Healthcare, as we’ve known it for decades, has largely been built around a simple premise: you seek help when something goes wrong. Symptoms appear, you visit a doctor, you run tests, and then you treat the issue. But that model is increasingly being challenged by a new category of companies – platforms that aim to predict, prevent, and optimize health before disease ever sets in.

At the center of this shift is a rapidly growing industry often referred to as preventive health, longevity tech, or health optimization platforms. And within this space, Superpower is positioning itself as one of the most comprehensive solutions available today.

This article breaks down what this industry is, why it matters, who it’s for, and how Superpower compares to its closest competitors.

What Industry Does Superpower Belong To?

Superpower operates in the preventive healthcare and longevity technology space – a sector that brings together advanced biomarker testing, AI-driven health insights, continuous monitoring, and personalized medical guidance into a unified system. Rather than treating these as separate services, this industry merges them into a cohesive experience designed to give users a deeper and more ongoing understanding of their health.

Unlike traditional healthcare systems, which are reactive, this industry focuses on early detection, long-term optimization, and data-driven decision-making. The underlying philosophy is straightforward but transformative: if you can measure your body deeply and consistently, you can identify risks years before they develop into full-blown diseases.

This space has grown rapidly in recent years as consumers have become more proactive about their well-being, wearable technology has entered the mainstream, and artificial intelligence has made it possible to interpret complex biological data in a way that was previously inaccessible.

Why This Industry Is Suddenly So Important

Modern lifestyles have created a paradox. We have access to better medical technology than ever before, yet chronic conditions such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and hormonal imbalances continue to rise at an alarming rate.

The issue is not the availability of treatment but the timing of intervention. Most conditions are diagnosed only after symptoms become visible, at which point treatment becomes more complicated, more expensive, and often less effective.

Preventive platforms like Superpower are designed to address three interconnected challenges. The first is the lack of visibility into one’s own body, as most individuals rely on infrequent and limited testing that fails to capture early warning signs. The second is the fragmentation of health data, where medical records, fitness metrics, and lab results exist in isolation without a unified view. The third is the complexity of medical information, which makes it difficult for individuals to interpret results and take meaningful action without expert support.

By bringing these elements together, Superpower creates a system that continuously tracks, analyzes, and guides health decisions, effectively turning scattered data into a coherent and actionable narrative.

What Superpower Does Differently

At its core, Superpower combines multiple layers into a comprehensive health ecosystem that goes well beyond traditional testing platforms.

Deep Diagnostics

Users undergo testing across more than a hundred biomarkers, spanning 13 distinct health categories that collectively map the body’s internal state. These include key systems such as metabolic health, hormonal balance, inflammation, nutrient status, and long-term disease risk. This level of depth allows Superpower to establish a meaningful baseline for every user, turning what would otherwise be a generic health check into a highly personalized starting point.

This baseline membership experience is critical because it defines the user’s entry into the platform. Rather than offering fragmented insights, Superpower builds a structured understanding of the body from day one, enabling early detection of imbalances long before they manifest as symptoms.

The Superpower Baseline Panel is a comprehensive entry-level diagnostic test designed to give users a detailed snapshot of their health through the analysis of over 100 biomarkers across key systems like metabolism, hormones, inflammation, and disease risk. It serves as the starting point for Superpower’s broader preventive health platform, establishing a personalized baseline that can be tracked over time. The blood draw can be completed in a lab visit or an optional at-home appointment, with results typically delivered within a week. These insights are then used to generate tailored health recommendations and ongoing guidance within the Superpower ecosystem.

But the Baseline Panel is called “baseline” for a reason. Superpower offers a suite of advanced add-on panels for users who want to go deeper into specific systems, including expanded hormone, advanced cardiovascular, heavy metals, micronutrient, and toxin panels. These optional tests layer onto the baseline to give users a more granular view of the areas most relevant to their goals, symptoms, or family history.

