The federal government is asking if 3D printers can be prevented from
printing guns or prohibited gun parts. I'll answer that one.
No matter how you feel about guns, the general form answer is no, such
prints cannot be effectively blocked in the manner the government
appears to be seeking.
While mass market commercial 3D printers using proprietary software,
hardware and firmware could be designed to not print specific items
with specific parameters (in theory like how commercial color copiers
may refuse to copy currency), the attempt would almost certainly be a
losing proposition in the long run, since 3D printing ecosystems based
on open source software, hardware, and firmware would not be subject
to any such controls. And open source in this ecosystem is very common
along the entire pipeline.
Even in the commercial space with 3D printers using closed,
proprietary code, it would likely be relatively trivial for
incentivized users to create subsystem parts that did not trigger
blocking algorithms, but could still be assembled (after printing) to
create their desired prohibited objects -- a very different situation
than copiers blocking the copying of currency.
The bottom line: You could probably block the "casual" printing of
guns and some gun parts by "turnkey" users of popular commercial 3D
printers and related software, but anyone who really wanted to print
them would still be able to do so with a bit more effort. -L
- - -
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
[email protected] (https://www.vortex.com/lauren)
Lauren's Blog: https://lauren.vortex.com
Mastodon: https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren
Founder: Network Neutrality Squad: https://www.nnsquad.org
PRIVACY Forum: https://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility
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