California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business(the3dprintingnerd.com) |
California AB 2047 makes 3D printers off-limits to students, educators, business(the3dprintingnerd.com) |
In this case you can say
“You need a license to do this activity”
[adds all the requirements in the bill to the licensing authority]
“Unlicensed activity is forbidden”
so now you can get your tiny LLMs added to 3D printers so that license holders can operate again, without specifically mandating unworkable technology or getting a freedom of expression challenge from the manufacturers you just invented court standing for
This works under every governance system
do you guys even America? catch up
All democrats present voted yes. All republicans voted no.
States in the US were modeled after sovereign nations, perhaps even more loosely connected than the EU is today. They didn’t even share a currency.
Eventually the federal government became more important and powerful, and there are many federal laws now, but states are fundamentally still their own thing with the rights to do certain things that are more like a sovereign nation than a province.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/santa-rosa-167-gun...
https://da.santaclaracounty.gov/da-task-force-seizes-ghost-g...
https://www.vvng.com/3d-printed-firearm-recovered-after-man-...
Money anti-counterfeiting is trivial, it's just 5 dots arranged in a specific pattern. Deciding what is a gun part is impossible, even for an expert human.
I will also be bringing an ergonomic grip for my camera.
My email is in my profile.
Like, it's true that refrigerators don't maintain a completely uniform temperature, meaning there's some philosophical wiggle room in what it means for a health department to say that raw meat must be stored at 41F. But it would be absurd for a meatpacker to declare that this means food safety is "impossible", and outrageous for them to conclude that they're just not going to bother refrigerating their meat at all.
Blocking the printing of parts of mechanisms is a completely different beast, because the functionality is only discernible after final assembly of the individual parts, which can be shaped in a variety of ways. Most of these parts are unique to guns or at least usable in other kinds of designs. E.g. the same trigger lever design could be used for a ghost gun or a nerf gun or a water pistol. So where would yiu draw the line of all the classifier sees is G code that combines support structures, the actual surfaces and infill of some arbitrary collection of parts?
I'm against guns in generally, but this classification problem seems particularly ill posed and I don't want it to result in tamper-resistant printers stopping people from tinkering and taking the fun out of printing. The US should just outlaw the casual carrying of guns of individuals in public. That's not a violation of the second amendment.
Some crimes are not worth it to eliminate, and western liberal society should just accept that the optimal amount of crime is non zero.
And in places where guns are tightly regulated, most people couldn't get hold of ammo even if they did build a printed gun, so it's not a big problem. (And the bad guys just use kitchen knives)
Obviously the law is stupid. But states passing their own regulations isn't on its face.
really? what percentage of Americans can't afford a bus ticket to the nearest city in an adjacent state?
About 15% of rural Americans aren't within 25 miles of any intercity transit, much less interstate; low-income residents are disproportionally represented in that group. That figure jumps to 25% if you exclude suburbs, and in some states that figure is as high as 62%.[2]
Even as intercity bus demand has increased due to the declining quality of air travel in the US,[3] rural intercity bus access has declined. Greyhound served many rural routes until its slow collapse before being acquired by FlixBus, which is more focused on urban access than Greyhound was. The deregulation of intercity bus access in 1982, which led to the closure of many intercity routes (disproportionally in the rural Midwest) that required subsidization from more profitable routes, was a major factor.[4]
So "what percentage of Americans can't afford a bus ticket to the nearest city in an adjacent state" is a non-starter of a question, because most of the Americans who'd _need_ an interstate bus ticket can't even get to a bus stop without first owning a car... with which they could simply drive to another state.
1: https://itdp.org/2024/01/24/high-cost-transportation-united-...
2: https://www.bts.gov/data-spotlight/85-rural-residents-have-r...
3: https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/travel/bus-travel-tickets-airl...
4: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/greyhound-bus-tran...
I believe the answer to both of those is yes, which leads to my next question, which is, do you think that's also absurd?
For reasons that aren't entirely clear to me, firearms manufacturers seem to think they're entitled to instead stomp their feet and say "no, no regulation, you have to let me do whatever I want!". I'm never quite sure why they think this foot-stomping would be at all persuasive to people who don't manufacture firearms. Again, I imagine you don't see things this way and I'd be happy to learn more about what I've gotten wrong here.
