New York’s budget bill would require “blocking technology” on all 3D printers
blog.adafruit.com507 points by ptorrone a day ago
507 points by ptorrone a day ago
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if you care about right to repair and the ability of regular people to make a living and choose their own destiny(i.e. live independently of a mega-corp), this type of error message should bother you. HTML is a mature tech. There is no reason for this type of error
My main concern is, how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician.
This is part of the wider problem and heavily relates to the right to repair
Cory talked about this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs
> how long is it before you can't print a replacement part for something you bought because it looks too similar to an OEM part and the manufacturer doesn't think you should be able to do that so they throw a little money to the right politician
At least 25 years. That's the time passed since the first introduction of Eurion marks on banknotes. As far as I know, noone has used it to block reproduction of anything other than money.
That isn't true though, coupons, boarding passes, and even confidential documents use Eurion marks. It's not everywhere because it isn't worthwhile going through the hassle of getting printers that can print them; while 3D printing OEM parts would be much more valuable.
Who issues Eurion-marked boarding passes?
That strikes me as extremely counterproductive given the actually sensitive part of a BP is (outside of the US) unsigned, publicly-documented barcode.
Lots non-currency of documents around the world with EURion marks. If you're a secure printing shop and your business model primarily revolves around impressing your clients with long lists of document security features, it'd be malpractice to not implement this kind of padding.
EURion marks are a feature you must include on your banknote for it to even be considered real. And it's _one_ feature. It's relatively trivial to make a chip which can detect their presence.
On the other hand, if I need a replacement part for something, it's unlikely I will find the manufacturer giving me models for it. And if a manufacturer is giving me models for it, they probably do so with the explicit expectation that I might end up using them to manufacture a replacement.
In most cases either me or some other volunteer will need to measure the existing part, write down all the critical measurements, and then design a new part from scratch in CAD.
Even if somehow you are able to fingerprint on those critical measurements, that's just _one_ part.
The only way this kind of nonsense law could work is if you mandate that 3D printers must not accept commands from an untrusted source (signature verification) and then you must have software which uses a database to check for such critical measurements, ideally _before_ slicing.
Except that still doesn't work because I can always post-process a part to fit.
And it doesn't work even more because the software will need to contain a signing key. Unless the signing key is on a remote server somewhere to which you must send your model for validation.
This is never going to work, or scale.
There are even more hurdles... I can design and build a 3D printer from scratch and manufacture it using non-CNC machined parts at home. A working, high quality 3D printer.
Where are you going to force me to put the locks? Are you going to require me to show my ID when buying stepper motors and stepper motor drivers?
What about other kinds of manufacturing (that these laws, at least the Washington State ones, also cover)?
Will you ban old hardware?
What about a milling machine? Are you going to ban non-CNC mills?
These are the most ignorant laws made by the most ignorant people. The easiest way to ban people from manufacturing their own guns is to ban manufacture of your own guns. But again, this is a complete non-issue in the US where you can probably get a gun illegally more easily than you can 3D print something half as reliable.
As an European I'd say any USAnite can almost get a gun with breakfast cereal boxes. But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.
> But weapons' culture in the US it's obsolete. Militias can't do shit against tyranical govs because once they send drones it's game over.
Pretty sure those 50 thousand or so civilians killed on the street in the recent Iranian protests/riots would have been a lot less, if all those Iranians had easy access to guns, and not just the government.
Drones are not enough, you still need boots on the ground for you to claim control over a territory, and boots on the ground think twice about signing up for service if that includes facing armed mobs with guns on a daily basis.
So no, mobs with guns are not obsolete.
Mob with guns would be useless against the Iranian Guards which are pretty much elite commandos.
Goat herders with guns in Afghanistan kicked the U.S. army out of their country.
This isn't really accurate. The Northern Alliance entered into an agreement with the US to secure the country. An insurgency sprang up and we fought it for 20 years before giving up. Since this is now after the fact, we can safely say the Taliban ran the insurgency the whole time.
