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Deadly Downloads: The moral frontier of 3D micro-manufacturing

September 22, 2012 by Admin Leave a Comment

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In their article, “Sci-Fi That Foretold The Future,”  Google’s Think Quarterly gives a list of science fiction films that have become, to some degree, a reality. More surprising than the reality of science fiction in our lives today is that the age old problems of reality have not changed at all.  As the micro-manufacturing industrial revolution unfolds, the ethical problems of being human remain the same.

Kickstarter recently decided to suspend its campaign to crowd-fund an open source 3D printable gun.  Cody Wilson had a extraordinary idea for a project that merges art, computer aided design (CAD), open-source 3-D printer code and the RepRap self replicating 3-D printer, with the entirely practical desire to kill people we fear.  He calls his project Defense Distributed, and here is his rather creepy video describing it:

Personally, I hope Indiegogo or some other crowdfunding platform lets him crowdfund it with them.  Or maybe he can create his own crowdfunding platform for a niche in lethal arts funding. After all, Offbeater is a crowdfunding platform for pornographers.  So why not deadly weapons crowdfunding? Art doesn’t kill people or give them venereal diseases or treat women and children and masochists like disposable sex toys: people do that.

This creates all sorts of delightful questions.  New age Zeno’s paradoxes:  In particular, is the open source movement becoming a bit too dangerous now that desktop manufacturing is moving forward so swiftly?  With the real-life option of  purchasing the materials to build your initial RepRap 3-D printer for less than $ 1000, and then using that initial RepRap printer and the open source design software of the RepRap Project to spawn unlimited copies of that same 3D printer, are there moral hazards we should consider?  “The RepRap Project started the open-source 3D printer revolution.” Well, why not download the open source CAD file to print a lethal weapon?  It seems impossibly stupid to outlaw publishing one’s own intellectual property and making it open source, even if that intellectual property is lethal.  Jail for the smart creative kid with a penchant for dangerous toys?  Will we have to outlaw some sorts of intellectual activity?  Outlaw THINKING? Ah! When thinking is outlawed only outlaws will think!

Imagine the difficulty of creating statutes to punish people who dream up interesting, dangerous CAD designs and publish them for free online.  As an ethics guy, I’ll be honest, this is paydirt.  Not because I know the answers, but because so far no one knows the answers.

Let’s start with an overview of 3-D printing and then look at some of the everyday applications that already exist:

Now for two examples of real things anyone can print: a bicycle and a real remote control plane or spy drone

or, of course, a machine gun if you like:

Now here is a cheap 3D printer anyone who isn’t all that DIY can buy for their own desktop weapons or doll furniture manufacturing enterprise

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Oh you want metal parts?  OK

Maybe use the CAD drawing of an automotive engineer and build an engine–soon this will be printable too … at home.  Call Ford; order the CAD files for the DuraTec and print a new engine in your garage?

This has always been the real appeal of science fiction, not so much the new technology, but that the same old ethical dilemmas remain in these new fangled realities.   So, with the possibility of downloading the CAD file to print a lethal weapon now a reality, should we censor that information?  It’s one thing to download an mp3 file but quite another to download machine gun parts or even an operational pistol with real lethality.  Understanding the trigger mechanism of an atomic bomb is vastly different from designing it digitally and uploading it as freeware. Downloading that digitised design in operational metal is an entirely new–and controversial–thing altogether.

In the past, the hurdle to creating deadly objects was generally the problem of manufacturing the parts. Now the only hurdle is knowledge itself and in Wiki world we all share.  We glorify sharing.  Wiki Wiki.   Anyone who can  think it can now build it and share it.  No denying that the power of the intersection of crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and custom manufacturing is dangerous.  But I am still pretty darned old fashioned myself and the censorship of thinking still seems vastly more dangerous than any basement bomb you can print up,  nuclear or otherwise.

We have ended the age of grand ideologies and come to an age of  focused ethics.  Yes, free speech is good, but not free neutron-bomb-making speech.  Open source CAD makes sense, but desktop bomb making doesn’t.  The problem is keeping the speech free but putting limits on the downloading. Oh wait! We already have that problem don’t we?

Related posts:

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  • The Dawning of the Age of Etsy
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  • CrowdFunding Part 1: Due Diligence? Fugetaboutit!
  • CrowdSourcing: Use it.
  • Google Apps vs. Office 365: How Will You Choose One over Another?
  • Geek Ethicist
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Filed Under: Web Hosting Tagged With: Deadly, Downloads, Frontier, micromanufacturing, moral

Private Cloud Hosting: The New Frontier

February 19, 2011 by Admin Leave a Comment

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Private cloud hosting represents a revolutionary new frontier in the information technology and – more specifically – the web hosting world.  Finally, the promise of computing power as a utility is upon us and it brings with it a new set of opportunities and challenges.  Many organizations are options to deploy their solutions into public cloud hosting environments, where there applications and data share physical hardware, storage, and network environments with hundreds or thousands of other companies.  While this certainly meets the needs of many businesses, many others are unwilling to take such a public plunge either because of security restrictions, performance concerns, or worries about loss of control of their infrastructure.   Because of this, a new hosting model has risen known as Private Cloud Hosting.  In the private cloud hosting model, your web site or corporate hosting infrastructure runs in a dedicated and/or virtualized environment and can be scaled up or down as your needs change. 

The first advantage most often cited for private cloud hosting environments is that of security, which means both the actual physical security of the environment as well as the perceived security of the environment in that it is private unto itself.  Sites that strive to reach PCI compliance for their electronic commerce applications have found that private cloud hosting environments can be secured in a way that can allow them to successfully achieve this goal.  Physically dedicated hardware provides the assurance that no data can be mistakenly transferred or shared between businesses, which is obviously almost a pre-requisite for any electronic commerce environment.  

Many private cloud hosting solutions rely heavily on virtualization technologies, such as the Xen Cloud Platform (http://www.xen.org/products/cloudxen.html).  The Xen Cloud Platform is a popular Linux-based selection among many leading hosting companies who are now offering private cloud hosting packages based on the underlying virtualization of the environment.  A cloud based on something like Xen’s solution offers the best of both worlds.  Customers are able to both control their own utilization of system resources as their needs change without the time and expenses inherent in provisioning new server and network infrastructure.  At the same time, the underlying virtualization technology allows you to fully utilize the hardware across a variety of applications and usage scenarios.  If designed properly, this sort of solution allows businesses to optimize both their time and money investment, while perhaps simplifying the actual deployment architecture.  For example, in an optimized private cloud hosting environment, you are more focused on the actual solutions you deploy (Databases 1 and 2, Email VM 1, Web Site 1 and 2, etc.) and the dedicated capacity assigned to each which frees customers from worrying about the nine servers and their various storage needs potentially needing to scale soon to a total of 14 servers. 

One additional advantage is related to the topic of resource flexibility but can be presented in a different light.  A cloud hosting environment is uniquely positions to help your business manage drastic swings in workload, whether that be due to a new organization coming on board, a roll-out from a test phase to production, or simply an onslaught of new customers due to some improved functionality or marketing.  In the traditional dedicated hosting world, these sorts of scenarios can bring a business to a complete halt if not planned for properly (and that planning itself takes a great deal of time and money in many cases).  Private cloud hosting offers the ability to reduce overall cost of a solution, the flexibility to scale to meet changing business needs, and the capacity to fully utilize your hardware and network resources.

Source: Private Cloud Hosting: The New Frontier

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Filed Under: Web Hosting News Tagged With: Cloud, Frontier, Hosting, Private

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