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Comment by angersock | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why this hasn't been all over the front-page of HN. This is huge. The article in closing summarizes it neatly:

> By eliding what's really at stake here—more a matter of free expression than any meaningful expansion of the already existing legal ability to make a gun at home—the states suing, and alas too much of the media, are ginning up unwarranted fear to expand the government's power to restrict speech, and alas those states have had at least a temporary success for now.

This is pretty clearly a freedom of speech issue. Knock-on effects of this would be, for example, removing all of the Wikipedia articles that talk about how compounds that the government Doesn't Like.

One error the article makes is that this isn't software, this is just normal CAD documents describing the objects in question.

If we as techies don't stand up for this, we're doing ourselves and future generations a huge disservice.

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>I don't understand why this hasn't been all over the front-page of HN.

I fear the hacker ethos of the tech world, the mindset that cared about the right to tinker and to not have the government tell you what you can and cannot know, has recently become smothered under a mountain of VC cash and a stew of Bay-Area politics that is all too willing to look the other way if the outgroup is the one looking to assert their rights.

Thankfully, it seems like the EFF is making good arguments: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjkzz4/the-self-d...

> “The design files at issue here, for example, are not ‘functional’ software that can be ‘run,’ ‘launched,’ or ‘executed,’” the EFF wrote. “They are storage files for text, images, and three-dimensional shapes, having “functional” consequences only after a third party interprets and implements them with software, hardware (such as a 3D printer), and raw materials. Even under the government’s flawed view that ‘functionality’ diminishes First Amendment protection, files here are, if anything, less ‘functional,’ and at least as protected, as the computer instructions for encrypting data.”

I'm reminded of a fictional quote from a video game (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri), but it seems relevant:

>Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. --Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"

> I don't understand why this hasn't been all over the front-page of HN

Probably because the discussion is entirely political, and political discussions on public forums rarely end well.

> This is pretty clearly a freedom of speech issue

Would you also support someone publishing instructions on building your very own nuclear weapon? If not, where do you draw the line between 'free speech' and 'free speech that is very likely to end in tears'?

I'm generally very much against limiting the spread of information, but I believe there are some things that we humans are not mature enough as a species to have freely available. Hell, we're not even mature enough when it's restricted.

This is in line with what I was thinking. The constitution is not a suicide pact, and at some point we're going to say you can't distribute certain knowledge. (How to destroy the world in one easy step).

Give that, there's going to be lots of debate where to draw the line, and that's ok. But arguing that there can't ever be a line is the kind of thing which gets people into untenable positions.

We already have instructions in widespread circulation about how to build your own nuclear weapon--the googling for it is pretty trivial.

We're not up to our ears in homebrew nukes because making them is expensive, and that doesn't change. People have been able to make zipguns for over a century with nothing more than a few bits of pipe and fittings.

It's queer that merely the idea of knowing how to do something should be so distressing to policymakers.

> We already have instructions in widespread circulation about how to build your own nuclear weapon

AFAIK (without enough searching to land on a no-fly/watch list), those instructions are at a very high level and are not enough to produce a working bomb without further extensive research/experimentation. That at least accounts for some of the 'expensive' part, getting appropriate fuel being the other portion.

Not to be pedantic, but 20 years ago the idea of having a microwave sized device on your desk that could make anything you wanted out of plastic seemed so impossible that someone could have (and probably did!) published firearm CAD files online and people would have laughed it off as well.

I wonder if in the future we will think back to this comment and say "man, we were so short sided to not recognize the emerging hobby of home nuclear fission!"

You do bring up an interesting point, but I think there's a key difference between posting instructions that require unavailable/unproven technologies and technology that is widespread. If I posted plans on how to build a warp drive, it probably won't enable you to build a warp drive, even in the theoretical future when the necessary materials/technologies might exist.

There's also a key difference between uncontrolled fission and controlled fission. Both are bad for your health if you are too close, but one of them is immediately bad for your entire neighborhood/district/city.

Arms control seems to me to be the right path for this. I don’t want a future where increasingly deadly weapons are more and more readily accessible. The fact that it’s an otherwise legal firearm precludes a bit of the slippery slope argument (IE what if it were plans for a $200 missile launcher?), but the untraceability of the guns creates a problem that the law enforcement system doesn’t really have the tools to deal with yet, and I think that is what keeps most people who aren’t gun activists worried.

A way I think about it is if I look 100 years into the future, there are energy weapons or auto tracing bullets or autoturrets with aimhax, would those be acceptable for anyone to build? Availability creates danger - someone has a psychotic break and builds up a bunch of guns in their garage and drops 200 people before they’re shot dead.

I wish we could get rid of this Wild West mentality - it is entirely possible to build a world in which guns are unnecessary in most anyone’s day to day life.

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