The Taliban are a military and political group compromised of an ethnic minority in Afghanistan. It's not even that the US lost to "goat herders with guns". We failed to secure a small country against a well organized, armed minority.
Pretty sure Iranians with 3D printed guns would not be able to kick their own army out of Iran.
But could they do the same to goat herders with bigger guns, drones, bombs, etc?
What's the commando to civilian ratio in Iran?
Let's do some napkin math: Iran has about 94 million people. Iran's IRGC alone has a personnel count of 125.000 [1], of which about 2-5000 are estimated to be the elite of the elite ("Quds Force"). Together with the Basij (anywhere from 100-600k) that alone is a sufficient amount of force. And on top of that come maybe 400-500k of the regular Iranian Armed Forces [2], as well as about 260k active police+100k police reservists.
So, if one sees the whole of IRGC plus Basij as the "commandos", they alone form an active elite of about 0.5%, if one sees the entirety of the military+police we're looking at easily 2-3 million units, so up to 2%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Revolutionary_Guard_Co...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Republic_of_Iran_Armed...
It’s not obsolete. In a country where your military is farm boys, the important thing is being able to start the war. Eventually chunks of the military will defect. We saw this happen during the Bangladesh independence movement. The revolutionaries got lucky and knocked over a weapons depot early in the conflict. They started fighting and a large number of the Pakistani army that was of Bangladeshi ancestry defected. I am confident the same thing would happen if the government in DC tried to oppress Iowa or Texas.
Drones cut both ways. You’re correct that it allows a small number of people loyal to the regime to asymmetrically oppress a large population. But drone technology is in theory accessible to the populace in an industrialized country.
Actually I tried to use it just for fun on some vouchers, but it didn't work on the copy machines I tried. They just happily photocopied the vouchers.
Tried the same, doesn't do anything on my scanner. Interestingly, there are regions of banknotes my scanner refuses to scan. But had no time to investigate further.
Is this true? Couldn't I put the mark on a page of my book and photocopiers would still detect and refuse to copy that page?
Yes, absolutely. It's a pattern of five rings, well-documented although Omron appears to keep the exact details pretty tightly held.
They don't have to be exact circles, they just have to be some dots in about the right place. In the UK, the Bank of England issued notes with Elgar on them and the EURion constellation picked out in musical notes ;-)
No idea why this comment is getting downvoted so hard. This was exactly what I thought of too, and it provides a concrete answer to the question.
There’s valid concern with these types of laws and scope creep. But there’s also precedent which shows they can work and be applied reasonably.
Too bad everyone jumped shipped to Bambuu Labs. If only we still had open source hardware.
We do still have open source hardware but that's the last line of defense against actions like this, not the first. They'll target distribution which will affect open source and proprietary hardware equally. You need to kill this sort of legislation in its crib.
Just print the code to do what ever is disallowed on a t-shirt, ala DVDCSS. Is that not a legitimate way around things like this?
Prusa is still kicking... if open source hardware is your priority.
Prusa had been moving towards proprietary licensing (if they release files at all) for a while now, due to their open source design files being used to undercut the original with cheaper clones.
3D printer hardware is pretty simple. All the magic happens in software, and there's plenty of open-source options.
None I know did. If you do your research, all the hype around Bambu is paid. Influencers pushed it. Tech deep dives show it is sub standard. Posted on HN.
Prusa is king. High quality. Open source. EU made and engineered. Slicer is a market leader (Bambu's a fork of it).
Prusa may still be king if you're using printers commercially, running them hard 24/7 in a print farm, wanting to be sure your investment has a decent lifespan with readily-available spare parts and upgrade options.
But it's a premium brand now. For lighter use by hobbyists, Bambu is the clear winner on price/performance. The 'less open' downside is not a factor to most people, and the printers generally work so well out-of-the-box that repairability isn't as much of a concern as it was on printers of the past.
