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Notes -
New York Vs. 3d Printers
The New York State governor's office reports:
To be charitable, the governor's office does not actually read the laws it signs. A more precise summary is that New York is establishing a working group that, within a year, "shall make recommendations regarding the minimum safety standards a three-dimensional printer's blocking technology must meet in order to comply with the requirements" that it scan the files for firearms or illegal gun parts, and within two years, must establish a rule mandating that technology on all 3D printers sold in the state unless the working group finds such a technology wholly unfeasible. Compliance with the mandate would begin in 2029.
The statute also separately bans possession of "firearms manufacturing code" with intent to use, along with transfer or sale to someone intending to use, unless the end-user is a gunsmith FFL. That's another step on the DefCad slippery slope, not that it'll give federal judges named Krause any more reason to know how PDFs work.
To be less charitable, the governor also signed a statute redefining "three-dimensional printer" to include "any machine capable of rendering a three-dimensional object from a digital design file using additive manufacturing; or any machine capable of making three-dimensional modifications to an object from a digital design file using subtractive manufacturing."
Hope there weren't any machine shops left in Albany, or that'll screw them over good. Any business worth its salt runs CAD/CAM, and alternatives like conversational programming don't scale to even moderately complex geometry.
Once implemented, this statute provides "a civil penalty of five thousand dollars for each qualified product that is unlawfully sold, transferred, imported, distributed, manufactured, marketed, or offered for wholesale or retail sale in New York state". By the strict text, that penalty can only be applied to a "[g]un industry member", which could mean the law would only apply to Defense Distributed and similar orgs... but that's a narrow plank to rest a million-dollar-plus fine against, the mandate applies regardless of whether the printer company is a gun industry member, and no printer company is going to want to take that risk.
But while the feasibility cutout seems like a massive dodge - blocking a broad class of shapes in an adversarial environment probably can't ever be that effective, since it's an even less forgiving version of the infamous Time To Penis problem - it's not that likely to work as an escape hatch. The statute does not require the technology to work 100% of the time, or any percent of the time; that's up to the working group. It does not require the technologies prevent circumvention. It only requires:
And other states have recognized impossible technologies as feasible, before, and courts have let them do it. The working group will be led and selected by the same administration that signed this bill. The state regulation has to happen unless the working group actively calls the regulation unfeasible. That offramp is far more illusory than it appears at first glance, and that's in the text of the statute:
The real dangerous part is what happens when you think, even moderately seriously, about what such a technology would require. You are not going to do serious volumetric profile analysis on a ATMega328 or ESP32 or STM32F4. These processors simply don't have enough RAM to even keep the full model in memory. Any pragmatic service will require either submission of all potential prints to an always-online service, or a hefty machine with an internet connection able to run AI-based models. That's not a strawman, that's Everytown's explicit proposal:
Their specific reference is to Print&Go's 3D GUN'T technology. It's not clear how this works in full, or even if the technology's advocates are willing to describe it. At minimum, they're dependent on mandatory uploads of 3D models (and, optionally, camera feeds) to a cloud service; there's no evidence of a local scanning mode, and Print&Go has cause to keep its model(s) or algorithms only on servers it maintains to avoid . My best guess is that the offline firmware prong is a technical check that Print&Go-equipped printers only run prints using a compatible slicer, but that's just the most plausible variant rather than a certain one. Add in the state ban on simple possession of prohibited code, and this makes for one hell of a chilling effect: not only will such regulated printers block the print, but they'll have all the information necessary for a prosecutor to bring slam-dunk criminal charges. They'll even have that information where the printer didn't block it at time of print.
(This also raises some serious EAR concerns, depending on where and how it's implemented.)
This should raise no small number of privacy and First Amendment concerns.
These technologies must deliver every print to a third party for analysis, and they can't distinguish between a political statement and a sex toy and a gun part until after delivery and review. That's the entire reason they need to upload the files to start with. Print&Go announces proudly that it maintains logs of those print requests, and that's standard among these software services; Print&Go is just unusual for the implication that those logs could put you in prison. In many ways, it's a textbook prior restraint, supposedly one of the spaces where First Amendment concerns are sharpest, and one where it's an open question whether the federal government could restrict publication of how to make a literal fusion bomb.
