Man Loses Password to Chip Embedded Inside His Body
A magician from Missouri had a crazy idea: implant a computer chip in his hand and then perform fun magic tricks with it. Too bad he forgot the password.
It sounds like a story concocted by Kurt Vonnegut, but it actually happened to Zi Teng Wang, a magician and molecular biologist from Missouri — who this month posted about his predicament on his Facebook account, along with an X-ray of his hand showing the white outline of the offending microchip embedded in the meat between his thumb and index finger.
“I’m currently living my own cyberpunk dystopia life, shut out from the technology in my body, and it’s my damn fault,” wrote Wang, who goes by the stage name Zi the Mentalist.
On the surface, it’s a pretty funny anecdote, but as companies like billionaire Elon Musk’s Neuralink bring brain chips to the public, Wang’s personal story serves as a cautionary tale about the risks of putting any technology, whether private or public, into your body; companies can go bankrupt, product lines can be discontinued, or in Wang’s case, you stupidly forget the damn password.
Wang explained in the Facebook post that he inserted a radio frequency identification (RFID) microchip into his hand “a long time ago” for fun magic tricks, but that required someone — like an audience member — to tap their smartphone with an RFID reader to Wang’s hand to activate the trick he developed.
“[B]But it turns out that repeatedly pressing someone else’s phone against my hand, trying to figure out where their phone’s RFID reader is, doesn’t really feel mysterious and magical and amazing,” he wrote. “And often people also have that reader disabled, while using my own phone for scanning also lacks oomph for obvious reasons.”
Moving away from using the gadget as a magic prop, he then tinkered with the chip by rewriting it with a Bitcoin address and then linking it to an image meme on Imgur, the online image sharing platform.
“But a few years ago that imgur link was broken and when I went to rewrite the chip I was horrified to realize I had forgotten the password I had locked it with,” he said.
The outcome of the story: Tech friends told him that the only way to unlock the chip was literally to “tie an RFID reader for days or even weeks” to his palm and “brute force every possible combination.” The chip therefore remains in his hand, lost password and all.
“At least the imgur link started working again,” Wang wrote. “But I’m still locked out of my own body’s technology, and it’s awkward but hilarious.”
This is not the first time this has happened. Daniel Oberhaus, former writer of Vicerecounted in 2018 how, while drunk, he had a near-field communication (NFC) chip implanted in his hand. But like Wang, he forgot his access code to the chip, making the writer what he calls the “most useless cyborg in the world.”
Fortunately, he finally recovered the password, after hours spent looking through technical catalogs.
“If I had just one piece of advice to give to anyone considering having an NFC chip implanted, it would be to do it soberly,” he joked.
Learn more about microchips: British companies implant microchips in their employees
