We can still stop California's 3D printer surveillance scheme

My 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.

California 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.

Looks even more draconian than the New York law. For example, it seems to mandate proprietary, locked down slicers from the printer manufacturer.

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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.

We'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.

How 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?

The Take Action link only took 30 seconds: https://www.eff.org/3DPrintCA

(did choose to edit the letter but otherwise really, it autofills and takes no time)

Imagine 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.

guess 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

At some point between this, age verification for the OS, and everything else, it starts to seem like a coordinated attack on computing.

Hope sanity prevails and printers stay free, don't give Europe ideas.

I'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.

If 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?

Is somebody organizing a rally to oppose this?

wow this is going to add a lot of friction to the printers they already don't make there

I 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.

I solved this problem by moving my U.S. home from Sunnyvale, CA to St. Charles MO.

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Let me get this straight. The USA has no gun control laws but legislators want to prevent people from making guns with 3D printers?