Magician forgets password to his own hand after RFID chip implant
- Reference: 1763732671
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/11/21/magician_password_hand_rfid/
- Source link:
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."
[1]
Oh well, how about making the chip spit out a Bitcoin address? "That literally never came up either."
[2]
[3]
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 [4]abruptly cut off on September 30 in response to the country's age verification rules.
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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.
[6]Zoomers are officially worse at passwords than 80-year-olds
[7]You'll never guess what the most common passwords are. Oh, wait, yes you will
[8]Credential stuffing: £2.31 million fine shows passwords are still the weakest link
[9]Will passkeys ever replace passwords? Can they?
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.
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Zi's idea is not innovative – individuals such as [11]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 " [12]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." ®
Get our [13]Tech Resources
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[4] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/01/imgur_exits_uk/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aSCaqLbPNtDd8fYctJVWvAAAAFg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/18/zoomer_passwords/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/06/most_common_passwords/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/07/credential_stuffing_231_million/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/17/passkeys_passwords/
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aSCaqLbPNtDd8fYctJVWvAAAAFg&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2012/07/26/captain_cyborg_gong
[12] https://www.zithementalist.com/
[13] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Magical recovery
Why doesn't he use some magic to recover the password? He is supposedly a magical tricks expert... Or maybe he needs to ask Harry Potter for some pointers.
If this happened to me ....
I'd keep *very* quiet about it.
Re: If this happened to me ....
There is not such thing as bad publicity in internet land. I could have spent the rest of my life without knowing of the existence of this dumbfuck, but here we are, discussing him. So he won.
I bet he facepalmed. He should knuckle down and brute force it.
That comment deserves a great big thumbs up!
Obviously "mentalist" has traditional meaning in magic acts, but brave to use in the UK (as likely to cause some confusion with those less aware of its historic meaning), given it is a famous Alan Partridge* insult?
I notice from his site that close up magic is one of his skills, if anyone is into close up magic I recommend Jerry Sadowitz (beyond being famous as a (some may say challenging) comedian, he also does some tours focusing on magic (with a few gags thrown in, but not like his stand up performance) - I was very impressed (he has a camera & video display rigged up too so those further back can see its legit & appreciate the close up magic skill)
* for non UK people Alan Partridge is a comedic character created by Steve Coogan.
And I can honestly say that I forgot the password to my own hand...
...was not on my bingo card for today.
"Not everything on the World Wide Web is forever"
Practically nothing on the WWW is for more than decade or so -- mostly not as long as that. As we "digitise" everything with wild abandon we're creating a dark age for those who look back in a couple of centuries (or maybe less).
Re: "Not everything on the World Wide Web is forever"
Except that a lot of things on it are a lot more forever than their offline equivalents ever were. It's much easier to find archives now that they're not in paper, and if we're motivated, and several organizations are, we can create distributed archives of those. Meanwhile, even before digitization, plenty of small archives were running out of money and recycling their paper in bulk. Lots of things we might want to look at from a couple centuries ago are unavailable because they were stored on paper and it burned. I think short-term historians will be fine. I make no promises for those in the 3000s, but I would also not be too confident if we were still printing stuff because, unless we start chiselling our records into something stable which neither fire nor water immediately destroys, we are not building stuff guaranteed to survive.
IoF
Internet of Fing(er)s
His Appendage!
"Zi Teng Wang, a magician who implanted an RFID chip in his appendage"
"His Appendage!", spoken in the manner of Lady Bracknell.
Appendage/male member. Pay by bonk
Sadly, it's probably not a powerful enough chip to run palmOS
Let's take this to the limit
A chip in your hand, Elon Musk is implanting chips in people's brains, there are other people experimenting with this type of technology.
Let's look forwards and you can have an AI enabled chip embedded in your brain. It will be able to analyse your movements, offer you advice, even warn against impending danger. How cool would that be?
Except that at the speed that the technology is evolving the tech would be obsolete within 3 years, and then what if the chip can be hacked?
The film "Upgrade" has an interesting take on this: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upgrade_(film)" there are other similar films, The Black Mirror, The Terminal Man etc.
But then like your video doorbell software support ends after a period...or an update borks the chip.
We are Borg. Resistance is futile.
"Magician forgets password to his own hand"
I immediately thought of Jonathan Creek's magician employer Adam Klaus.