Interesting story. My larger concern is that incumbent businesses and political interests will use this type of story to spread FUD that enables them to enact fear-based regulation before the benefits of cheap 3D printing can be realized by the general population. One simply has to look at piracy concerns and asanine infosec and privacy regulations for previous examples.
Just wait until you can download a handgun. Just wait until someone attaches explosives to a DIY drone and sends it into a shopping mall. Just wait until someone hacks the firmware on your self-driving car. It's going to get ugly.
I don't see how a DIY drone is any different from using an off the shelf RC plane and a wireless camera. The car one though, I have serious concerns about. There's an urban legend about cell phone viruses infecting cars via bluetooth, and while I don't know of any real cases of remote car hacking, it's not a happy thought.
One would hope that self-driving cars will have their driving system disconnected from any networks, but I don't know if that's even practical.
> I don't see how a DIY drone is any different from using an off the shelf RC plane and a wireless camera.
It isn't, except in as much as you can program it to follow a flight-path and then clear off. Given that you don't need to be in wireless range (200 meters?) you could send the drone in from miles away. But that aside: your comment is rational, but I wouldn't rely on politicians being so faced with scare stories about these exciting new technologies. Allied to their usual technophobia, they will try to ban everything, or require licences with onerous conditions.
I suppose it's more effective still, given small-scale production, to upgrade components on existing fire-arms rather than try to manufacture one from scratch.
tomorrow: handcuff manufacturers call the DMCA over reverse engineering and subsequent pirating of their keys copyright.
everyone with a key is considered suspect. EFF suggest you walk around with several keys to your neighbors houses to enable a doubt defense.
Feds waste millions of tax dollars on 3D printers crackdowns trhu the country, since they can't be used for anything else other than pirating handcuffs keys copyrighted material. Seizes thingverse servers and demand CEO extradition.
You do know they'll use your suggestions as their playbook now, don't you? These days, the US Government seems to be using 1984 as their playbook, so why not this, too.
It's sad that it seems any story can be twisted into some way that entrenched powers can exert themselves, particularly over information. Such a shame.
The thing is that certain forms of 3d printing technology brings the costs down so far for manufacturing certain technologies, that not restricting it as a society means that you will win technologically overall, compared to more restrictive societies.
They are in basic form, the first generation of digital replicators and some of the open source variants are already under $500, with dirt cheap print costs.
Who only knows what the patent industry is going to do, because certain sections of it are now screwed far, far worse than the recording and distribution industry ever was over people downloading MP3s, especially given that the mashup and resharing of different objects will probably be an extremely common use of desktop manufacture-to-order technologies and is easily accomplished over many existing and popular MMORPGs, alongside all the standard web channels, so is an absolute nightmare to try and police.
And that's without even considering the issues raised by laser scanning, photographic 3d, or just artists with a good eye and memory.