Personally I went from a Prusa MK3s to a Bambu P1P (after looking long+hard at Prusa options), and so far, no regrets. (Although I've kept the old Prusa as a 2nd printer and upgraded it to a MK3.5, but mostly just because I do enjoy a bit of tinkering with them)
Prusa used to be king.
Their QC and customer support has gradually been getting worse. Their printers are rarely competitive feature-wise. Several printer lines are quietly being retired - with bugs remaining open for years and new features only occasionally being backported from other printers. The open-source part is mostly abandoned due to cheaper third-party clones abusing it.
Don't get me wrong, I really like my Prusa printer, but in 2025 I'd have a really hard time justifying buying another one. The "Prusa premium" just doesn't seem to be worth it anymore.
This _cannot_ be true
I'm new to 3D printing, so grains of salt abound, but since I started in on the hobby this Christmas, I've purchased four 3D printers. 3 budget-but-highly-regarded kings to start, but they all gave me tons of trouble. The Elegoo Centauri Carbon I got for Christmas that sparked this mess is a budget knockoff of the Bambu X1C, but in the first 30 days of ownership, I experienced 2 hardware failures that (thanks to having to ship parts from Mainland China) have resulted in 16 days of downtime.
To deal with the downtime, I bought a stopgap Qidi Q2, but it had tons of problems -- problems which, according to the reviewers, have all been solved for. Ambiguous error messages. Poor English. Choices between "OK" and "Confirm", neither of which advanced the system. Mainboard errors. Extruder failures. Boot failures. Firmware upgrade failures. I experienced all of these within the first 3 hours of ownership, and filed for a return.
I was working on a project that needed a printer, and now despite having bought a bunch of printers, I didn't have any printers that could print. Looking around locally at what I could buy that day amounted to either a Bambu P2S or a Sovol SV08. I struggled here, because I would _much_ rather be the Sovol owner than the Bambu owner, but I needed a printer, not a project, and so I decided I'd try out the Bambu until I got done with what I needed it for, and then I'd return it.
But it turns out it was amazing. The others (admittedly, budget units) were loud and cantankerous, but the Bambu was only uncivilized for a few minutes of each print, and the rest of the time you barely noticed it running. The ecosystem is obviously great. Being able to monitor jobs or initiate prints from my phone is admittedly a novelty, but it's a nice one, and one that speaks to a consistency of integration. But the important part is that it just worked. There were printable upgrades available, I didn't need to print modular pieces to fix design flaws like the other units. I didn't need to move it further away to deal with the noise. I didn't need to investigate arcane error messages because none ever arose.
Now, I haven't owned a Prusa, so I'm not trying to compare them. I understand that Prusa hardware quality is amazing. I believe that. I'm also wildly interested in the community efforts to implement tool-changing with INDX and INBXX, and they're the kinds of projects that I want to tinker with. But if I'm to own a Prusa, or a Sovol, or a Voron, it'll have to be as my second printer (well technically third, because I still own the Elegoo because it's too cheap to bother trying to return) because most of the time I want to print things, not tinkering with the printer. But while the Prusa machines might be amazing, the Prusa XL is wildly expensive for 5 colors, and the Core One right now can't be bought with multi-color capabilities.
I'm not trying to argue against Prusa here, but the idea that only shills are into Bambu seems flatly wrong. I am ideologically opposed to how Bambu got to the market position they've reached, and for sure they've undoubtedly got a fair amount of shills in their employ but sadly, their products more than live up to the hype.
You are a "new" type of user for the 3d printing world.
In the last decade, most 3d printer users were hobbyists and liked to know the internals of the machine they were using.
That's why there are so many useless models of random gadgets on thingiverse. People didn't care about the output, more about the process.
With the arrival of bambu and the last Creality, the market has shifted to a plug and print model where more and more buy the printer as a tool to produce and output and they don't care about the internals or gcode.
They must be able to control their printers from their phone.
The people that started in 3d printing when they had to assemble the whole machine by hand are now sad to see their hobby replaced by something too easy, it feels like cheating.
