Magician Forgets Password for Chip Implanted in His Body for Magic Tricks

RFID Chip Implantation in a Human Body

Magician Forgets Password for Chip Implanted in His Body for Magic Tricks - Not the First of Its Kind

A magician from Missouri found himself in a strange situation after deciding to implant an electronic chip in his hand for use in magic tricks. However, he later forgot the password for the chip. Ting Wang, a magician and molecular biologist, shared his story on his Facebook page, along with an X-ray image of his hand showing the white lines of the implanted electronic chip between his thumb and forefinger.

At first glance, the story seems amusing, but with companies like Neuralink, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, striving to bring brain chips to the public, Wang's personal experience serves as a warning about the dangers of implanting any technology, whether private or public, in the body. Companies could go bankrupt, production lines could be halted, or, as happened with Wang, someone could simply forget the password, according to a report by Futurism.

In his Facebook post, Wang explained how he had implanted an RFID chip in his hand "a long time ago" to perform entertaining magic tricks. However, these tricks required someone—perhaps a member of the audience—to press their smartphone, equipped with an RFID reader, against Wang's hand to activate any illusion he created.

RFID chips are used for identification via radio frequencies. They contain a number or stored data that can be read by a special reader. They are commonly used in subway cards, pet collars, and for tracking products in warehouses and stores.

But he said that repeatedly pressing someone else's phone against his hand, in an attempt to locate the RFID reader on their phone, didn't seem as mysterious, magical, or amazing as it should be. He added that the reader is often disabled on most people anyway, and using his own phone to perform the scan lacked the element of spectacle for obvious reasons.

After abandoning the idea of ​​using the chip as a magic tool, he later modified it by reprogramming it to contain a Bitcoin address and then linking it to a meme on the image-sharing platform Imager. "But several years ago, the Imager link stopped working," he added, "and when I went to reprogram the chip, I panicked when I realized I'd forgotten the password I'd used."

His tech-savvy friends told him the only way to unlock the chip was to literally "wear an RFID reader for several days or weeks" on his palm and "try every possible trick." So the chip remained in his hand, with the password missing. "At least the Imager link is working again," Wang said. "But I'm still unable to access my own body's technology, which is annoying but also funny."

This isn't the first time something like this has happened. In 2018, Daniel Oberhaus, a former Vice writer, recounted how a near-field communication chip was implanted in his hand while he was drunk. But like Wang, he forgot the chip's passcode, making him, as he described himself, "the most useless robot in the world." Fortunately, he eventually recovered the passcode after hours of searching through technical catalogs.