThe masses have no idea who Andreessen is.
- narrator 4mo agoYeah, and then all those wild eyed assassins will get the reward of being sent out to the countryside to do hard labor, just like the Red Guards, who were also a bunch of radicalized blood-thirsty teenagers sent to tear down society, got after they were used to get Mao back into power. Enjoy eating stale rice and picking weeds all day while singing patriotic songs as your only form of entertainment.
- kgwxd 4mo agoMark Andreessen has joined the FUD party, he's knowingly regurgitating a fake narrative.
- azov 4mo agoIs somebody organizing a rally to oppose this?
- tangotaylor 4mo agoThe plan is to show up at the Public Safety Committee hearing on Tue June 30th. 8:30 a.m. - 1021 O Street, Room 2200 Louis Rossmann and David from 3D Printing Nerd should be there. They were at the last one on June 23rd and planned to show up again. https://spsf.senate.ca.gov/agenda https://spsf.senate.ca.gov/agenda
- fortran77 4mo agoI solved this problem by moving my U.S. home from Sunnyvale, CA to St. Charles MO.
- platevoltage 4mo agoWe all know Missouri really cares about the rights of the people.
- giardini 4mo agoAnother fellow who hopes to fight in the American Civil War! Why don't I see more of these guys going to the Ukraine?
- platevoltage 4mo agoWhat on earth are you going on about?
- Esophagus4 4mo agoThat’s a long way to go for 3d printing… It probably would’ve been cheaper to just buy the gun at a store if you wanted one that bad.
- giardini 4mo agoLike your username!8-)) How are gun/hunting laws in MO?
- shiptoaster 4mo agowow this is going to add a lot of friction to the printers they already don't make there
- gdiamos 4mo agoMy kindergartner has a 3D printer. I got a call from the school principal. She said “another parent called and said your son 3D printed a gun and brought it to school”. I looked at the print history. It was a tiny toy mandalorian figurine holding a blaster pistol in his hand. I bought my son a bigger 3D printer and told him to stop playing with that boy.
- gorgoiler 4mo agoGood for you. Over-enforcement absolutely needs to be penalized. One of my biggest weaknesses is refusing to let people get away with the kind of lazy thinking you encountered. Hands up if you’ve ever been told you can’t do something because of potential SOC2 audit non-compliance. Or it’s against GDPR. Or legal won’t allow it. Or it’s against IT security policy. Or just against “policy”.
- SoftTalker 4mo agoWhy do you suppose all those rules and policies came to be?
- Ancapistani 4mo agoBecause of a problem that all those rules and policies don’t solve, while introducing new ones and creating an entire bureaucracy dependent upon keeping them in place regardless of their efficacy?
- xeromal 4mo agoFear of everything
- gorgoiler 4mo agoThe rules are well intentioned. The policies stem from not standing up to bullies. In my experience: 1/ Some top-level authority writes down a rule saying “as of 2021, it is forbidden to have red pencils”. 2/ The authority might prosecute one or two cases, but most enforcement is largely farmed out to certification bodies: the lawyers, auditors, inspectors of this world. 3/ No auditor or auditee ever wants to be the first to fall foul of PNCL21 regulations. The expense one would incur of being a test case incentivizes every regulation to be widened in scope, unreasonably, to try minimize risk. 4/ Moreover, there is a purity spiral incentive as an auditor to maintain the illusion you know what you are doing and therefore justify your $500-a-day fee. No widening-of-scope is too much! No one ever got fired for buying IBM, and no one ever got fired for banning pink crayons “just to be safe”, even though no normal person would call them either red or a pencil. Cylindrical graphite rods stored in the same building as red paint? Audit failure risk. Orange pens on your desk? Audit failure risk. Office within 1000 yards of a stationery shop? Audit failure risk. You are single, own a traditional twig-broom, and you like black cats? Audit failure risk, I say!
- wolvoleo 4mo agoI'm glad I don't live in California (or America in general) but this is such BS. I don't think we will have much of this in Europe because guns are pretty rare here and so is ammo. We just don't really have gun problems except with organised criminals but they don't 3D print them, they just buy them. But anyway, 3D printing isn't rocket science. It never was and it sure isn't now. Anyone can build one in their garage and many of us have in fact done so when it was a new tech. If someone wants to be printing gun parts they are going to be printing gun parts.
