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Faking a Positive Covid Test

sonicggg 5y ago
Came here thinking they were able to fake a legit covid test. Instead they waste their time in one of these crappy rapid tests. Where I live no government body accepts results from these anyway, I'm not sure what's the point of faking a test that is already considered to be unreliable anyway.
simonjgreen 5y ago
Last I checked almost all lateral flow tests could be faked with a drop of orange juice or coca cola. Was quite common here in schools with kids using them to get sent home and generally troll.
calebegg 5y ago
I can't find a citation now, but my understanding of why these test use bluetooth is that the FDA + CDC want to know how many people are testing positive. So the app has to report results to them.
mikojan 5y ago
You mean to tell me they reverse engineered the bluetooth communication of some obscure device when they could've just used a ballpoint pen to draw another line on that piece of paper?
- GameOfFrowns 5y ago
  I think that attacking the electronic component leaves behind less evidence of tampering with the device.
waveywaves 5y ago
In India it's become quite common to fake an RTPCR test by changing the dates on an existing one. All you have to show here is a pdf copy of your test as you get off your flight and no one checks the feasibility of the test via the given qr code, they just check the date and that's it.
umvi 5y ago
If covid really is the greatest threat to our society like the media leads us to believe, covid testing and vaccine passports can't be on the honor system or easily faked. We need a new government agency like the "Public Health Compliance Administration" (similar to the DEA or TSA) to enforce the compliance. Non-compliance would result in huge fines or felonies. PHCA officers would have the authority to raid houses suspected of hosting super-spreader events (birthday parties, thanksgiving dinners, etc.) and or stop and test random people in restaurants, arresting those who are unvaccinated with a fake passport. Sounds crazy, but we are on the path to increasingly authoritarian covid compliance. Other countries are even further along that path. I personally think covid is no longer an emergency with the advent of vaccines. I say leave it up to the individual whether to get vaccinated or not, and implement bed rationing for the unvaccinated if ICUs are over capacity. Otherwise there is no endgame, we will wring our hands and live in fear until the end of time.
- Shorel 5y ago
  I personally think covid is no longer an emergency with the advent of the pill. In a few months, I expect it will be over.
  - umvi 5y ago
    I would love for it to be "over" in a few months, but until the media stops fear mongering every variant and case rates and such it won't be over.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    Do you mean horse dewormer pills? They should make them really huge and taste terrible and turn your pee blue, just to fuck with people stupid enough to take them for Covid. umvi: It would already be long over with vastly fewer deaths, if only certain politicians and their followers hadn't downplayed it and lied about it from the beginning, and made not wearing masks and not social distancing and not getting vaccinated and instead popping horse pills hot-button political issues, all the while accusing the scientists and media of fear mongering, when the media was actually just reporting the scientific facts that trained experts were telling them, but that those certain politicians were systematically ignoring and lying about. Fear mongering about the dangers of Covid may annoy and inconvenience you, but the most deadly, consequential, and intentionally deceptive fear mongering is from the lies and propaganda those politicians and their media outlets are spreading against vaccines and masks and social distancing. qwertywert_: And how much do you want to bet that the exact same people presently popping horse dewormer pills while refusing for political reasons to social distance, wear masks, or get vaccinated are going to also refuse to take the Pfizer pill because they decided to make it a political issue too? If they don't trust science and Pfizer and their vaccines, then why would they ever trust Pfizer's pills? (Which begs the question: why the hell do they trust horse dewormer pills if they don't trust vaccines? Answer: because they were told to.) Those people would eat lead coated asbestos pills if their cult leader told them to. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-asbestos-707642/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-as... https://www.asbestos.com/news/2018/07/11/russia-asbestos-trump/ https://www.asbestos.com/news/2018/07/11/russia-asbestos-tru... It's never going to be over until after those people have finished selecting themselves out of the gene pool, and that's going be a long painful time, while they're dragging many innocent people down with them.
h2odragon 5y ago
Also this device has a recall for false positives: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/ellume-recalls-covid-19-home-test-potential-false-positive-sars-cov-2-test-results https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/e... The "Bluetooth" hardware looks similar to this: https://hackaday.com/2020/09/09/digital-pregnancy-tests-use-leds-to-read-between-the-lines/ https://hackaday.com/2020/09/09/digital-pregnancy-tests-use-... Because $25 of electronics to read a $1 paper strip makes perfect sense in today's world I guess. As does not making the strip a replaceable consumable part.
- robbiep 5y ago
  There are a lot of products out there that, just because they are possible, does not mean they should be built. Can you imagine the rooms where people come up with stuff like this? A world of PowerPoint slides and consulting Mumbo-jumbo
- adolph 5y ago
  make_it_decision = (BOM < consumer_value); See also: https://www.engadget.com/2006-07-24-pure-digitals-new-disposable-digicams-unlocked.html https://www.engadget.com/2006-07-24-pure-digitals-new-dispos...
- derbOac 5y ago
  Tangentially, if someone is looking for a business idea, reusable pregnancy tests are an untapped market last time I knew anything about it.
