Looks like Bambu is getting more enshittified. I am so glad I didn’t let my recent frustration at my clumsiness with my Prusa steer me into Bambu-land.
Looks like Bambu is getting more enshittified. I am so glad I didn’t let my recent frustration at my clumsiness with my Prusa steer me into Bambu-land.
They’re trying hard to couch this as a security thing but I remain unconvinced that the “threats” they’re positing actually exist. Do you even leave your printer connected to the outside internet anyway? I sure as shit don’t.
The only person they’re locking out of your printer with this is you. This is to keep you walled within their own bullshit software ecosystem as much as possible, and the only possible benefit of that is so they can inflict further restrictions later, probably in the hopes of making the software side of their crap a subscription model so they can extort you for that sweet recurring revenue.
Their bambu filament has an RFID tag in it, presumably so you don’t have to tell the printer what kind of filament is loaded. I would bet big $$ that is going to be used to lock out third party filament at some point. Calling it here and now.
The RFID is only used by the AMS. As long as they support direct filament insertion without an AMS, and they have to if they want to support TPU and other exotics, then they can’t lock out 3rd party filament.
Then why implement over the top security and encryption in said RFID tags if it’s only for AMS compatibility? The fact they went to so much trouble is writing on the wall that some time in the future they want to try and implement a printer cartridge-esque walled garden where only approved filaments can be used.
Just for the record I looked at how they encrypt and sign the data and it’s nothing I would call over the top or particularly troublesome.
Signing data that’s used to configure a piece of hardware isn’t unreasonable in my book.
It would certainly be better to have a mechanism for custom tags, and better yet the ability for you to trust a filament producers key, but the mechanism they’ve used for the signing really doesn’t say anything to me of note.
As evil as I think Bambu is, that would be suicide.
Stupider things have been done by other stupid corporations.
I wouldn’t be surprised by Bambu if they aren’t planning it already.
Meh, I don’t think they’re quite foolish enough to go full Juicero, but I won’t be updating my firmware.