- NegativeK 4mo agoIt was partially completed lowers before this, and general machine tools before that. I support gun control. This feels like theater, not gun control.
- wolvoleo 4mo agoOh yeah I support gun control too, obviously. But more like a total ban (I don't even support sports shooting since many of the massacres we have seen were perpetrated with guns from that community). In America the problem is really more that people can just buy guns, not the printers.
- gorgoiler 4mo agoHow is enforcement supposed to work? The firmware narcs pull your printer over and checksum your SD cards against permitted firmware? Or they scan it for illegal gun-algorithms?
- polishdude20 4mo agoI'm surprised I haven't seen any makers on the popular YouTube channels I watch say anything about this. Where's William Osman, Adam Savage etc talking about this?
- shevy-java 4mo ago> One of the most dangerous aspects of the bill is that it criminalizes individual users for common practices, like creating and using alternative open source programs with their 3D printer. This is, by the way, very similar to attempts to curb down the right to repair, or more recently the age sniffing that also tries to destroy VPNs. Lobbyists are getting rich right now. It's amazing to see how corruption works in the USA here.
- rdtsc 4mo agoLike I wrote before is that it signals to the outsiders that things in CA are actually pretty well. The biggest problems are solved if the top of the agenda is to police 3D printers. That’s at least how it should be. I am being sarcastic, of course, I’ve seem the homeless in San Francisco and I am sure that’s not the only major problem.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo agoYou've also got an infestation of billionaires in the San Francisco/ San Jose area ;-)
- calbuilds 4mo ago[flagged]
- paradoxyl 4mo agoThe racketeering statutes should be applied to the treasonous elites within business, government, and banking who conspire to use "private-public" partnerships to subvert the U.S. Constitution and our indiviudual rights. I further believe these individuals and groups need to be arrested, prosecuted, and punished to the full extent that the treason clause permits.
- coraaegis 4mo ago[flagged]
- warumdarum 4mo agoCould the solution for surveilance state creep is to creat systems to subvert faster than they are subverted ?
- Ccecil 4mo agoI am curious which 3d printer manufacturers/developers are poised to take advantage of this. What machines already have locked down (or partially locked down) slicers and communications to the boards? Have those companies made a statement? Is there any opensource firmware which can comply? This is a massive hit on the opensource community. As a vendor/dev of an opensource CNC control board (Smoothieboard) I will be forced to limit sales to any state with these laws (our board can easily be used to bypass these protections). Having watched over the last 13 years how our boards have led to many other machines and innovations outside of the 3d printing community over the years (OpenPNP, Wazer, Opentrons, etc) I can only see this as stifling to development in every direction. I wonder how companies like Machmotion and other retrofit CNC controls are viewing this as well. Since this also applies to all CNC. I don't live in any of the states proposing these types of laws...but when it does come here I doubt it will be stopped. The simple act of making your own machine for art/design will make you a criminal. "The more rules and regulations...the more thieves and robbers."
- oceanplexian 4mo agoIt's fascinating because there are 3+ Constitutional Rights being stepped on which makes this much more nefarious than impacting some 3D printer hobbyists. If they can get their foot in the door on this issue you can kiss all of your civil liberties goodbye. 1) The right to bear arms absolutely gives you the right to make your own gun. It would be like saying the right to vote doesn't give you the right to use a pen or enter a polling place. 2) For the politicians that lack an imagination, print out the GCODE file and put it in a paperback book. Now is the government going to claim it's illegal to disseminate a book? 3) Neither does the government have a right to "search" a 3D printer without probable cause. That's a violation of the Fourth Amendment.
- mcdow 4mo agoHaven't done any research into this, but I wonder how tough it would be to build a decent 3D printer. Maybe there are open-source designs out there.
- tangotaylor 4mo ago[dead]
- zftnb666 4mo agoCalifornia: "We need to track your 3D printer." Also California: "Why is everyone moving to Texas?