- Rebelgecko 5y ago
  That's how digital pregnancy tests work- just a simple sensor that detects the line on the strip
- smnrchrds 5y ago
  > Because $25 of electronics to read a $1 paper strip makes perfect sense in today's world I guess This makes sense, because you can calibrate the sensor in the factory and not worry about "is that a faint line I am seeing? Do faint lines count?" situation anymore. Converting continuous data to a simple yes/no output has value. > As does not making the strip a replaceable consumable part. This may or may not make sense based on the requirements for maintaining calibration. I am not sure about this.
dpcan 5y ago
The one I have, you can use a red marker and lightly draw 2 lines in the space where they would appear if you have covid.
- jonny_eh 5y ago
  Exactly, these devices are meant for personal use. Why would you want to fiddle with the results?
  - vladak 5y ago
    Here, such devices are used for testing kids at basic school. I heard a story from one of our managers that some kid in his kids' class wanted to fake his test to read positive (to evade school duties) so he used a pen marker however this attempt was discovered :-)
  - nness 5y ago
    I was wondering that... Potentially where the implications of quarantine are not as bad, as say, going to work? Or maybe to inconvenience someone? Maybe insurance fraud? If you were somehow covered or wanted a refund on some travel. But again, I can't imagine a policy which explicitly covers COVID being beneficial for the underwriter.
  - comprev 5y ago
    To satisfy family members over Christmas. "I'm sorry I can't join the family meal, I have tested positive"
    - jonny_eh 5y ago
      You don't need a test to lie.
      - adolph 5y ago
        You don't have to send a doctor's note to your granny to skip holiday luncheon? That's just anarchical.
KMnO4 5y ago
My rapid antigen tests come with positive and negative control samples. I think that would be easiest: just “swab” with the positive control and it will always show as positive.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
So this does show my ignorance - but if I wanted to fake a Lateral Flow test, what chemicals would I need to fool one of the "normal" swab based tests that do not use bluetooth? OK - so I know it detects "IgG neutralising antibodies that target the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein" - but surely there is a hack ... Not that I want to hack it, (I mean why?) but just interested ...
- lukeo05 5y ago
  This article was on the BBC earlier this year, when the "pingdemic" was happening in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210705-how-children-are-spoofing-covid-19-tests-with-soft-drinks https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210705-how-children-are... Kids realised they could get time off school if they faked a positive LFT so were using soft drinks to create false positive. How true – or widespread – it is, I have no idea.
  - jerf 5y ago
    Remember your Karnaugh maps in school? Those logic diagrams where you use boolean operators to cover as large a space as possible on the map, which results in as simple as possible a boolean expression? And how much you appreciated the "don't cares" because it made it so easy? For similar reasons, a cheap binary test for X is inevitably going to be easy to convince to give positive or negative results [1] for a wide variety of substances not considered by the test creator, because you just can't make a cheap test that tests COVID-19 and exactly and only COVID-19. Basically, every presented substance other than a correctly-done test is a "don't care". The resulting test takes advantage of this, and it will map quite a lot of things to either true or false outside of the domain of interest. I don't know if such a test would even be possible to create strictly 100% accurate, but certainly for a lot more expense we could get much closer than we do today. But we wouldn't be shipping some swabs and some strips, we'd be shipping tests where mass spectrometers would be a key component, along with a very large instruction book. But for situations where the test is being taken in good faith, who needs that? And the expense it would take to stop kids faking the test itself is too silly to contemplate. Instead, while the news articles didn't mention it, I'm sure where this cheating was endemic they took the simple step of making the child do it in front of them. That only raises the bar, but it'd be enough for the vast majority of the cases. The math makes this inevitable, by the fact that the set of inputs that could be presented to a test is effectively infinite. It can't hardly be false that of the thousands of substances you have ready access to, quite a few of them will produce false positives. This is also not specific to "COVID-19", it's true of any of the simple paper strip tests. In practice, though, this is just a curiosity, not a problem. [1]: e.g., while I don't know if this would work, if you want to fake a false test, add in some bleach to your sample. I haven't tried it and won't but I wouldn't be surprised something caustic like that would simply destroy both COVID-19 and the test itself, in relatively small quantities. If not bleach, something else.
rob_c 5y ago
There's one night every minute. Why did all of the "save the planet" and "stop polluting" crowd turn a blind eye to bad excuses for products like this? I'm certain the amount of single use things have shot up in the last 2 years under the covid banner and the fact it's getting not just a free pass but celebrated by some is nauseating.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Everything has a cost/benefit analysis. The waste from COVID testing is a rounding error on the damage we're doing to the environment, and it's got a lot more societal benefit than, say, the plastic wrapper on a banana (https://twitter.com/flybyday63/status/1006650858505949190 https://twitter.com/flybyday63/status/1006650858505949190).
  - Fnoord 5y ago
    There's a need to have plastic around a banana: it spreads less good that smell it does to ripe other bananas around it, which 'modern' bananas do (they're send while green and ripe in grocery store). Whether that is a valid reason and how valid is a different debate.
