Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant
It's important to have your login in hand, literally. Zi Teng Wang, a magician who implanted an RFID chip in his appendage, has admitted losing access to it because he forgot the password.
It seemed like such a neat idea – get an RFID chip implanted in your hand and then do magical stuff with it. Except it didn't work out that way. "It turns out," said Zi, "that pressing someone else's phone to my hand repeatedly, trying to figure out where their phone's RFID reader is, really doesn't come off super mysterious and magical and amazing."
Then there are the people who don't even have their phone's RFID reader enabled. Using his own phone would, in Zi's words, lack a certain "oomph."
Oh well, how about making the chip spit out a Bitcoin address? "That literally never came up either."
In the end, Zi rewrote the chip to link to a meme, "and if you ever meet me in person you can scan my chip and see the meme."
It was all suitably amusing until the Imgur link Zi was using went down. Not everything on the World Wide Web is forever, and there is no guarantee that a given link will work indefinitely. Indeed, access to Imgur from the United Kingdom was abruptly cut off on September 30 in response to the country's age verification rules.
Still, the link not working isn't the end of the world. Zi could just reprogram the chip again, right?
Wrong. "When I went to rewrite the chip, I was horrified to realize I forgot the password that I had locked it with."
The link eventually started working again, but if and when it stops, Zi's party piece will be a little less entertaining.
He said: "Techie friends I've consulted with have determined that it's too dumb and simple to hack, the only way to crack it is to strap on an RFID reader for days to weeks, brute forcing every possible combination."
Or perhaps some surgery to remove the offending hardware.
Zi's idea is not innovative – individuals such as Professor Kevin Warwick and his cyborg ambitions spring to mind – but forgetting the password certainly highlights one of the risks of inserting hardware under the skin.
Zi goes by the stage name "Zi the Mentalist" and, in addition to performing close-up magic, also refers to himself as "an accomplished scientist with a focus in biology."
"I'm living my own cyberpunk dystopia life right now, locked out of technology inside my body, and it's my own damn fault," said Zi. "And I can honestly say that I forgot the password to my own hand." ®
