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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday October 03 2017, @04:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the gotta-have-guns dept.

The Ghost Gunner has been updated to allow the CNC milling of a much more popular and accessible form of firearm: a handgun:

For the past five years, Cody Wilson has applied every possible advance in digital manufacturing technology to the mission of undermining government attempts at gun control. First he created the world's first 3-D printed gun, a deadly plastic weapon anyone could print at home with a download and a few clicks. Then he started selling a computer-controlled milling machine designed to let anyone automatically carve out the body of an untraceable AR-15 from a semifinished chunk of aluminum, upgrading his provocations from plastic to metal. Now his latest advance in home firearm fabrication allows anyone to make an object designed to defy the most basic essence of gun control: A concealable, untraceable, and entirely unregulated metal handgun.

On Sunday, Wilson's gun rights advocacy group, Defense Distributed, announced a new release of software for his computer-controlled milling machine known as the Ghost Gunner. The new code allows the 1-foot-cubed tabletop machine—which uses a spinning bit to carve three-dimensional shapes with minute precision—to not only produce untraceable bodies of AR-15s but to carve out the aluminum frame of an M1911 handgun, the popular class of semiautomatic pistols that includes the Colt 45 and similar weapons. Wilson says he plans to follow up soon with software for producing regulation-free Glocks and other handgun models to follow.

Wilson's goal now, he says, is to do for small arms what Defense Distributed did for AR-15s when it first released the $1,500 Ghost Gunner milling machine exactly three years ago to the day: Give people the ability to make a lethal weapon at home with no regulation whatsoever.

M1911 pistol.

This story came out before the mass shooting in Las Vegas, on the third anniversary of the initial release of the Ghost Gunner, just in case you were wondering.

Also at Ars Technica:

"It's a certain type of person who builds and enjoys an AR-15—that's a lot of gun, and most people don't feel the need to have a big ol' battle rifle," Wilson says. "But we believe lots of people are interested in the conversation about an untraceable, concealable handgun. It's been on the roadmap the whole time for this project. It's just always been a question of how we get there, and it ended up being very, very difficult—kinda like the brass ring of the project, if you will."

Previously: FedEx Refuses to Ship Defense Distributed's Ghost Gunner CNC Mill
Man Who Used CNC Mill to Manufacture AR-15 "Lowers" Sentenced to 41 Months


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @09:43PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 03 2017, @09:43PM (#576795)

    Alright. I'll play Angel's Advocate and also explain why computer security sucks.

    An image file is software for a virtual machine designed to decode raster data. The "image display" software is actually an operating system which facilitates the image reading virtual machines, manages memory and hardware storage, display device API, input peripherals, etc. The modern computer is a nested hive of (virtual) OSs, Software & Machines for them. Even the opcodes for your CPU are only virtual machine codes decompiled into microcode by another virtual machine before performing the operations. The human body is also a hive of machines within machines all the way down to the molecular level. In fact, it is the nature of the universe that as complexity increases so too does the information processing of any interaction, becoming a machine, then a machines of machines, and ultimately a sentient being at a certain degree of complexity.

    Because an Image File is actually software for a virtual machine, it can even contain a malware. Malware is typically made of code for multiple VMs. One set of VM opcode exploits a defect in the image processing virtual machine, and prepares one or more sets of OP codes to run against one or more other VMs. Ancient mystics considered universal principals as Gods, the Egyptians did not believe their deities had animal heads; They wrote in symbolism (linguistic opcode) and chose those symbols which they identified with the concepts being discussed. Much of the ancient legends are actually philosophy mixed with history and science.

    Because you godless fanatics believe "There is no VM! No Imaginary Sky Creator set out with the purpose to put VMs into our PNG or JPG decoders, or make document & image viewers into Operating Systems! This "Emergent Intelligent Design" by proxy is nonsense!" You do not treat "data" as if it were "software", and thus have little to no security in today's computing world.

    Checkmate, atheists.

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  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 04 2017, @01:33AM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Wednesday October 04 2017, @01:33AM (#576882) Journal

    I... I don't exactly know what you're going for here. Technically true, software is anything not hardware including data such as text, video or images. My gripe is the article makes it sound more complex and difficult to implement than it really is.