  - carlmr 5y ago
    >The waste from COVID testing is a rounding error on the damage we're doing to the environment Citation needed. In most countries except Japan or the US I haven't seen single wrapped bananas. Even the normal covid tests produce so much plastic trash. This adds electronics which are even worse waste. All to determine with terribly low accuracy that someone has covid.
    - jacobolus 5y ago
      You won’t believe how much plastic trash is produced by hospitals treating Covid patients. https://www.pnas.org/content/118/47/e2111530118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/47/e2111530118
      - 5y ago
MrDunham 5y ago
So… Fun story about how I submitted semi false COVID paperwork in order to gain entry into Italy. In September my wife and I went on a delayed vacation to Italy. At the time they required Covid tests to be completed no more than three days before arrival (we were flying all day Tuesday). {Sidebar… In Italy it took us 15 minutes to get Covid tests with no scheduling. Walked right in and on our way. No wonder they thought a couple days was enough time.} We scheduled Covid tests for Sunday and could only do PCR since no one was offering rapid tests within Ohio - or at least, nearby. As we pull up to the window, we are told that, since it is Sunday and the next day is memorial day the lab will get our samples on Tuesday and we’ll have our results on Wednesday (remember, we arrive on Tuesday). So we declined testing and happened to find the last two Binax Now non-proctored self-tests in the area. We take the tests and both test negative. We submit a negative result to the Binax website (no one has checked anything. - I think it was a literal “not positive” checkbox), get confirmation emails, and upload them to the United website. They take hers but declined mine for being taken too far outside of the three day window… even though we took them and uploaded same day. I tried two more times, declined two more times. So I think… My birthday was a few days before we took the test, I wonder if the automated systems or screeners are picking up on my birthday and rejecting it. *So I take the email into Mac’s preview app, drag a white box over my date of birth, save, upload.* Success. No one stops us at United, no one stops us at customs, no one questions us at all. After we arrived in Rome I realized I could have literally found a copy of the email on the Internet, put my name and test time in, and uploaded. And that’s how we got to go on vacation to Italy.
- 0xdeadb00f 5y ago
  This is literally what people are doing in my area to fake COVID vaccine verification PDFs.
- andrew_ 5y ago
  I recently gained entry to an NBA game out of state (away from home and without access to any valid paperwork) by using devtools to edit the results page of a test I had last year, to make it valid for that day, and then printing the page. The clinic in question is all over the state and partnered with a major regional hospital, and they use a very basic means to print the page; just some media css. For every burden of proof, enterprising people are going to find a way around it. There's now a vast market of spoofed, lookalike QR code destinations on the web that your average Joe isn't going to be able to spot the difference for in a quick glance. WRT gaining entry to the NBA game, the person inspecting paperwork didn't spend more than a half second looking at what I presented. I could have simple printed "negative" on a piece of paper with a bunch of Lorem Ipsum. It was complete theater.
ynezz 5y ago
> Implement additional obfuscation and OS checks in the Android app Hold my beer.
988747 5y ago
Why fake it? Just infect yourself with Omicron (which will probably happen to you anyway). It is mild, so no risk, plus it boosts your immunity better than the vaccine.
- throw8932894 5y ago
  In a few weeks it will be everywhere. It has crazy infection rate, look at super spreader event in Norway. I would just recommend to do periodic self tests not to "miss it". Reinfection may be hard.
- yosito 5y ago
  This only works if you are an expert at playing Russian Roulette.
- mbg721 5y ago
  I have no idea how you'd go about doing that intentionally. It's not like there are scary vials labeled "Omicron" sitting on some shelf. In practice, it would look like the Midwest has looked for a year anyway.
naturalauction 5y ago
Kids in the UK were in the news for doing this to get out of school a few months back [1]. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/02/uk-pupils-orange-juice-fake-positive-covid-test-results https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/02/uk-pupils-oran...
exdsq 5y ago
This is all cool and stuff, but kids in the UK found a way after the first lockdown by dipping the lateral flow test into coke
gwbas1c 5y ago
Stupid question: Why would someone want to fake a positive Covid test? (I mean, I understand why someone would want to fake a negative test, and I can understand why someone would want to hack this device.)
- Fnoord 5y ago
  Because they can, or to test security. Also, to get a certificate that they're cured from COVID-19, to avoid social gatherings such as avoiding showing up at work/family or to force work from home.
- vikingerik 5y ago
  Kids getting themselves out of school seems to be the primary use case. Possibly also adults getting themselves out of work, particularly if your employer offers lots of paid sick time for Covid.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- throw8932894 5y ago
  Some people even want to CATCH covid to get recovery cert. For many people covid infection is quite mild with no symptoms.
- danielfoster 5y ago
  Presumably you could fake a negative test just as easily as a positive test using the same method as the researchers. The researchers obviously were not covid-positive and thus had no choice but to fake a positive test for their research.
- throaway46546 5y ago
  I think it is just a proof of concept. If you don't have covid you would have to infect yourself to fake a negative test. Faking a positive test proves that it is possible to fake a negative.