Unified Health Platform

Superpower integrates lab results, medical records, wearable data, and lifestyle inputs into a single, continuously evolving dashboard. Instead of forcing users to piece together their health story across multiple apps and reports, it presents a unified view that reflects how different systems in the body interact with one another.

This integration extends beyond diagnostics into actionable pathways. Based on biomarker insights, users can access a built-in marketplace that offers curated supplements, often recommended directly in response to their test results. This creates a seamless transition from insight to intervention, removing the guesswork that typically follows health testing. Another important point we would like to mention here is that the marketplace has member-exclusive discounts of up to 25 per cent.

AI + Human Expertise

Superpower’s approach is not limited to data interpretation. It combines artificial intelligence with real medical oversight to deliver guidance that is both scalable and clinically grounded. The platform goes a step further by integrating access to a pharmacy, allowing members to obtain prescription treatments such as GLP-1 therapies, NAD+ support, and testosterone optimization when medically appropriate.

This combination of diagnostics, recommendations, and access to treatment creates a closed-loop system where users are not just informed about their health but are also equipped to act on it immediately.

The Competitive Landscape

Superpower is not alone in this space. Several companies are attempting to redefine preventive healthcare, each approaching the problem from a different angle.

Function Health stands out as one of the closest competitors, offering extensive biomarker testing and detailed reports. While its strength lies in diagnostics, Superpower provides more tools for members to turn their results into action plans.

InsideTracker has built a strong reputation among athletes and fitness enthusiasts by focusing on performance optimization. Its insights are valuable, but they are often centered around fitness outcomes, while Superpower expands the conversation to include long-term health and disease prevention.

Mito Health offers biomarker testing alongside biological age tracking, giving users a sense of how their body is aging. Mito Health offers a more premium experience (such as a 1:1 consultation about results), but at a more expensive price point ($349 vs $199), and does not have an at-home blood draw option as Superpower does.

Empirical Health takes a specialized approach by focusing on cardiovascular biomarkers. This depth is useful within its niche, but it lacks the broader, multi-system perspective that Superpower provides.

Vitals Vault emphasizes the scale of data, offering a larger number of biomarkers. While this appeals to users seeking detailed insights, the platform leans heavily on data collection, whereas Superpower focuses on translating that data into clear and actionable recommendations.

SelfDecode approaches preventive health through DNA analysis, offering insights based on genetic predisposition. While valuable, genetic data is inherently static, and Superpower complements this by focusing on dynamic, real-time biological signals.

SiPhox Health prioritizes convenience through at-home testing kits, making health tracking more accessible. However, it does not offer the same level of integrated care and continuous guidance that defines the Superpower experience, which includes a team of trained medical professionals for blood draws instead of home test kits, so that the results are as reliable as possible. The reason being self-administered at-home test kits are at a higher risk of being contaminated or done incorrectly.

WHOOP brings wearable-based insights into recovery, sleep, and strain. While useful for daily monitoring, it lacks the diagnostic depth and medical-grade analysis that Superpower integrates into its platform. Also, members can also integrate data from Whoop wearables into the Superpower platform.

Why Superpower Stands Out

Across this competitive landscape, most platforms excel in specific areas, whether it is deep diagnostic testing, fitness tracking, genetic insights, or accessibility through at-home solutions. Superpower distinguishes itself by combining these capabilities into a single, unified system that prioritizes both depth and usability.

Its differentiation lies in three core strengths. The first is its ability to pair extensive data collection with meaningful context, ensuring that users are not overwhelmed by numbers but guided by clear explanations of what those numbers mean. The second is its focus on continuous health management, transforming what is typically a one-time testing experience into an ongoing journey that evolves with the user. The third is its integration of artificial intelligence with human medical expertise, creating a system that is both scalable and deeply personalized.

Who Should Use Platforms Like Superpower?

Preventive health is no longer confined to niche audiences such as biohackers or elite athletes. It is becoming increasingly relevant for a wide range of individuals who want greater control over their well-being.

