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.
Let’s entertain the thought. How would one identify what is a gun part being printed, and what is a tube, a mechanical latch, or whatever else. Heck, I printed a plastic replica of a movie prop once. Would that be illegal?
I mean, I’m not in the US, and I know how to drive three steppers according to a list of extremely basic instructions that never ever represent anything “final part-y” looking, but the question remains. How do we go from “lots of gcode” to “yep, that’s definitely illegal” without saying that everything is illegal?
Ever heard of the EURion constellation?
This is the same, just an additional dimension.
“Markus Kuhn, who uncovered the pattern on the 10-euro banknote in early 2002 while experimenting with a Xerox colour photocopier that refused to reproduce banknotes.[2] The pattern has never been mentioned officially; Kuhn named it the EURion constellation as it resembled the astronomical Orion constellation, and EUR is the ISO 4217 designation of the euro currency.[3]”
It would seem governments always poke into corporations for debatable “safety”. Even if they don’t say it.
You can of course build your own printer from stepper motors and belts. Good luck, see you in a year. Also 3d printing in general has improved lightyears, so it’s becoming a decent-sized corpo thing => tools becoming scrutinized by government vogons.
That’s… not applicable here. Like, at all. To reproduce a printed document, you input it. To make a 3D print, you produce tailored list of operations depending on many, many settings. Usually, the file that reach the printer have little in the way of knowing what is printed, aside from expensive reconstruction that would only give the general shape, if even that. And even if you can send actual 3D model files to a printer that would do the slicing locally, there’s no “absolutely required” fingerprint there. A tube is a tube.
And, just so you know, there’s a slew of public printers and scanners that will just plain not recognize any of this, too. There’s also some “protection” pattern in some official document; large office printers would choke on them, where a home scanner was fine. This is, at best, only enforceable in the flimsiest of ways.
Applicability is in the eye of the beholder… of bureaucracy.
It is not really enforceable what people grow in their nook with led lights, or what they produce with metal lathes and metalworking tools, or what they mix up with common chemicals, and yet!
With EURion, printers/scanners that are capable of somewhat convincing replica go into the “definitely need to do this thing” money bracket I guess.
Printer instructions are also usually quite convoluted (don’t event know if anybody really knows the actual format), but definitely it’s not the actual document being sent to a printer (except some last decade printers perhaps), just the actual dithered inkjet patterns, though I am heavily guesstimating. And yet, from inkjet patterns, the printer knows to crash, presumably, though I dont know, the knowledge of currency steganography seems spotty…
There is a semi-infinite amount of processing that can be done on the slicing machine, so detecting gun-like item is wildly possible. Making your own slicer is the same as making your own photoshop (or hacking it). I definitely don’t see 3d printers having enough horses to figure out a non-watermarked-model produced geocode to have gunlike things. But! We forget! With legislation, everything is possible. Probably will require any decent (especially things like metal) 3d printer to have an ISIC specifically programmed to rebuild a model from geocode and do analysis :D (Honestly, completely easy with current technology, MNIST 99.99% accuracy fits into 10k transistors or so)
But I guess this assumes same amount of know-how and confident skills that they had in 90s. It will probably all crash and burn and make all honest customers very unhappy.
Additional note: Since 2003, image editors such as Adobe Photoshop CS or PaintShop Pro 8 refuse to print banknotes. According to Wired.com, the banknote detection code in these applications, called the Counterfeit Deterrence System (CDS), was designed by the Central Bank Counterfeit Deterrence Group and supplied to companies such as Adobe as a binary module.[13]
Everybody with Photoshop / Paintshop pro literally has an unexplained (likely uninvestigated) government binary blob that might be a backdoor :D