Technology

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.

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.

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."

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.

Because it makes for a good distraction from actual problems that they don't care to solve because those problems would require them to heavily tax millionaires and billionaires.

It's not about firearms.

It's about controlling what you can 3D print.

When your 3D printer has to connect to a third party service to check if it's allowed to print what you just sent it. That's a clear vector for companies to enforce IPs.

Printing a replacement part for your appliance? Sorry, they're blocked.

Printing parts to repair part of your vehicle or snap something back on? Sorry, that's banned.

Printing something that resembles the intellectual property of any other company? Sorry, that's banned.

Can't have you cutting into the profits of corporations by self-servicing and self-repairing.

Also a mass surveillance device to produce surveillance of what people are 3D printing and report it to a central authority.

Because it makes firearms available to people without having to jump through hoops the government can track, but they can make a machine that makes flexi-dragons into a boogyman, so they throw a "protect the children" in the bill and it automatically passes.

"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.

It is nothing less than, I say without exaggeration, a war on property rights as a whole.

Great points, I think you're on to something.
I think the old saying "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" doesn't apply when malice and corporate interests are in alignment. Now I'm curious to dig into who actually wrote the bill, and who are they financially supported by...

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?

Which unfortunately means the base price for a California-legal 3d printer is going to be exorbitant.

Here's the thing. This isn't about banning weapons. It's about controlling access to IPs and preventing right to repair.

A forcibly Internet connected online. Only 3D printer that has to first check a public database to see if it's allowed to print the thing you just sent is most definitely going to be used to block you from printing parts to fix your appliances or devices.

And definitely going to be used to provide copyright protection and blocking to IPS of large corporations and companies.

It’s not law yet, and may never be.

Then refuse to participate. Use open source software and any other kind of system outside their control until they throw you in jail. That's what I'll be doing. If enough of us do they can't jail us all. Participation is consent.

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.

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.

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.

And largely unenforceable. Like, it can only really block the sale of prebuilt, proprietary crap like Bamboo, but most of these things are built out of common parts that are used for a verity of applications and there are countless completely open source printers you can just built from sourced parts that this literally cannot apply to.

Even for most of the prebuilt or kits you get you put open source firmware on it. They can boot lock the board that comes with it, technically, but the board is easy enough to replace on most printers and it's a standard micro controller and/or raspberry pi nowadays.

Half the time people who get those kits end up replacing various components to customize for their use case. I have a Sovol SV08 that I put stock Klipper on and want to do the multi-print-head mod someday. I've even considered replacing the main board with a more powerful one so I can run higher microsteps without overloading the processor.