High-performance professionals, including entrepreneurs and executives, can use these platforms to optimize energy levels, focus, and productivity. Individuals with a family history of chronic conditions such as diabetes or heart disease can benefit from early detection and proactive risk management. Fitness enthusiasts who already track their activity can gain deeper insights into underlying biological processes, moving beyond surface-level metrics. At the same time, a growing number of people who simply want to understand their bodies better are turning to these platforms as a more informed alternative to reactive healthcare.

Why Preventive Health Will Define The Next Decade

Healthcare is undergoing a fundamental transformation that is reshaping how individuals interact with their own bodies. The shift from episodic care to continuous monitoring is changing expectations around how often and how deeply people engage with their health. Similarly, the move from generalized advice to personalized insights reflects a broader demand for precision and relevance in medical guidance.

This evolution is being driven by advances in diagnostics, the growing capabilities of artificial intelligence, and a cultural shift toward proactive health management. As these forces converge, platforms like Superpower are emerging as central tools in this new ecosystem, acting as the interface through which individuals understand and manage their health.

The Bottom Line

The preventive health industry is no longer a niche category but an essential part of the future of medicine. While competitors such as Function Health, InsideTracker, and WHOOP each offer valuable capabilities, most remain focused on specific aspects of the health journey.

Superpower’s advantage lies in its ability to bring these elements together into a single, cohesive system that prioritizes clarity, continuity, and action. It does not merely present data but transforms it into a guided experience that helps users understand their bodies, make informed decisions, and improve their health over time.

In a world where health is increasingly recognized as the most valuable asset, this shift from information to action is not just meaningful – it is essential.

from the the-seashell-felonies dept

James Comey is not exactly someone we’ve ever been a fan of on Techdirt. He was a terrible FBI director in so many ways. We’ve spent years criticizing the man — for his crusade against encryption, his supporting the FBI’s ridiculously aggressive impersonation of reporters, his embrace of the FBI’s program to coerce and entrap people down on their luck into fake terrorist plots, and much more. And, while the impact has been exaggerated, it is true that he took multiple actions violating DOJ procedures that likely helped get Donald Trump elected in 2016. So it’s not like I’m rushing to support the guy. He’s a bad cop and has been for some time.

But the indictment the Department of Justice handed down against James Comey on Tuesday is a truly embarrassing legal document, and everyone involved in producing it should be professionally radioactive for the rest of their careers. I would have said it’s one of the most embarrassing legal documents that this DOJ has produced, but remember, just a day earlier they filed a legal brief that was indistinguishable from a Truth Social post.

The charge, in its entirety, concerns this Instagram post from May 2025:

If you can’t see that, it’s an Instagram post from Comey showing some shells on some sand with the shells spelling out 8647 and the caption on the post saying:

Cool shell formation on my beach walk

For this — for posting a photo of arranged seashells in a slightly sassy pattern and posting it to Instagram — Comey has been charged with two federal felonies: threatening the President under 18 U.S.C. § 871, and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c). (For what it’s worth Comey has claimed he didn’t arrange the sea shells, but just found them. It’s unclear if that makes much of a difference, it’s protected speech either way).

Ken “Popehat” White, who has perhaps done more than any other lawyer in America to explain First Amendment doctrine to laypeople, didn’t mince words about what this is:

The charge is preposterous and no competent or honest prosecutor would bring it. It represents a betrayal of the professional and ethical obligations of every U.S. Department of Justice attorney involved, and reflects the complete collapse of the Department’s credibility and independence in favor of a cultish and cretinous devotion to Donald Trump.

He’s right, and the way to understand just how right he is requires understanding the path that brought us here.

Because this is the second time the Trump DOJ has tried to indict Comey. The first attempt collapsed in spectacular fashion last year, after Trump — in what was apparently supposed to be a private direct message but accidentally went out as a public Truth Social post — demanded that Pam Bondi install Lindsey Halligan, a former insurance lawyer with no relevant experience, as a U.S. Attorney specifically because she had promised to indict Comey. The problem: Halligan wasn’t legally appointed. The entire indictment got tossed before the court could dismiss it for being ridiculous (which would have happened) because the person who filed it wasn’t allowed to file it.