Who exactly is the "firearms manufacturer?" I've owned and used 3D printers for years. Not once has anything I've used or seen from any 3D printer manufacturer or other related supplier have anything to do with guns.
Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead
It's incredibly bizarre that you feel entitled to issue commands about what I or the California legislature must do instead of passing the regulations you don't like. What is your mental model of the world, where someone would read the words "Go solve gun crime with boots on the ground instead" and not become more passionate about the idea that we must regulate you whether you like it or not?
"Anthropic announces Project Disarm, a new model designed for 3d printer manufacturers to quickly infer whether the intent of an stl file is a weapon. The printer first submits the job to the cloud, and only after it's approved will it print."
Not that I want this future, just that I can imagine it.
I'm not mad at you for suggesting this, you're right, I'm just generally aimlessly angry and ready for this world to burn.
I recently was in Venezuela, I have been in Cuba. I am a native spaniard. There you have a group of people that took control of the weapons in the country and uses it to basically enslave the rest of the country.
When the people in power have automatic weapons and you don't there is basically nothing you can do to defend yourself from the abuses of power.
That is a real thing the people in power have wet dreams and would love to do in any country, including the US.
You can no longer just buy a tool and use it.
Echoes of Network Neutrality problems, where BigCo is permitted to block or degrade sites about how to cancel your BigCo service.
The input to the detector could be not the G code instructions, but a 3D model representation recovered by simulating the G code. (That's a thing that exists.)
The requirements for a 3D printer which detects weapon shapes is actually fairly realistic.
It would likely have laughable false positives: 8-year-old Johnny not being able to 3D print a squirt pistol.
Some common tools have pistol-like form factors: spray guns, glue/grease/caulking guns, drills, hair dryers.
It is a cockamamie idea; but to claim that it is not doable seems a bit disingenuous.
1. Your printer probably puts a secret code into everything you print (not just money-like things) with the time and a serial number of the printer. [0]
2. Windows and MacOS constantly sends the serial-numbers of your connected devices back to the mothership. [1][2]
3. So when you print out a flyer that somehow annoys the regime, they read out the serial number, then call a buddy at Microsoft/Apple.
4. Now there are thugs knocking at your door to talk about how your picture was criminally mean to Dear Leader.
[0] https://www.eff.org/pages/list-printers-which-do-or-do-not-d...
3D printed is a very niche case. They're only good for one shot ever, they are not reliable even for that. And they're bulky. The one thing they do is make it much harder for a metal detector to find them.
Ghost guns made by CNC milling equipment are nearly identical to what you would buy from the manufacturer, except they do not have a serial number and you won't have the background check for a firearms purchase.
But politicians are reacting to the ghost guns by going after the printed guns.
Given that it is extremely well known that most commercial printers will refuse to print anything that looks like counterfeit currency, why is this considered technically unworkable?
I agree that compliance would be onerous, but that's different from insisting that it's not possible.
Roll call: https://legiscan.com/CA/rollcall/AB2047/id/1702219
* Dr. Darshana R. Patel (D)
* Tim Grayson (D)
A grim day for 3D printing if so.
It seems more precise to say that 3D printers sold/transferred in California would need built-in anti-firearm-printing controls?
I don't see how this directly bans students/teachers/businesses from owning 3d printers, which is what the title seems to say.
https://spreadthesignal.com/files
Note that in particular banning of 3d printing severely decreases chances for bringing back manufacturing - high labor and other costs makes domestic manufacturing feasible only when it is highly automated and highly customizable.
My bet is the US militaro-industrial complex is busy preparing juicy contracts to sell shitload of drones and drones-related tech to the US government now that they understood that drones in warfare were a thing (Ukraine vs Russia showed it and Iran-vs-the-world showed it too).
The US has something like 12 tech companies in the top 20 biggest companies by market cap in the world: do you really think the US is "falling behind in drone tech" because a country that has never invented anything (besides mass killings of their own citizens) since religious extremists took over managed to fly a few low-tech drones into US military assets?
That a country bent on violence (including towards its own citizens) where pick-up trucks armed with .50 cal, AK47s and explosive are the norm can slap explosive on DJI drones is resourceful but I wouldn't exactly call it "passing ahead in drone tech".