Came here thinking they were able to fake a legit covid test. Instead they waste their time in one of these crappy rapid tests. Where I live no government body accepts results from these anyway, I'm not sure what's the point of faking a test that is already considered to be unreliable anyway.

simonjgreen 5y ago

Last I checked almost all lateral flow tests could be faked with a drop of orange juice or coca cola. Was quite common here in schools with kids using them to get sent home and generally troll.

calebegg 5y ago

I can't find a citation now, but my understanding of why these test use bluetooth is that the FDA + CDC want to know how many people are testing positive. So the app has to report results to them.

mikojan 5y ago

You mean to tell me they reverse engineered the bluetooth communication of some obscure device when they could've just used a ballpoint pen to draw another line on that piece of paper?

GameOfFrowns 5y ago
I think that attacking the electronic component leaves behind less evidence of tampering with the device.

waveywaves 5y ago

In India it's become quite common to fake an RTPCR test by changing the dates on an existing one. All you have to show here is a pdf copy of your test as you get off your flight and no one checks the feasibility of the test via the given qr code, they just check the date and that's it.

umvi 5y ago

If covid really is the greatest threat to our society like the media leads us to believe, covid testing and vaccine passports can't be on the honor system or easily faked. We need a new government agency like the "Public Health Compliance Administration" (similar to the DEA or TSA) to enforce the compliance. Non-compliance would result in huge fines or felonies. PHCA officers would have the authority to raid houses suspected of hosting super-spreader events (birthday parties, thanksgiving dinners, etc.) and or stop and test random people in restaurants, arresting those who are unvaccinated with a fake passport. Sounds crazy, but we are on the path to increasingly authoritarian covid compliance. Other countries are even further along that path. I personally think covid is no longer an emergency with the advent of vaccines. I say leave it up to the individual whether to get vaccinated or not, and implement bed rationing for the unvaccinated if ICUs are over capacity. Otherwise there is no endgame, we will wring our hands and live in fear until the end of time.