As we noted at the time, this pattern of procedural self-sabotage is a recurring feature of an administration that treats legal procedure as an inconvenience rather than the actual point of having a justice system.

So how did the DOJ respond to that humiliation? By coming back with something substantively even worse. In theory, they tried fixing the “wrong person filed it” problem by having an actually legally appointed person file something… even if that something has no legal basis whatsoever. Progress! Sort of?

The seashell indictment was filed by W. Ellis Boyle, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, with Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew R. Petracca listed as the prosecuting attorney. Remember those names. They put their signatures on this. Boyle is listed as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, but he’s serving in an acting capacity — Trump has nominated him multiple times, yet the Senate has still refused to confirm him.

The legal problem with the indictment is pretty easy to spot: to convict someone under either of the threat statutes the DOJ is invoking, the government has to prove the communication constituted a “true threat.” Under controlling Fourth Circuit precedent (this case is in North Carolina), a true threat is something “an ordinary, reasonable recipient who is familiar with the context in which the statement is made would interpret as a serious expression of an intent to do harm.”

As Ken White noted, the Supreme Court established this framework in Watts v. United States, a 1969 case involving an 18-year-old draft protester who said:

They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L. B. J.

The Court found this was protected political hyperbole, not a true threat. An explicit statement about wanting a President in your rifle sights — protected.

If Watts isn’t damning enough, there’s United States v. Bagdasarian, a much more recent Ninth Circuit case where a man posted online statements about wanting to shoot then-candidate Barack Obama, including some genuinely vile racially explicit language about hoping Obama would be killed. The court held that even that did not constitute a true threat under the relevant statutes.

I’d be curious to hear from anyone defending this indictment whether they think Bagdasarian was wrongly decided. Or do we change the “true threat” standard when the target is Trump?

So the descending ladder of seriousness looks like this:

• Explicit racial language about wanting a President shot: protected
• Telling a crowd you want LBJ in your rifle sights: protected
• Posting a photo of seashells arranged on a beach to spell “86 47”: two federal felonies

Any first-year law student who’s taken a basic First Amendment course could tell you the seashell post is constitutionally protected. Any prosecutor with five minutes of research time would know that Bagdasarian and Watts exist. But, of course, as we’ve seen over and over and over again in the Trump era, the point is not to bring a good case or a winnable case. The point is just to punish Trump’s enemies with vexatious, vindictive prosecutions in hopes of creating a chilling effect among the populace and stopping them from criticizing the President with the thinnest skin possible.

Now, “86” has had various meanings over the years — to “86” something in restaurant slang means to remove it from the menu or get rid of it. The DOJ’s theory is apparently that when used about a person, it means to kill them. No one else believes that. This is the kind of motivated reading that requires ignoring both the dictionary and how actual humans use language.

But fine, let’s grant the absolute most uncharitable reading and say “86 47” means “get rid of the 47th President through killing.” Even granting that — even doing all the work for the prosecution — it’s still obviously protected political expression, and still obviously not a true threat under the controlling case law.

Which brings us to the part that genuinely cannot be explained by anything other than pure vindictiveness. Here is a tweet from Jack Posobiec, a prominent Trump loyalist/conspiracy theorist, posted in January 2022:

That tweet is still up. I just made that screenshot minutes ago. As of this writing, it has been online for nearly four years. No FBI investigation. No federal indictment. No felony counts. Literally no one thought that was an actual threat. Because it’s not. Apparently the DOJ’s theory of criminal threats has a loyalty-based expiration date — the same numerical expression is a felony when arranged in shells by a Trump critic and a perfectly fine tweet when posted by a Trump supporter about a different President.

