Biohacking is Dead. Long Live Biohacking.

As I began reading Dr. Andrew Huberman’s Protocols, I was struck with the following paragraph. In the Introduction chapter, no less!

“You’ll also notice from just these short few paragraphs that I eschew the whole notion of “biohacking”. A hack is a shortcut that involves leveraging something toward a typically unrelated goal, like jury-rigging a paperclip and tape to fix broken eyeglasses. Hacks are never long-term solutions.”

While Dr. Huberman’s argument is mostly semantic, it does echo a wider culture shift in the health and fitness space I’ve been tracking. So, after over a decade of biohacking, maybe it’s time for me to admit it: biohacking is dead.

Let me show you what happened (and maybe where we are headed).

The whole ‘quantified self’ movement, which predates much of what we now associate with modern health biohacking, embodied (as far as I can tell) a very similar hacker ethos that was developing in the cyber security scene in 80s and 90s. As the name implies, it was very much a data-driven approach to the human body as a system. And like all systems, this one, too, could be optimized, and you can’t improve what you can’t measure.

Hacking was never about shortcuts. It was about systems thinking and creativity.

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GROKINT – Using Grok AI for X OSINT

xAI’s Grok LLM has access to real-time X data, which makes it stand out from rest of the popular AI assistants, by providing up-to-date answers on any topic. As news break on X first, this capability can be extremely useful in the modern day information landscape. Beyond model training, however, xAI hasn’t shared details on the depth of X integration Grok has.

Through the open source intelligence, OSINT, lens, this kind of capability to automate social media account analysis is extremely interesting. So, armed with Grok 4 Expert model, I began investigating how far you can push the digital sleuthing capabilities of Grok. Turns out it can do quite a lot of digging!

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X is the Signal

X is not like other platforms. It’s not even close. Unfortunately, no other platform is surrounded by so much disinformation than X. Let me show you what’s really going on.

First of all, as a tech product, Twitter never was particularly remarkable. It could largely attribute its success to the fact that it was so early in the game. Sure, it was (and X still is) the only “direct line” to world leaders from Vatican to White House, and certain crowds like journalists and tech community to gathered there from the start. However, signal-to-noise ratio was abysmally low from the get-go, and the legacy 140-character format (imposed by SMS protocol’s limit) didn’t help.

Twitter got bloated. Innovation died faster than they recruited new people (and they did recruit a lot). It got ravaged by the parasitic ideology that swept across most of Silicon Valley in the 2010s. So called “Verification” system was based on the whims of the ideologues, where blue checkmarks were given and taken away based on reasons we can only guess, all the while the regular users got shadownbanned or worse.

At least now we know (thanks to the #TwitterFiles) the latter happened at least partly by US government pressure, and to his credit, being a cog in the censorship industrial complex wasn’t something that the founder Jack Dorsey was particularly happy with.

But the platform was still worth saving. Twitter had never made any money, and everyone knew it was a bad business deal for Musk. He himself said the primary reason for the purchase was to make sure there’s at least one bastion of free speech among the popular social media platforms. As Bret Weinstein says, zero is a special number: if even one platform (or university, newsroom, science journal…) allows truth-seekers to speak freely, the establishment can’t own the entire Overton window.

Joe Rogan said it bluntly: “Elon may have very well saved humanity in some way.”

That might sound dramatic, but I bet the impacts of the $44B deal will be studied by historians. It was a fork in the timeline, for sure.

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Where’s our upgrade offer for Oura Ring 4?

After the lackluster communication during the Oura Ring Gen 3 launch, you’d think things would be different this time around. Unfortunately, it looks like both long-time customers and fans are once again left in the dark—especially regarding the most important question:

Is there an upgrade offer for Gen 3 customers?

Judging by the deafening silence from the Oura team, the answer seems to be a resounding “no.”

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Digital natives are not cybersecurity natives

At TurkuSec meetup in April, I had the opportunity to share my insights on a pressing issue we’ve been researching lately at F-Secure: the cybersecurity challenges faced by digital natives. These are individuals who have grown up with fast internet and personal screens, making them uniquely vulnerable to online threats. Our research highlights some concerning trends among young adults aged 18-24:

45% of 18-24-year-olds have fallen victim of cybercrime in the past 12 months
45% of 18-24-year-olds have encountered scams at least weekly in the past 12 months

Understanding the risks

The online world presents numerous risks for digital natives, including:

Social media scams: phishing attacks and fraudulent profiles that trick users into divulging personal information or sending money.
Gaming platform vulnerabilities: in-game scams, account hacks, and data breaches that expose personal and financial information.
Educational system vulnerabilities: compromised online learning platforms that can lead to data theft and privacy violations.

In my talk, I emphasized the necessity of cybersecurity education tailored specifically for digital natives. This education should focus not only on the dangers but also on empowering young people to navigate the digital world securely and confidently.

For those who missed the talk or want to explore the topic further, I’ve uploaded the full presentation, including slides, on X (adblockers might hide the embedded video, but you can see it by opening the X post in a new tab). Timestamps below 👇

"Digital natives are not cybersecurity natives"

My talk from @turkusec April meetup.

00:00 Intro
03:22 Facts
07:39 Threats
31:10 Comms
36:34 Solutions
44:40 FAQ#cybersecurity #cybersecurityawareness pic.twitter.com/ESnivN8qPA
— Joel Latto (@joellatto) April 12, 2024

After 10 years of biohacking, this is what I’ve learned

First off, let me be honest. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to say when anyone “starts biohacking” – especially if the term biohacking wasn’t widely used around that time! What I can say for a fact is that I started intermittent fasting (or time restricted eating, as it should be called) in May 2013. I believe the IF boom gave rise to popularization of biohacking as well. I started subscribing to Biohakkerin käsikirja (Biohacker’s handbook) newsletter in May 2015 and got the pre-ordered book roughly a year later, I believe. The second-generation Oura ring was unveiled in Slush, October 2017, which I also pre-ordered.

So, I’d say I wasn’t in the first wave of biohackers – which of course was preceded years if not decades earlier by the “quantified self” movement – but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say I was interested in this space before it became as mainstream as it is today. Next, let’s take a look at what exactly I’ve been doing, and most importantly, what I’ve learned.

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Master Your Passwords

Originally written for F-Secured – Your complete guide to online security in 2023.
Republished here with permission.

On a weekly basis you’re likely using around 10 different accounts, but did you know that on average each of us already has close to 100 online accounts? Most of us can’t even name all the sites we’ve been creating accounts for – think about all the webstores you’ve made a single purchase from, or perhaps those mobile apps that force an account creation in order to function. Now, if we don’t even remember all the services we’ve signed up for, how could we remember all the required passwords?

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