Shorel 5y ago
I personally think covid is no longer an emergency with the advent of the pill. In a few months, I expect it will be over.
- umvi 5y ago
  I would love for it to be "over" in a few months, but until the media stops fear mongering every variant and case rates and such it won't be over.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Do you mean horse dewormer pills? They should make them really huge and taste terrible and turn your pee blue, just to fuck with people stupid enough to take them for Covid. umvi: It would already be long over with vastly fewer deaths, if only certain politicians and their followers hadn't downplayed it and lied about it from the beginning, and made not wearing masks and not social distancing and not getting vaccinated and instead popping horse pills hot-button political issues, all the while accusing the scientists and media of fear mongering, when the media was actually just reporting the scientific facts that trained experts were telling them, but that those certain politicians were systematically ignoring and lying about. Fear mongering about the dangers of Covid may annoy and inconvenience you, but the most deadly, consequential, and intentionally deceptive fear mongering is from the lies and propaganda those politicians and their media outlets are spreading against vaccines and masks and social distancing. qwertywert_: And how much do you want to bet that the exact same people presently popping horse dewormer pills while refusing for political reasons to social distance, wear masks, or get vaccinated are going to also refuse to take the Pfizer pill because they decided to make it a political issue too? If they don't trust science and Pfizer and their vaccines, then why would they ever trust Pfizer's pills? (Which begs the question: why the hell do they trust horse dewormer pills if they don't trust vaccines? Answer: because they were told to.) Those people would eat lead coated asbestos pills if their cult leader told them to. https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-asbestos-707642/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-as... https://www.asbestos.com/news/2018/07/11/russia-asbestos-trump/ https://www.asbestos.com/news/2018/07/11/russia-asbestos-tru... It's never going to be over until after those people have finished selecting themselves out of the gene pool, and that's going be a long painful time, while they're dragging many innocent people down with them.

h2odragon 5y ago

Also this device has a recall for false positives: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/ellume-recalls-covid-19-home-test-potential-false-positive-sars-cov-2-test-results https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/medical-device-recalls/e... The "Bluetooth" hardware looks similar to this: https://hackaday.com/2020/09/09/digital-pregnancy-tests-use-leds-to-read-between-the-lines/ https://hackaday.com/2020/09/09/digital-pregnancy-tests-use-... Because $25 of electronics to read a $1 paper strip makes perfect sense in today's world I guess. As does not making the strip a replaceable consumable part.

robbiep 5y ago
There are a lot of products out there that, just because they are possible, does not mean they should be built. Can you imagine the rooms where people come up with stuff like this? A world of PowerPoint slides and consulting Mumbo-jumbo
adolph 5y ago
make_it_decision = (BOM < consumer_value); See also: https://www.engadget.com/2006-07-24-pure-digitals-new-disposable-digicams-unlocked.html https://www.engadget.com/2006-07-24-pure-digitals-new-dispos...
derbOac 5y ago
Tangentially, if someone is looking for a business idea, reusable pregnancy tests are an untapped market last time I knew anything about it.
Rebelgecko 5y ago
That's how digital pregnancy tests work- just a simple sensor that detects the line on the strip
smnrchrds 5y ago
> Because $25 of electronics to read a $1 paper strip makes perfect sense in today's world I guess This makes sense, because you can calibrate the sensor in the factory and not worry about "is that a faint line I am seeing? Do faint lines count?" situation anymore. Converting continuous data to a simple yes/no output has value. > As does not making the strip a replaceable consumable part. This may or may not make sense based on the requirements for maintaining calibration. I am not sure about this.

dpcan 5y ago

The one I have, you can use a red marker and lightly draw 2 lines in the space where they would appear if you have covid.

jonny_eh 5y ago
Exactly, these devices are meant for personal use. Why would you want to fiddle with the results?
- vladak 5y ago
  Here, such devices are used for testing kids at basic school. I heard a story from one of our managers that some kid in his kids' class wanted to fake his test to read positive (to evade school duties) so he used a pen marker however this attempt was discovered :-)
- nness 5y ago
  I was wondering that... Potentially where the implications of quarantine are not as bad, as say, going to work? Or maybe to inconvenience someone? Maybe insurance fraud? If you were somehow covered or wanted a refund on some travel. But again, I can't imagine a policy which explicitly covers COVID being beneficial for the underwriter.
- comprev 5y ago
  To satisfy family members over Christmas. "I'm sorry I can't join the family meal, I have tested positive"
  - jonny_eh 5y ago
    You don't need a test to lie.
    - adolph 5y ago
      You don't have to send a doctor's note to your granny to skip holiday luncheon? That's just anarchical.