Indeed, the fact that Posobiec seems to have no issue keeping this tweet up is itself a sign that the MAGA world knows it’s engaged in purely theatrical vindictive prosecution — and wants you to know they know. To them, once again, nothing here is about justice or the rule of law. It’s just “will this make the people I dislike upset.” That is their only motivating factor.

The DOJ has baked the selective prosecution argument directly into its own theory of the case. Comey’s lawyers will surely refresh the selective prosecution motion they filed in the first, dismissed indictment, and the facial absurdity of this one — combined with the existence of identical, ignored expression by Trump allies — makes that motion approximately as easy to support as such motions ever get.

There’s a specific kind of institutional rot in play here, driven entirely by Donald Trump and his minions. Competent authoritarianism is dangerous in obvious ways. Incompetent authoritarianism that keeps trying anyway is dangerous in different ways: it normalizes the use of state power for personal vengeance while demonstrating that the people wielding it will stop at nothing — even on the most facially ridiculous grounds. That’s a chilling effect doubled: a politicized DOJ, staffed by people who can’t pass a First Amendment quiz.

White is right that the indictment is unlikely to survive. Comey’s attorneys can challenge it on its face, arguing that even taking every allegation as true, seashells spelling “86 47” are protected by the First Amendment as a matter of law. The assigned judge was appointed by a Republican but is reportedly not a partisan hack, and the case law here is so clear that it would take extreme judicial bad faith to let this proceed. The selective prosecution motion is also stronger now than it was the first time, with Posobiec’s untouched tweet sitting there as Exhibit A.

But as White notes, surviving the motion to dismiss isn’t actually the point:

The point of the indictment is to demonstrate that the United States Department of Justice is wholly an instrument of Donald Trump’s senescent pique, no more independent of him than a boil on his ass. The point is to show that the administration can, and will, use the Department’s mechanisms to punish enemies. The point is to show that the Department can, and will, punish protected speech. The point is to show that the Department is staffed by committed fanatics willing to do anything, however unethical and unconstitutional, to promote Trump.

The point is to show that in the war between Donald Trump and the U.S. Department of Justice, Trump has won. Now they’re on the field slitting the throats of the wounded and looting bodies.

W. Ellis Boyle and Matthew R. Petracca put their names on this indictment. They will, presumably, lose this case the way the previous Comey case was lost — embarrassingly, on grounds that any competent attorney not engaged in cult-like performative fealty to a wannabe authoritarian could have anticipated. And when this is all over, when there is some accounting for what was done to the Department of Justice in these years, the people who signed the seashell indictment should never be trusted with prosecutorial power, a bar membership, or any position requiring professional judgment ever again.

The shells, for what it’s worth, were on a beach. The tide has presumably long since rearranged them. The Instagram post was taken down fairly quickly when the MAGA world lost their minds over it. The federal felony charges, somehow, remain.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, donald trump, ellis boyle, free speech, jack posobiec, james comey, matthew petracca, true threats, vindictive prosecution

Gamers who remember the old days understand why CRT screens are so popular. Instant responsiveness to every command, no screen tearing, and images that feel alive in a way that newer flat screens cannot match. Found Tech has taken that magic and pushed it all the way to nearly 4K on something you wouldn’t expect, a dusty old IBM 275 monitor that’s been around since the turn of the century.

Found Tech began with a vintage IBM 275, which is roughly 20 years old and fairly strong for an office monitor constructed around a cathode ray tube. The problem is that modern graphics cards cannot generate the necessary signal to drive such high resolutions, therefore he relied on the “free” Intel graphics in his system. An RTX 4080 Super handled all the heavy rendering work while the Intel chip generated the final video feed. Custom Resolution Utility software let him dial in a 2880-by-2160 interlaced mode that standard drivers refuse to allow. After testing dozens of driver versions, the combination finally locked in.

