Tell me how many handmade 2D printers are out there with this restriction?
How many 2D printer building kits have you seen online?
Ever seen open source sold with censorship built in? How would that work?
You do know that any regular printer you have/use, for at least a decade, has an identical feature against printing/copying currency ?
Afaithfulnihilist@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Devial@discuss.online 4 days ago
It doesn’t block open source firmware. It just requires a detection algorithm for the factory default firmware on new printers sold. Did any of you geniuses actually read the article ?
Afaithfulnihilist@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
There is no algorithm for that. That’s just technobabble. In order to detect if somebody is trying to print any specific shape you’re going to need software that can look for that shape in an arbitrary cloud of point data. That software does not exist.
No one has developed that kind of software and in order to develop it would require a tremendous amount of research and development. Who pays for that?
Now let’s say you were the company who did that research and development Do you build the cost of developing this anti-product into a line of products that you will sell? What’s the market for that product? If you sold the printer with no chip at all are you exempt from that requirement?
Will a device that has to include the additional cost that comes with all of the additional needed computer hardware, software development, and anticircumvention technology be in any way competitive on the market against models that don’t include these additional unnecessary expenses?
How long will people be allowed to make aftermarket modifications to their 3D printer if the aftermarket modifications don’t also include the additional computer hardware needed to run software that could arbitrarily detect gun parts in 3D printed designs?
I don’t think you understand how completely insane and unworkable a plan like this is because you’re comparing 3D printers to 2D printers. That’s a little bit like comparing paint by numbers to scratch and sniff.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 4 days ago
There’s a much simpler and more horrifying solution here, that would actually be technically possible. All 3D printers sold must have a sort of cryptographic lock on them. Only safety-verified prints are allowed to be printed on them. The code running on the printers themselves will still be dirt stupid, but there will be a software lock on the thing preventing uncertified prints from being printed. Every 3D printer sold is locked down tighter than a John Deere tractor.
Every 3D print company would offer a large number of pre-verified prints. (AFAIK many already have libraries of print files.) But you as a user wouldn’t be able to just print anything you wanted. At best, maybe 3rd-party verification services would exist. Model what you want, then pay 20 bucks to some company for a print verification. You send them the file, they screen it for any contraband, and they send you a cryptographic key that lets you print that file and only that file. Long term they would hope AI can do the screening. For now it will be someone’s job to just stare at 3D models all day and to figure out if it’s a gun or not. It would start with screening for guns, but it would inevitably expand to things like intellectual property protections.
They won’t have to change the fundamental deep logic and operation of the printer itself. Just like the fundamental mechanisms inside a tractor haven’t changed. They’ll just make it a felony to sell a 3D printer that isn’t locked down to Hell and back.
fhein@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I think you missed the part where it said “[…] cannot be overridden or otherwise defeated by a user with significant technical skill.” I.e. either the printer will only allow flashing with signed firmware containing the detection algorithms, or it would have to be done by a separate chip which isn’t affected by flashing firmwares.
But also detecting firearms in gcode is a ridiculously complex task, and if companies actually try to comply they might opt for building the algorithms into their closed source slicer instead, and then only allowing their printer to print encrypted/signed gcode. Or they might do the analysis using some AI algorithm on their cloud servers, requiring an always on internet connection to print things. It might be tempting to think that nobody would buy a printer like that, but I think that enough people will do if they make it convenient and cheap enough.
Coleslaw4145@lemmy.world 4 days ago
And?
Devial@discuss.online 4 days ago
And you don’t see Amazon using that feature to spy on everything anyone on earth has ever printed, do you ?
Coleslaw4145@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Will modifying your regular printers firmware make you a criminal?
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
I bet HP would try to have you jailed for it if you threaten their ink racket.
Auli@lemmy.ca 4 days ago
Doesn’t it just have the yellow dot pattern.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Yep. The way that is accomplished is that practically all governments that issue paper money add a specific pattern of five circles to it somewhere, often in numerous places. American 10, 20, 50 and 100 bills use repeating patterns of those numbers to disguise it, others hide or celebrate it in various ways. Any scanner, copier or printer is looking for that pattern, and if it sees it, it refuses to print it.
The problem to solve there is “is this 2D pattern present?” It’s like asking if the word “soup” is printed somewhere on a page in Courier New, in terms of the computational power it takes to solve; it’s just optical character recognition.
Prusa is evidently stupid enough to bake a bitmap image of the object to be printed in their G-Code file, but that could be stopped. The printer doesn’t get to see the model file, only the hundreds of thousands of lines of G-Code that it is expected to obey as perfectly as it can.
There are still printers for sale today that run on Arduino Mega-based control boards; you want them to try answering “is this G-Code going to make a part of a gun” as a function of the firmware? Psh.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 4 days ago
That’s something highly specific that was carefully designed to only activate on currency. They added highly unique dot patterns to currency that scanners could detect. And the printer doesn’t (at least by law) spy on everything you do. The printer will just refuse to copy a dollar bill. The printer doesn’t refuse to operate unless it has an open communications line to the FBI.
If they wanted to do something similar with 3D printers, I would have no objections. Others have pointed out the technical problems with preventing any form of 3D print, but I’ll speak conceptually here. There are 3D printers that print metal. Countries with high-denomination coins might find it useful to bar 3D metal printers from printing those coins. You could assumedly create some sort of 3D version of the dot patterns used on paper currency. Then you pass a law stating that any 3D scanner must refuse to scan an object if it detects those very unique dot patterns on it. Then countries with high-value coins could mint them with these unique dot patterns or other features. If anyone tries to scan a coin to reproduce it, the scanner just refuses or outputs only noise. No need to phone home. No need for mass surveillance. Just a simply refusal that would only be active in this very specific case.
If someone wanted to implement a feature like that into 3D printers, technical problems aside, I would have no objections. That would be directly analogous to the 2d printer example, and it would represent no escalation in spying or restrictions on freedom of use.