Mildly Infuriating

They're using weapon printing as the wedge, but this is really about protecting all manufacturers.

You'd think with a title that says "California just passed a law", that it would actually be about California passing a law. It still has to go through the senate and then get signed by the governor.

Edit: The bill was passed in the Assembly back in May. This is a nearly 3 month old article.

Should put the tracker in the filament, since most ghost guns just get a solvent bath when they're done now.

Even more pointless than DRM on movies.

https://all3dp.com/2/how-to-build-a-3d-printer-from-a-kit-or-from-scratch/

I’d love to know how they expect printer manufacturers to do this, given all they do is read gcode. Do the legislation makers even know what a slicer is?

DIY 3D printers aren't that difficult. It's just two or three motors, a motion controller and a hot nozzle for most plastic printing. Replace the hot nozzle with a really epic laser for metal parts or possibly a stick welder. Even better with lithographic printing minus the really toxic fumes of the material. Take a really bright high resolution screen or maybe a projector and one motor and you got yourself a lithographic printer. Are you going to compete directly with cutting edge printers? Probably not. Will you still be able to make shit that works? Most likely after some tinkering.

How would this even be enforced?

Like, it seems like it would be a trivial process to just install a firmware package without the blocks.

Good luck with that... 3D printers are not complicated and you could build one yourself if you wanted to.

The standards will not mandate perfect efficacy – they will allow for “an acceptably low level of evasion” against a bank of identified design files.

They've just admitted that it won't work. It will rely on a bank of banned designs which means anyone can just modify them until the algorithm doesn't recognize it as such while still being functional or simply make their own designs. Whoever finds a way to evade those restrictions will pass on the word.

Sucks that this will act as a push to lock down 3D printer firmware for everyone else though. Mass enshitification inbound. The only hope I see is that 3D printer manufacturers will simply get out of California as a result instead because the expense of developing such an algorithm and the risk of fines if it is not performing well enough are too great to be worth it.

Let's get rid of, or use less, plastic! No, says coffee pods and 3d printers.