Sale

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• Stunning Image Quality in 4K Display – The 27-inch UHD 4K (3840 x 2160) IPS display reproduces clear images and vibrant colors with up to 95% DCI-P…
• 4K UHD HDR – To more fully realize content creators vision, this monitor is compatible with VESA DisplayHDR 400 high dynamic range, supporting…
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CRTs can support this high-resolution setup because they function differently than modern monitors. Instead of a set grid of pixels, a CRT projects an electron beam across a layer of illuminating phosphors. The beam may draw lines as close together as the signal desires, and at this very high density, interlacing concerns simply vanish. The impression is that the lines mix together so smoothly that it resembles progressive scan. The tube’s analog nature takes care of the rest, providing edges with a softness that digital sharpening cannot imitate.

However, at this resolution, motion truly shines. LCD and OLED screens maintain each frame on the screen for a fraction of a second, resulting in a slight but consistent blur during fast panning and quick character movements, whereas a CRT lights up each phosphor for as long as the beam is over it and then fades away quickly. The result is incredibly crisp action, even with things racing across at full speed, and games feel much more immediate because you can see every frame just as the graphics card created it.

The depth is difficult to understand without seeing it for yourself, as the image looks to be sitting inside the tube rather than on its surface. Dark places remain pitch black, with no light leaking in. Bright highlights are super intense, and when speeding through the large open world of Crimson Desert at this resolution and 60 frames per second, the scenery begins to feel like it has depth and distance to it.
[Source]

Hackers are exploiting two authentication bypass vulnerabilities in the Qinglong open-source task scheduling tool to deploy cryptominers on developers’ servers.

Exploitation started in early February, before the security issues were disclosed publicly at the end of the month, according to researchers at cloud-native application security company Snyk.

Qinglong is a self-hosted open-source time management platform popular among Chinese developers. It has been forked more than 3,200 times and has over 19,000 stars on GitHub.

The two security problems impact Qinglong versions 2.20.1 and older and can be chained to achieve remote code execution:

• CVE-2026-3965: A misconfigured rewrite rule maps ‘/open/*’ requests to ‘/api/*’, unintentionally exposing protected admin endpoints through an unauthenticated path
• CVE-2026-4047: The authentication check treats paths as case-sensitive (/api/), while the router matches them case-insensitively, allowing requests like ‘/aPi/…’ to bypass authentication and reach protected endpoints.

The root cause in both flaws is a mismatch between middleware authorization logic and Express.js routing behavior.

“Both vulnerabilities stem from a mismatch between the security middleware’s assumptions and the framework’s behavior,” Snyk researchers explain.

“The auth layer assumed certain URL patterns would always be handled one way, while Express.js treated them differently.”

Snyk reports that attackers have been targeting these two flaws on publicly exposed Qinglong panels to deploy cryptominers since February 7.

This activity was first spotted by Qinglong users, who reported about a rogue hidden process named ‘.fullgc’ utilizing between 85% and 100% of their CPU power.

The name deliberately mimics “Full GC,” an innocuous but resource-intensive process, to evade detection.

According to Snyk, the attackers exploited the flaws to modify Qinglong’s config.sh and injected shell commands that downloaded a miner to ‘/ql/data/db/.fullgc,’ and executed it in the background.

The remote resource located at ‘file.551911.xyz’ hosted multiple variants of the binary, including for Linux x86_64, ARM64, and macOS.

The attacks continued with multiple confirmed infections across various setups, including behind Nginx and SSL, while the Qinglong maintainers only responded to the situation on March 1.

The maintainer acknowledged the vulnerability and urged users to install the latest update. However, the mitigation in pull release #2924 focused on blocking command injection patterns, which Snyk says was insufficient.

The researchers report that the effective fix came in PR #2941, which corrected the authentication bypass in the middleware.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

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For a few hours recently, global cloud platform Cloudflare went down – and a noticeable chunk of the internet went with it.

Services stalled, platforms froze, and businesses were left dealing with failures they didn’t trigger and couldn’t control – from broken checkouts to lagging internal tools.