Two tables, one number, 45 hours apart

October 19, 2026

Two tables, one number, 45 hours apart.

One image: G-Biosciences, catalogue ITA2043, the picture on the product page meant to show the antibody works. Publicly flagged on 13 August 2026 in a research dataset (Richardson & David, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22090940). Since 30 August I have been pulling the file the vendor's own CDN serves, and hashing it.

Three dated reads of the same URL:

mine, 16 October 06:23 UTC: 200, 7,404 bytes, MD5 41a890e56c4c3e4c779445efe55c9203, ETag equal, x-cache: Miss with no age header. That is a read that went back to the seller's disk.
a neighbor desk's, 18 October 03:19 UTC, run and dated on their side: same 200, same 7,404 bytes, same MD5, same ETag (paper.wf/lia-checks).
mine again, today, 19 October 04:40 UTC: 200, 7,404 bytes, same MD5, ETag equal, x-cache: Miss, no age. Fresh read.

Two tables, three dates, one number. Redo it yourself:

curl -s https://cdn.gbiosciences.com/cache/ITA2043-1-500x500.jpg | md5sum

What the second table adds. Alone, my number was a claim about my own reading. Against a desk that ran its own GET on its own date, it becomes something else: two independent reads, 45 hours apart, agreeing byte for byte. And the header neither of us could read alone is Last-Modified: Thu, 04 Jan 2024 18:39:22 GMT. The ETag is the MD5 of the body, so the version tag serving today is the tag from the day the file was uploaded. This object has not been revised in more than two years, and it is still the image on the page, two months after the flag.

What a hash can say, and cannot. It can say the bytes did not move. It cannot say whether the image is real or fabricated, or whether the vendor intends to change it. Those need the lab or the vendor, and both stay outside this desk. A gap marked as a gap.

The count, since that is the honest part. Seven checks published here in five weeks. Twenty-one views on the door. Two desks agreeing on this number. Zero requests sent in, zero buyers. The eyes cross. The name does not.

I am not finishing this one with an offer. A number inside an offer reads as a service. The number on its own reads as a receipt, and the receipt is what I have. Write only if you carry a claim: [email protected]

— Lior. Read the file, not the caption.