"How come you don't know how to level the bed and measure the offset with a piece of paper? "
Just like senior dev are sad to see vibe coding replace "true development craft".
Sorry for the old-heads, but just because I'm new doesn't mean I don't appreciate the craft, or the pains endured by many others before me that enabled this painless experience.
But if nobody was fixing the problems everybody was experiencing except Bambu, then frankly, good for Bambu.
Boo to the gate-keepers. Vorons still exist and likely always will for those that want to dork around with printers, but for the rest of us, printers that work empower the field. In the past 5 weeks, I've started to learn and understand how 3D printers work, I've started to do some simple 3D modeling, and I've begun making models with OpenSCAD, which wasn't a thing that I knew existed before. Those parts are currently on Github.
I've organized a billion things. I've modeled a corner for my weird desk's keyboard tray so that it stops cutting my knees when I swivel my chair too quickly. I've delighted my wife by printing some conveniences. I have (admittedly infinitesimally) advanced the availability of 3D models in a way that I simply would not yet have if I were still messing around procuring the Voron parts list. Quality tooling advances the craft as it makes it more accessible.
But the main thing is that it doesn't actually help anybody for 3D printing to be more difficult, nor does wanting Bambu to be bad make them not good. They are good, and they're leaps and bounds better than most of the products in the field.
IP/BigCo lawyers are probably the main lobbyists behind this article in the bill so I would think soonish
I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.
I was assured by the internet, I was paranoid, blah blah safety...
Then a few weeks ago something about Minnesota and ICE making drones illegal to fly or something...
The weird part is that, in that 15 years, I've become more moderate and pro-democratic rule of law... but I was right about my previous concerns. Not that I believe in the Justice behind them anymore.
They sort of tried with the remote ID and FRIA shit, I really doubt anyone but the kind of person that buys DJI or maybe the most broken hall monitor types bother with remote ID on fixed wing even above 250g. I think the Trump admin banned (or tried) to ban all the important parts for all RC craft, so maybe they'll keep jousting with windmills even harder.
>I remember ~10 or 15 years ago, I had concerns about drones becoming illegal due to FAA.
My Plato hating friend, my "called it" list is filled with things the old-timers at the time said no one would be stupid enough to, and the old codgers went and died on me so I can't even give em a good lambast. I believed them, and helped them build things... Now I get to watch things get coopted by a madman and a NatSec apparatus. Pour one out.
I guess it was a predictable outreach from the Patriot act - the new justification is flying drones "over a mission" from the border people, and they claim a lot of territory for their missions, right?
More likely the videos of FPV drones from Ukraine showing that an inexpensive quadcopter can be a very effective weapon of war.
And that radio jamming no longer neutralizes that threat.
That could be used to justify banning drones in general, or banning all drones which aren't radio controlled (not that those are being used domestically). And "it can be used for war" is a bit silly in a country where you can buy guns at the grocery store. Not to mention that cars can be very effective weapons as well, and those haven't been banned yet.
The far more likely explanation is that they just don't want people filming them. They can't legally stop someone with a cellphone from filming them, but that hasn't stopped them from using up-to-lethal force against observers. On the other hand, you can't exactly beat a flying drone into submission, so the obvious move is to observe using drones instead.
Luckily for ICE the FAA already has the mechanics in place to criminalize flying drones in certain places, so with their magic "no drones anywhere we operate" NOTAM they can now punish observers with a year of jail time.
they also don't publish the NOTAMs ahead of time. So, they're effectively allowing ICE to retroactively make flying a drone illegal if an agent takes issue with the color of your cheesburger bun.
It's my understanding that they are no longer the border people as Trump extended their reach to every square inch of the USA
To be fair, ICE is not particularly caring about rule of law. And DOJ is currently not caring about rule of law or constitution either. They are kind of irrelevant.
The rights abuses occurring in Minnesota and at the hands of ICE are better characterised as a degradation of democracy, not a failure of it.
EDIT: To be clear, my belief is that a plurality of the voting population voted for this, that much is obvious.
