3D printer gone rogue

From The Verge 3D printer nightmare fuel: Bambu X1C and P1P started printing while owners were asleep:

When owners of Bambu’s extremely well-regarded 3D printers woke up on August 15th, some found their printer had gone rogue.

[…]

These printers started printing unattended, overnight, without any additional user input, according to a flood of user reports

This looks like a scenario of machines taking over while it was just a glitch in the software running on the remove servers (the cloud) that the printer connects to to do its work.

My only question is “Why would you connect it to a remote server on the internet?”

It’s probably convenience because it’s easier short term to have a server accessible on the internet to act as an intermediate between the device and the applications that connect to it. At least from the perspective of cutting development cost. And it likely the default mode.

But this system design is really full of drawbacks. The above example being one of them, imagine if this was a deliberate attack. We have seen the security and privacy nightmare with video surveillance camera, that by default (if not the only way) upload the videos to the vendor servers, and where there have been several cases of them being available to anyone because of botched software development. There is also the case of devices whose vendor decide it’s too costly to operate the server after selling the for cheap and forces you to discard the hardware that became a brick as a consequence.

I call this “Internet of Turds”. And there are plenty of other horror stories.

It seem that Bambu, this 3D printer vendor, is willing to own the issue, but it will take some time. And there is a local working mode for the machine that should avoid this kind of problems.