Late last month Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, the 31-year-old creative technologist for Goldsmith College’s Interaction Research Studio at the University of London, released what he’s calling ‘Disarming Corruptor,’ a piece of free software designed to distort 3D-printable blueprints such that only another user with the app and the knowledge of a certain key combination can reverse the distortion and print the object. That means any controversial file–say, a figurine based on Mickey Mouse or another copyrighted or patented shape, or the 3D-printable gun created earlier this year known as the Liberator–could be ‘encrypted’ and made available on a public repository for 3D-printing blueprints like the popular site Thingiverse without tipping off those who would try to remove the file.

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