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Citing the threat of plastic, 3D-printed firearms, U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., held a press conference this weekend calling for the renewal of the Undetectable Firearms Act. The act was originally conceived in 1988 in response to the Glock 17, a handgun with some components made from plastic composites.

The law has been renewed several times since its inception, most recently in 2003. It's currently due to expire in December 2013.

For gun rights advocates, the Undetectable Firearms Act comes across as legislative hand-wringing. Others find the law to be an example of security theatrics and a … Read more

When I last spoke with Cody Wilson, Defense Distributed had just met its $20,000 funding goal, and he had taken delivery of his Stratasys uPrint SE 3D printer. Fast forward nine days and the outlook for his 3D printed firearm project looks less positive.

As reported here in September, Defense Distributed, a group headed by University of Texas graduate student Wilson, began navigating the uncharted material and regulatory waters around designing a gun to be printed from common plastic on a relatively low-cost 3D printer like the MakerBot Replicator.

Now, Wired's Robert Beckhusen reports that Stratasys has voided … Read more

Welcome to the dark side of 3D printing.

The hobby is best known for creating colorful toys and trinkets, but some enthusiasts are working on design files that would allow anyone to print a working gun. These don't exist yet, but some believe it's only a matter of time.

Why would a 3D-printed gun be appealing? For one, it could potentially be cheap. You can buy a preassembled 3D printer for about $500. A spool of ABS plastic to print with goes for $50. Depending on where you shop, you can buy .38 Special ammunition for 30 cents a round. The plans will undoubted be distributed free like so many MP3s. … Read more

Yahoo is teaming up with radio giant Clear Channel on a distribution and cross-promotional deal, expanding on its strategy of striking content-sharing deals with traditional media brands.

The companies announced a partnership late Wednesday in which Yahoo will use Clear Channel's iHeartRadio platform as its official digital radio service. As part of the multi-year deal, Yahoo will carry nearly a dozen live Clear Channel events annually, as well as live video from this year's iHeartRadio Music Festival in Las Vegas.

iHeartRadio boasts a monthly audience of about 45 million unique listeners and 80 million downloads of its mobile … Read more

Researchers at MIT have developed a robotic system for duplicating shapes, a potential alternative approach to three-dimensional printing.

The Distributed Robotics Lab at MIT today detailed research aimed at replicating objects by essentially carving them from an unformed pile of "smart sand" or "robot pebbles." The vision is to have these miniature robots automatically create replicas of different sizes with only an original shape to work with.

A key difference from other approaches to replicating objects is that, unlike three-dimensional printing techniques, the smart sand builds by subtracting building blocks from a larger heap, according to … Read more

I attended GigaOM's Structure:Data 2012 conference in New York City last week. This is the second one I've attended and I'm now a confirmed advocate of this event. Om Malik brings together people who, in one way or another, represent much the creative thinking around so-called big data. I got the feeling that I could strike up a conversation with anyone there and learn something new.

I noticed at least two major differences between the Structure:Data event I attended last year and this year's version. Last year, most if not all of the exhibiting … Read more

Adobe Systems and Apple may not see eye to eye over the Flash Player plug-in, but they've come to an understanding with the new app store era of software distribution.

Adobe announced today that both its consumer-oriented photo and video software, Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10, are now available on the Mac App Store. The move parallels what Adobe already has done with iOS apps and expands on its earlier sales only of Photoshop Elements 9 on the Mac App Store.

The Mac App Store, a standard feature of recent versions of Mac OS X, lets Apple … Read more

After creating a group of contacts in Address Book, you can send e-mails to its members by simply typing the name of the group in the address field of an e-mail message, and Mail will fill in a list of the e-mail addresses of its members.

When Mail does this, by default the primary e-mail address for the contacts in the group will be used, so if a member has multiple e-mail addresses then the first one listed will be used. However, this default behavior can be changed by using Address Book's distribution list editor (available in the Edit … Read more

A major Sony warehouse responsible for distributing optical discs, such as Blu-rays, DVDs, games, music, and films, has been destroyed by rioters in London.

The warehouse in Enfield, one of the flash points of the London riots, was set alight in the late hours last night, Sony confirmed.

"The fire is under control but can be described as 'smoldering' and consequently no one can enter the facility," a Sony spokeswoman told ZDNet UK today. "Therefore at this time we are unable to confirm the extent of the damage or the cause until the fire is fully extinguished … Read more