Comment by 9cb14c1ec0
19 hours ago
This sentence in Bambu Lab's blog post is wild:
> We have documented incidents of service outages caused precisely by spikes in unauthorized traffic - overwhelming the servers, causing service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users.
So it's a problem that their printers are popular, and they can't be bothered to scale their infra, so let's gate everything based on USER AGENT STRING! This is so crazy of an excuse that I don't believe it.
"We forced every user of every printer, worldwide, to interact with their printer through our centralized servers. This caused service disruptions affecting everyone. The cost was instability felt by all users."
There, I fixed it for you Bambu. You may use it under Creative Commons.
Seems like making the slicer only able to talk to the printer via the cloud was a bad way to do things, where any issue results in “instability felt by all users.”
It can talk to the printer directly if you use "LAN mode". This also work with 3rd party slicers like OrcaSlicer.
This is false. After the authorization-related firmware changes last year LAN mode doesn't allow 3rd party slicers to connect.
LAN mode is also abandonware with numerous issues and missing features that they've had no interest in fixing. Orca slicer has had to rely on hacky workarounds in Bambu's buggy networking plugin just to be able to connect to printers in a different subnet. https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/4512
3 replies →
So if my printer isn’t working because their network is down, it’ll swap to lan mode for a seamless experience? No? Huh.
They also seem to not know their nerdy customers, which means, fun times ahead :)
Do the well-behaving clients really need to use those servers? Could you have done something to avoid this bottleneck for all users?
Yeah, this is a farce.
So am I understanding correctly that all of this "unauthorized traffic" was their customers...using their product?
So it would seem.
So technically they just said that their printers would be less popular if Orcaslicer ceased to exist.
I guess if it's a security issue, it's a security issue: https://github.com/bambulab/BambuStudio/issues/10681
A conspiracy-theory steelmanning interpretation of that statement is that Bambu thinks that some unscrupulous Chinese manufacturer is performing DDoS attacks against them, but can't fully and publicly admit to that for legal reasons.
... and sending a cease and desist to OrcaSlicer somehow mitigates that DDoS?
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