KMnO4 5y ago

My rapid antigen tests come with positive and negative control samples. I think that would be easiest: just “swab” with the positive control and it will always show as positive.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

So this does show my ignorance - but if I wanted to fake a Lateral Flow test, what chemicals would I need to fool one of the "normal" swab based tests that do not use bluetooth? OK - so I know it detects "IgG neutralising antibodies that target the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein" - but surely there is a hack ... Not that I want to hack it, (I mean why?) but just interested ...

lukeo05 5y ago
This article was on the BBC earlier this year, when the "pingdemic" was happening in the UK: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210705-how-children-are-spoofing-covid-19-tests-with-soft-drinks https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210705-how-children-are... Kids realised they could get time off school if they faked a positive LFT so were using soft drinks to create false positive. How true – or widespread – it is, I have no idea.
- jerf 5y ago
  Remember your Karnaugh maps in school? Those logic diagrams where you use boolean operators to cover as large a space as possible on the map, which results in as simple as possible a boolean expression? And how much you appreciated the "don't cares" because it made it so easy? For similar reasons, a cheap binary test for X is inevitably going to be easy to convince to give positive or negative results [1] for a wide variety of substances not considered by the test creator, because you just can't make a cheap test that tests COVID-19 and exactly and only COVID-19. Basically, every presented substance other than a correctly-done test is a "don't care". The resulting test takes advantage of this, and it will map quite a lot of things to either true or false outside of the domain of interest. I don't know if such a test would even be possible to create strictly 100% accurate, but certainly for a lot more expense we could get much closer than we do today. But we wouldn't be shipping some swabs and some strips, we'd be shipping tests where mass spectrometers would be a key component, along with a very large instruction book. But for situations where the test is being taken in good faith, who needs that? And the expense it would take to stop kids faking the test itself is too silly to contemplate. Instead, while the news articles didn't mention it, I'm sure where this cheating was endemic they took the simple step of making the child do it in front of them. That only raises the bar, but it'd be enough for the vast majority of the cases. The math makes this inevitable, by the fact that the set of inputs that could be presented to a test is effectively infinite. It can't hardly be false that of the thousands of substances you have ready access to, quite a few of them will produce false positives. This is also not specific to "COVID-19", it's true of any of the simple paper strip tests. In practice, though, this is just a curiosity, not a problem. [1]: e.g., while I don't know if this would work, if you want to fake a false test, add in some bleach to your sample. I haven't tried it and won't but I wouldn't be surprised something caustic like that would simply destroy both COVID-19 and the test itself, in relatively small quantities. If not bleach, something else.

rob_c 5y ago

There's one night every minute. Why did all of the "save the planet" and "stop polluting" crowd turn a blind eye to bad excuses for products like this? I'm certain the amount of single use things have shot up in the last 2 years under the covid banner and the fact it's getting not just a free pass but celebrated by some is nauseating.

ceejayoz 5y ago
Everything has a cost/benefit analysis. The waste from COVID testing is a rounding error on the damage we're doing to the environment, and it's got a lot more societal benefit than, say, the plastic wrapper on a banana (https://twitter.com/flybyday63/status/1006650858505949190 https://twitter.com/flybyday63/status/1006650858505949190).
- Fnoord 5y ago
  There's a need to have plastic around a banana: it spreads less good that smell it does to ripe other bananas around it, which 'modern' bananas do (they're send while green and ripe in grocery store). Whether that is a valid reason and how valid is a different debate.
- carlmr 5y ago
  >The waste from COVID testing is a rounding error on the damage we're doing to the environment Citation needed. In most countries except Japan or the US I haven't seen single wrapped bananas. Even the normal covid tests produce so much plastic trash. This adds electronics which are even worse waste. All to determine with terribly low accuracy that someone has covid.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    You won’t believe how much plastic trash is produced by hospitals treating Covid patients. https://www.pnas.org/content/118/47/e2111530118 https://www.pnas.org/content/118/47/e2111530118
    - 5y ago

