lima

Plenty of European countries have an eID CAs and it works fine. The PKI part is a solved problem.

Doesn't even need ZKP, the CA can just issue an attestation.

You were right to call out the other person for trivializing the risks of tick bites, just assume good faith and be kind.

You don't respond to them at all, flag the comment, and/or email the moderators.

Being snarky does not contribute to the discussion and gets your comments flagged.

But of course, neither does Tailscale's weird DIY contraption.

No need to be rude, though!

If you're going to disagree with basic textbook biology knowledge, the burden of proof is on you.

However, guidelines universally recommend against testing ticks. For instance, IDSA says this:

> Knowing tick characteristics (ie, species, life stage, and an assessment of the degree of blood engorgement) is helpful for anticipatory guidance and in determining if antibiotic prophylaxis to prevent Lyme disease is appropriate [127]. Tick identification is available in most commercial laboratories and at some local health departments. Studies from the United States and Europe have shown that detecting B. burgdorferi sensu lato in Ixodes spp. ticks, however, poorly predicts either subsequent disease (0–12.4%) [126, 128–133] or asymptomatic seroconversion (0–4.7%) [126, 129, 130, 132, 134]. This is likely due to a variety of factors that influence the likelihood of transmission and the observation that most Ixodes spp. ticks discovered by patients have been attached for <48 hours [61, 62, 135].

(https://www.idsociety.org/practice-guideline/lyme-disease/)

The point is that the test is likely not useful to reliably inform any sort of prophylactic treatment, especially if the risk of transmission is high enough to warrant prophylactic treatment in the first place, in which case the PEP is indicated regardless of the tick test.

Sure, it modifies the prior probabilities, but what's the clinical significance of that?

Only if the test is sufficiently accurate to rule out transmission. Even molecular tests can't reliably predict that.

The vendor claims "lab-level accuracy" (conveniently omitting the actual accuracy numbers), but the test is a lateral flow test, which means its Limit of Detection is going to be orders of magnitude worse than molecular tests. Tick tests do not require FDA clearance, so their claims are most likely unreviewed.

Existing lab tests for ticks are almost universally based on PCR.

Ticks are small (especially nymphs) and extracting enough material can be tricky even for molecular testing, so I can't imagine an LFT test working terribly well, especially for nymphs, which are responsible for a lot of Lyme infections due to being easy to miss.

The other, bigger problem is that the test result is mostly useless.

The risk of Lyme transmission from an infected tick ranges rougly from <1% for a fresh bite (<24h) to ~10-25% once the tick is engorged (72h+). A positive tick test result would be insufficiently predictive of Lyme disease transmission on its own to justify taking antibiotics in most cases in the absence of other symptoms.

And you can't trust negative results either due to limited sensitivity, so you can't rule out transmission either.

In my opinion, tests like this can lead to worse overall health outcomes due to unnecessary treatment or withholding prophylaxis from someone who otherwise qualifies.

There's other types of social engineering, but phishing is mostly an engineering issue.

Bad take - the actual problem is that there was a trusted network in the first place. This kind of network access control is trivial to bypass, and trusted devices can get compromised.