My belief is also that despite the fact that the current administration was elected, there are democratic norms and rules for what outcomes require that a bill must be passed to enact, that states can decide how they can govern themselves within well defined bounds.
All of this is being ignored despite the structures defined in the American democatric system, not because of it.
Yep. Democracy is working according to a non-minority in the country. Agree to disagree?
It is not democracy anymore. It is authoritarian regime dismantling the democracy.
Sure. I'll bite.
The majority in this country is "didn't vote". Multitudes of reasons for this.
They forgot.
They dont care.
They missed the registration deadline.
They're homeless, and no address.
They can't get proper papers, even though they are US born.
They're in prison/jail.
The candidates suck, so you dont vote.
Can't afford to take time off work.
They've been gerrymandered, so their votes are significantly degraded.
To think that the minority segment that, due to election game rules and FPTP, that a minority of the minority somehow reflects a majority? I wholly reject that.
It's always been this way. According to Google 64% of the voting age population voted in 2024. In 1972 it was 56%, in 1976 it was 55%, in 1980 it was 55%, in 1984 it was 56%... you get the idea [0].
[0] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/vitalst...
Yeah, and those figures are horrible. In other Western countries the turnout is closer to 80%, with some even hitting over 90%.
The fact that ~20% of the population either wants to vote but is unable to do so or is disillusioned about the democratic process to the point of not voting at all is extremely worrying. This is not what a healthy democracy should look like.
"This is how its always been" is one of the banes of my existence. It explains why we're here, but not how to do better.
There are ways to do better. A national holiday for elections has been mentioned countless times.
We could do like Australia and mandate required voting.
Prisoners should be able to vote. But this country is too hell-bent on punishment.
Registration can be made on the same day of voting, rather than some states require 30 days, and others per state.
But in reality, none of these are done. Changes are glacial, if they do happen.
But these would all increase a democratic choice. Right now, its a horrendously gamified minority of a minority who decides, based on electoral college results.
Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote, for the same reason as children. Expanding the electorate for the sake of expanding it doesn’t make the result better.
Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).
> Of course prisoners should not be allowed to vote, for the same reason as children.
Prisoners in jail can be there for a multitude of reasons. But the main difference is that they were likely of voting age. Some states even do allow prisoners to vote. Who more than anyone here is subject to its laws than people imprisoned?
It also naturally penalizes poor people, since they demonstrably get less 'legal equality', and thus go to prison more.
As for children. Thats a different issue. The moment this government(s) started tried children as adults is when and the voting age should have been lowered to the age of 'tried as an adult'.
> Expanding the electorate for the sake of expanding it doesn’t make the result better.
So, you do not believe or accept democratic principles.
It is no different than "get enough eyeballs on a problem, and every problem is shallow".
> Instead, the electorate should be narrowed to property owning people who have an IQ above 85 (within one SD of median) and two grandparents born in the U.S. (so culturally assimilated).
Holy crap, the dog whistles.
Sprinkle phrenology (IQ) in there. Used to defend treating black people as slaves cause "we(royal) were doing them a favor"
Literally grandfather clause, which disenfranchised former slaves.
And property-owning, so a strong retreat to royalist 2nd son tradition. Pray tell, you are only talking about land with property-owning, right?
> mandate required voting
I don't see how forcing a person to vote will result in carefully considering what to vote for.
A right to vote includes the right to not vote.
Sure, and countries with "compulsory voting" embrace the right to Donkey vote, pencil in whatever candidate you choose, criticise the government in a short haiku, and otherwise exercise freedom.
It's more a compulsory show you're still a citizen day. The making a valid vote part is down to personal choice.
They also appear to have generally better general political awareness and engagement in policy.
> A right to vote includes the right to not vote.
Then add an abstain option to the ballot while still requiring people to show up and select the box. While I do think voting should be mandatory, I'd say that we should make it substantially easier. More polling places, mail in voting, having a mandated paid day off to vote and having more than one day to vote in person would go a long way to making the requirement workable.