A magician who implanted an RFID chip in his hand lost access to it after forgetting the password, leaving him effectively locked out of the tech embedded in his own body. The Register reports: "It turns out," said [said magician Zi Teng Wang], "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.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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