There is the 'spooky' AI involvement, and the call For The Children, and the political advocates waving the UnitedHealthcare CEO's bloody shirt to get what they wanted anyway, and you'd think there would be some ideologues who'd speak up against each of those things, even if not in the way I'd like.
Emphasis on "should". Both the federal ACLU and New York NYCLU have been mum. While there are a number of 3D printer manufacturers that have philosophical or pragmatic opposition to cloud-first architectures for these very privacy and regulatory concerns, none of them have spoken out. Many others have bought into a cloud-first approach long ago, and many industry groups have simply invited or supported these technical restrictions. Hackaday's political outreach might go far, but not this far. Some printer manufacturers have philosophical objections to a cloud-first design, either ideological ones about the maker community, or self-centered ones like not wanting to support the infrastructure costs, but most don't and already bit that bullet; Bambu Labs isn't going to hesitate to add (additional) surveillance and filtering on print requests.
That's not nutpicking, or just the partisans on one side, or just the people who couldn't be expected to know or care. Cory Doctorow, famous for his crusade against enshittification, long in favor of personal privacy, and having specifically written the work Printcrime (cw: not very good) and hot off the presses farming out his recent book (that includes large sections about the surveillance implications of AI) on his weekly link blog, has not spoken on the matter publicly since 2018. The law is designed to work in terrorem, since any serious challenge would leave the challenger subject to absolutely punishing personal punishment, and pre-enforcement or facial challenges are unripe or dependent on courts recognizing First Amendment activity early in the challenge. No criminal or civil defense organization on a crusade against the breadth of arbitrary and capricious lawfare has planted a flag, here. The statute's breadth, covering additive and subtractive manufacturing of any type so long as a digital design file is involved, is a bullet to the brainstem of any serious reindustrialization effort. Mike Rowe - who, unlike Doctorow, I otherwise respect! - has had no comment.
To be fair, the EFF managed to publish on it... a month ago. Now that the bill has become law, and the stakes are far higher, they've had nothing but a few scattered quotes in mainstream press reporting. Louis Rossmann has a sizable video, to his credit. There's a small portion of the FIRST environment that sees this as implementing a FRC to prison pipeline, and it's a funny joke, in the funny-cry sense. Adafruit has actively been trying to shame the Open Source Hardware Association, which makes me slightly better about how much I've overpaid Lady Ada over the decade. TechDirt had something in February. And the gun rights world, unsurprisingly, cares, including even the parts that think 3D printed guns are more dangerous to their wielder than to their targets.
California and Washington State are considering similar bans. Neither state's political infrastructure seem likely to resist a major Everytown political target.
Well done. I'm heavily on the side of New York not violating the first or second amendment, but this issue feels exhausting. Democrat ruled states seem to have adopted the gish gallop approach to law on gun control, just keep throwing things at the opponents until they throw up their arms and give up or leave.
I'm curious what happens in the situation where someone buys a 3d printer in Texas or Canada and then moves and takes their jail broken 3d printer to New York? Is it the manufacturer that is still in trouble, or the individual bringing the printer?
I am very much not a lawyer, but reading the bill, it seems like it specifically makes it illegal to "sell or deliver any three-dimensional printer in the state of New York unless such printer is equipped with blocking technology". So the company is definitely fine, and I think the individual might also be fine (doesn't "deliver" imply some other person you're delivering to?).
Unless I'm misreading, the definition of "qualified product" to which much more strict restrictions are applied only includes "digital firearms manufacturing code", not unrestricted 3D printers. It still seems like a huge problem for Internet companies, and a First Amendment issue, to apply gun-control restrictions to drawings of guns on a computer.
Sounds like most gun control legislation I guess, designed to be maximally annoying for law abiding citizens and completely ineffective against criminals.
Easy ways around this:
Use the US postal service, use email, or any other data sharing service that doesn't read all the content it's sharing.
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