MrDunham 5y ago

So… Fun story about how I submitted semi false COVID paperwork in order to gain entry into Italy. In September my wife and I went on a delayed vacation to Italy. At the time they required Covid tests to be completed no more than three days before arrival (we were flying all day Tuesday). {Sidebar… In Italy it took us 15 minutes to get Covid tests with no scheduling. Walked right in and on our way. No wonder they thought a couple days was enough time.} We scheduled Covid tests for Sunday and could only do PCR since no one was offering rapid tests within Ohio - or at least, nearby. As we pull up to the window, we are told that, since it is Sunday and the next day is memorial day the lab will get our samples on Tuesday and we’ll have our results on Wednesday (remember, we arrive on Tuesday). So we declined testing and happened to find the last two Binax Now non-proctored self-tests in the area. We take the tests and both test negative. We submit a negative result to the Binax website (no one has checked anything. - I think it was a literal “not positive” checkbox), get confirmation emails, and upload them to the United website. They take hers but declined mine for being taken too far outside of the three day window… even though we took them and uploaded same day. I tried two more times, declined two more times. So I think… My birthday was a few days before we took the test, I wonder if the automated systems or screeners are picking up on my birthday and rejecting it. *So I take the email into Mac’s preview app, drag a white box over my date of birth, save, upload.* Success. No one stops us at United, no one stops us at customs, no one questions us at all. After we arrived in Rome I realized I could have literally found a copy of the email on the Internet, put my name and test time in, and uploaded. And that’s how we got to go on vacation to Italy.

0xdeadb00f 5y ago
This is literally what people are doing in my area to fake COVID vaccine verification PDFs.
andrew_ 5y ago
I recently gained entry to an NBA game out of state (away from home and without access to any valid paperwork) by using devtools to edit the results page of a test I had last year, to make it valid for that day, and then printing the page. The clinic in question is all over the state and partnered with a major regional hospital, and they use a very basic means to print the page; just some media css. For every burden of proof, enterprising people are going to find a way around it. There's now a vast market of spoofed, lookalike QR code destinations on the web that your average Joe isn't going to be able to spot the difference for in a quick glance. WRT gaining entry to the NBA game, the person inspecting paperwork didn't spend more than a half second looking at what I presented. I could have simple printed "negative" on a piece of paper with a bunch of Lorem Ipsum. It was complete theater.

ynezz 5y ago

> Implement additional obfuscation and OS checks in the Android app Hold my beer.

988747 5y ago

Why fake it? Just infect yourself with Omicron (which will probably happen to you anyway). It is mild, so no risk, plus it boosts your immunity better than the vaccine.

throw8932894 5y ago
In a few weeks it will be everywhere. It has crazy infection rate, look at super spreader event in Norway. I would just recommend to do periodic self tests not to "miss it". Reinfection may be hard.
yosito 5y ago
This only works if you are an expert at playing Russian Roulette.
mbg721 5y ago
I have no idea how you'd go about doing that intentionally. It's not like there are scary vials labeled "Omicron" sitting on some shelf. In practice, it would look like the Midwest has looked for a year anyway.

naturalauction 5y ago

Kids in the UK were in the news for doing this to get out of school a few months back [1]. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/02/uk-pupils-orange-juice-fake-positive-covid-test-results https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/02/uk-pupils-oran...

exdsq 5y ago

This is all cool and stuff, but kids in the UK found a way after the first lockdown by dipping the lateral flow test into coke

gwbas1c 5y ago

Stupid question: Why would someone want to fake a positive Covid test? (I mean, I understand why someone would want to fake a negative test, and I can understand why someone would want to hack this device.)

Fnoord 5y ago
Because they can, or to test security. Also, to get a certificate that they're cured from COVID-19, to avoid social gatherings such as avoiding showing up at work/family or to force work from home.
vikingerik 5y ago
Kids getting themselves out of school seems to be the primary use case. Possibly also adults getting themselves out of work, particularly if your employer offers lots of paid sick time for Covid.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throw8932894 5y ago
Some people even want to CATCH covid to get recovery cert. For many people covid infection is quite mild with no symptoms.
danielfoster 5y ago
Presumably you could fake a negative test just as easily as a positive test using the same method as the researchers. The researchers obviously were not covid-positive and thus had no choice but to fake a positive test for their research.
throaway46546 5y ago
I think it is just a proof of concept. If you don't have covid you would have to infect yourself to fake a negative test. Faking a positive test proves that it is possible to fake a negative.