> People were getting good results because Theranos was using machines from Siemens in their hidden lab.

Thus the tests sometimes were good, and sometimes bad. Some patients underwent unnecessary medical treatments and procedures based on bad tests.

You'd have to prove to the court that theranos used their bad techniques instead of their good ones.

I am not as optimistic they kept such detailed records of their crimes, and feel this would be a tough angle to successfully prosecute.

After failing to produce their own reagents and hardware, Theranos pivoted to using off-the-shelf Siemens hardware and reagents (purchased through a shell company) and dramatically diluting the blood samples to make good on the "single drop of blood" customer promise.

This would've been an impressive feat of reverse engineering, software eating the world, IF IT WORKED. But it didn't. Results couldn't even pass internal audits and the FDA forced Theranos to invalidate ~1 million test results when they found what was going on.

Reverse engineering is not bad, and it is dismaying that someone posting on a site called "Hacker News" would think so.

If they were taking apart and studying the hardware inside competitors' machines, then that would not have been a problem. It's something which many companies do. But they would not be using this for patient testing, they would use it as input to product development and engineering.

Theranos were modifying the machines to operate outside their design parameters. Medical diagnostic equipment is validated at great expense to operate within given parameters to give a diagnostic result which is known to be accurate with a very high probability. They are carefully calibrated and tested to guarantee the accuracy of every test. Tampering with them makes them invalidated and destroys any guarantee of diagnostic result accuracy. The FDA approval for the equipment is only valid if they are operated as intended.

For this reason there are carve-outs in copyright law where something is illegal except when done for the purpose of reverse engineering; for example, in the US, you have Sega v. Accolade.

Personal attacks aside,

I'm just saying that if I get a blood test and it says I've got AIDS and I actually don't -

and that's all because some sociopath grifter with less of an education than what's been proven with my own Bachelors of Fine Arts realized that to swindle millions of more dollars from her geriatric backers she's been manipulating (and ruining the lives of their own family members),

she needs to fake the test results from an impossible dream machine that does NOT exist and couldn't ever - because it defies the laws of physics,

and does this by running modified machines of her competitors that are now basically broken,

in secret rooms she doesn't tell journalists or inspectors about,

well: that's truly fucked.

But I don't know if the context of any of this is what some really want to discuss. It's just the slogans. You know: "hack the planet" and all.

I also don't think I'd be really OK with working for a company that told me to do this reverse engineering, but if your morality says differently, then: hey.

Of course badly done reverse engineering can be bad. But that's not because it's reverse engineering; it's because it reaches incorrect conclusions that hurt people, just like not doing any reverse engineering at all. The problem that put people at risk in this case wasn't that Theranos did reverse engineering; it's that they didn't do enough reverse engineering.

No, sure, real reverse engineering is fine.

But when "reverse engineering" is used in the sense Theranos (and/or Holmes' defense team) apparently did -- i.e. tampering with a competitor's machines so they sometimes don't work properly, and passing off the sometimes-invalid results as super-duper hot stuff created by your new and superior WonderTech™ -- then yes, it darn well should be criticized to Hell and back.

Well, better than the relevant standards. Otherwise all the "reverse engineering" -- i.e, tampering -- is fucking meaningless.

Those machines weren't designed to work that way though, so the test results were wildly inaccurate when they did dilutions. And they fired people who wanted to delay rollout in order to ensure that they had consistently accurate results.

Lying about it to the Investors, and possible intellectual/contract issues with Siemens are another issue.

Unfortunately, it turns out that "fake it til you make it" doesn't work with some problems that are seemingly unsolvable (at least by the approach they took).

IOW, it turns out that "fake it til you make it" doesn't work if you don't actually make it.

Very few tests are 100% reliable, so I would expect that Theranos claims about how the tests where performed would play a significant role in determining the guilt. People where told they would get the perfect magic pixy dust test that worked on one drop of blood instead they got one of the early covid tests that needed at least four repeats to give a "most likely negative" result, unsurprisingly the covid tests also resulted in confused tweets by the one or other VC.