I don't gamble but I'd make an exception and bet big that the US is going to end up right next to China, at the very top, when it comes to drone tech. While I fully expect the EU to fall behind in drone tech.
And de-facto won the war as a result. That is reality. That is the power of that weaponry, and that is the falling behind. And that after 4 years of such a war in Ukraine.
I agree it is very possible that US would be at some point able to build up those capabilities. Though, limited to established players, it most probably would be very expensive and thus go against the key feature - cheapness - which in itself allows for the other key feature- mass scale of the drone weapons.
Why do the pols feel like they have to pick fights in so many places? I doubt there’s a majority of voters who want this.
The only thing that's different about this one is that it mentions a technology geeks care about. But I doubt that's enough. As another commenter noted, you can no longer hide behind "we have no technology to distinguish between guns and non-guns". We have AI that's supposedly PhD-level and will soon automate all jobs. Looking at STL files sounds like a job.
That's actually one of my fears about LLMs: they make thought policing cheap. There are profound privacy and cost barriers to having a Facebook employee review all your private messages. There are no such barriers to having a robot watch all your IMs in real time.
If this fails it'll be because the tech industry expresses disapproval too loudly to ignore.
The legislators don't care about the underlying criticism. Almost no legislators have ever used a 3d printer or written any software, beyond maybe simple assigned programs if they had a required intro-to-programming course. Few are "tech" people. The rest don't understand this technology, or any technology really, beyond it being a black box for specific purposes. They see 3d printing and plastic guns and think something must be done, because the 3d printing black boxes are producing dangerous weapons.
Looking at just the silhouette or shape, you couldn't really tell the difference between the body of a firearm that was later going to receive a metal tube from the hardware store or a plastic bracket that I'm going to use to support a shelf.
And even if you could accurately tell the difference, how do you know I'm not helping my nephew build a Nerf gun?
They will refuse to print images that contain the EURion constellation, a cluster of points with specific distances between them. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation)
More generally, "Does this image represent US currency?" and "Does this 3D mesh represent a dangerous gun part?" are different kinds of questions.
Checking if an image is US currency is simple. Not only can an image similarity hash be used, but the design of the currency can be changed to make checking easier. The checking program just has to run a textbook algorithm and compare the result with a handful of hashes (we only have a few denominations of bills).
We can be confident that the checking program will always see substantial portions of the bill, so it can always see the pattern. If someone chopped the bill into tiny pieces, it would look fake when glued together. Looking like a real bill is the thing we want to control, and that's something we can reliably measure with simple algorithms.
Checking if a 3D shape is a gun part is an unsolvable problem. (It would be equivalent to making a program that can detect hidden "subversive" meanings in text.) It would have to understand how the piece could operate, in cooperation with a skilled mind who studies it carefully. The parts could be printed in multiple pieces, or have material removed after printing, so it'd have to anticipate that too.
Even if the problem is limited to "match against these known gun part hashes", gun parts are not defined by their appearance. The files can be mutated until they no longer trip the detector, yet can be easily post-processed into functional components. (Also, a similarity hash for 3D toolpaths may not exist.)
(Such a hashing regime would be useless to stop "3D-printed guns" as a concept, because the design could be changed to not match the hash at all, without post-processing.)
There is a law in California that has been interpreted to mean that all clubbing weapons are illegal. So if you by a length of pipe and keep it around (e.g. under your bed) explicitly for self-defense purposes, you have committed a crime.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell, keeping a shotgun in your home for self-defense purposes would be fine, as long as you aren't planning ahead of time to use it as a club.
[edit]
My information is slightly out-of-date; there was an injunction against enforcement in 2024 from Fouts v Bonta. I have no clue the injunction is or is not still in effect, so ask your lawyer before carrying a club.
This is why many may have heard lawyers say "if you're going to carry a baseball bat in your car, make sure to also carry a ball and mitt"
https://legalclarity.org/is-it-legal-to-have-a-baseball-bat-...
I think so many people in the US are so focused on the topic of guns as weapons that we sometimes forget that we have laws regarding other weapons as well.
Maybe they'll ban Github, too - as it hosts unregulated open source software that can power these scary tools.
