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DangerousThings Biohacking Forum

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18 pointsWorldPeas8 comments

They ought to rename themselves to biomedical hacking. Biohacking in contemporary usage usually refers to homebrew laboratory-grade biotechnology (those involving PCRs, gene modification, a ton of biochemistry). The dangerous things forum is primarily about implants which falls under biomedical and neural engineering, not biohacking.

On a side note, I strongly do not recommend trying out any of the biomedical implants without a good reason. You can approximate magnet implants to a reasonable extent with a bit of superglue and RFID chips can be placed in rings and jewellery. Risk of infection aside, accidental nerve damage is very difficult to fix with our current level of understanding.

And scrolling through the forum, I get the impression that the implants they discuss are basically just NFC chips? I really have never understood why someone would go through the risk of implanting something that is already very easy to make into a wearable item, when it doesn't actually need to interact with any biological functions. Is it just the novelty factor that motivates them, or am I missing something?

at a high, reductive level, yes. that is what motivated me to get mine.

I found it disappointing that the implants were largely security keys of one kind or another.

One could put that in an earring or wristband. Under the skin offers very little advantage.

I was hoping for implants that enhanced the body in some way, helped treat an illness, or that it would look cool at least.

While the idea of "becoming a cyborg" is a little charming, I don't think injecting NFC is good for anything serious, for now.

Actually, it feels more like a security hole, because (1) people are using the same key for everything (same password for everything!) (2) Injected chips are difficult to replace once breached (3) so the injected chip becomes a single point of failure.

Still, it might be good for some minor things in your life, like unlocking bike locks and storage boxes (not think-walled safes), logging into IoT devices, etc.

>(1) people are using the same key for everything (same password for everything!) (2) Injected chips are difficult to replace once breached

It's not really the same as using the password for everything, because having access to the key doesn't allow you to compromise it later on. These security keys have an internal key that they use to sign challenges, but that key is never divulged. Short of some sort of critical exploit in the chip firmware, the key isn't going to get breached.

Imagine when the practice is common enough that in order to rob you a thief will have to cut off your hand.

I have a few of their devices implanted - NFC, Vivokey, LED, Magnet.

The LED and Magnet are for fun. I watch the Vivokey github with interest. The most use I got from the NFC was the last time I travelled to the USA.

For some reason I was always stopped, asked questions etc regardless of if it was a holiday trip (to NY) or a work event (I used to work at Automattic). Given the stops I experienced, my experience of the TSA and the fact that while in their jurisdiction I (a UK citizen) effectively had no powers I was fully expecting that my laptop could be opened and inspected. IIRC work advice was to give up any passwords. Nope.

I backed up the machine and did a clean install of the OS. On another machine I separated out that which would be essential for work, encrypted it and uploaded it to a domain I had never used before and nested the data many dirs deep.

Using my phone I then wrote the full path (without /) and the encryption key to one of the NFC chips. I knew where the slashes would go and I knew the domain, but to anyone else it was just a very long alphanumeric string.

Given these implants do not show up on current devices used to scan people, and that implants can be placed almost anywhere on the body they seem an ideal way to get data through checks. Granted the data size is tiny but it is still useful.

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