The frame is the part that gets the serial number and is considered the controlled part of the gun. Rather than the trigger, the springs, the barrel, etc.
Other than the frame, which requires an FFL for transfer, especially across state lines, the rest of the parts can be ordered and shipped from anywhere and are not controlled.
Mind, that’s changing, again notably in CA, as they now talk about “gun pre-cursor” parts.
The 3D printed frames are similar to the “80% lowers” which are aluminum blocks that are “80%” complete AR-15 lowers (the lower receiver, again, the controlled part of an AR-15).
With straight forward machining and some jigs, those chunks of metal can be finished into an operational lower receiver, and the rest of the rifle can be assembled from disparate parts ordered from anywhere.
The original “ghost gun” before 3D printers enabled folks to assemble Glocks in their garage.
Some parts in regular firearms can be printed in plastic, guns with polymer parts have existed since polymers existed, but it is only marginally simpler than machining it out of metal. After all you can buy a metal CNC machine for handful of bucks more than a 3d printer and you don't have to worry about shitty materials breaking immediately.
And there are already plenty of examples of hardware store pipe guns that if someone spent more than a day or two working on it would by far surpass anything anyone can print.
Fwiw, when I paid attention to my local police department's released body cam vids, maybe around 1/3 of the guns they showed as evidence were polymer80s (edit: which I mistakenly assumed were 3d printed, but it turns out they aren't so feel free to disregard that fun fact)
Polymer80 is defunct but still sold under a slightly different modified mold that someone mysterious somewhere owns and is selling through some other companies("76%" instead of 80%)
A pure plastic gun seems more likely to blow the users hand off than hit their target. Especially if just downloaded and printed in PLA on default settings (few walls, sparse infill...)
So what the ATF does is take an essential part not substantially influenced by wear and declare it to be the gun. Trade in anything that sufficiently resembles this part is treated as trade in guns. Other parts are not considered guns, they're just pieces of metal or plastic. Then there are the parts that you're not supposed to have. But is that an oil filter or a silencer? When it's on the gun it's obvious, when it's listed on a website as an oil filter...
Or you just 3d print the "receiver" for something like an Ar-15, which isn't load bearing. If you use the right materials and the beefier designs it will lats hundreds to thousands of rounds. The rest of the parts can be bought through the mails unregulated.
All they have to do if frame it as an unnecessary freedom that only conservatives and wackos want to keep and they will 100% support it.
They see their state as a sort of oasis in the country and will do whatever it takes to keep the guns out. They really believe they’re just a few laws away from solving any issue a “reasonable” American could face.
Some made life hard for Californians like the CARB gasoline blend requirement but I think if you proposed removing any of those laws you'd find yourself downvoted here and called a corporate bootlicker on Reddit - which is not a poll of all people but should give you an idea of the fact that they're not unpopular.
That said these politicians have pushed:
The ban on disinfectant soaps
Stop Shirley bill (charge you for public records in order to suppress access to public information)
Effort to sideline charter schools by teachers unions
Reduced sentences for murderers (this isn't unarmed robbery, etc., rather murderers)
Per mile traveled tax (for a state with the highest gas prices in the lower 48)
Sanction unsafe needle litter (as if there weren’t enough in playgrounds already)
Strangers can assume custody of children without parental consent
Allow politicians to dip into taxpayer money to fund campaigns.
Leniency towards solicitation of minors(!) this was unbelievably passed.
Or your literal thoughts depending on how far we're able to push neuralink type technology.
Other countries regulate the pressure-bearing parts instead. It probably started off with a safety rationale (those parts are generally proof tested), but those parts ALSO tend to be the ones that are more difficult for someone to produce at home.
So, I suppose the answer to your original question is: they're slowly grinding forward on a progressive-politics agenda in a public and straightforward manner that's generally popular among the electorate.
There is a reason why California is leading the nation in migration out of the state.
Note that this isn't really limited to guns either. I foresee a similar moral panic wrt 3D printing "killer drones" (i.e. parts that allow one to attach explosive to a drone) and software that allows you to circumvent various restrictions on drone firmware. All it'll take is one high profile attack using a drone...
The existence of a house resolution mean that one representative wrote a thing, not that it's on the precipice of becoming law.