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 …

[Bebu sa Ware]

"Magician forgets password to his own hand"

I immediately thought of Jonathan Creek's magician employer Adam Klaus.

[PCman999]

Re: "Magician forgets password to his own hand"

Isn't the forgetful person billing himself as a 'mentalist'? Why doesn't he just hypnotize himself to remember the password?

Or look under his keyboard? ;)

[b0llchit]

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.}}

[ITS Retired]

Re: Magical recovery

He should have had the password tattooed on his wrist. Problem solved.

[JimmyPage]

If this happened to me ....

I'd keep *very* quiet about it.

[A. Coatsworth]

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.

[KayJ]

I bet he facepalmed. He should knuckle down and brute force it.

[David 132]

Nailed it.

And as far as finger-related puns go, I really can’t think of thumbthing else.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

That comment deserves a great big thumbs up!

[Ken Shabby]

Gripping stuff

[The man with a spanner]

He needs to wait for palm Sunday for a handy miracle, and while he is waiting he can watch Jesus ride into town on his ass.

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

There's a phalanx of similar comments could be made

[tiggity]

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.

[Camilla Smythe]

Thanks for that. Who is Steve Coogan?

[Bran Muffin]

Steve Coogan is the person who created the Alan Partridge character.

[Paul Herber]

That sort of information probably isn't available in media encyclopaedias (when did I last use that word?) outside the UK. One day there may well be a way for such information to be passed around globally. I foresee a fleet of ships carrying a cargo of last year's books from continent to continent ... how will revel in all that knowledge.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Who is Steve Coogan?

A standup comedian character created by local TV 'star' Alan Partridge

[Paul Herber]

Perhaps Steve and Alan were created at the same time via quantum entanglement.

Call it the Lexi Paradox.

Could be a PhD there for someone ...

[Kane]

And I can honestly say that I forgot the password to my own hand...

...was not on my bingo card for today.

[Mike 137]

"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).

[doublelayer]

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.

[chivo243]

Re: "Not everything on the World Wide Web is forever"

I'm reminded of the analogy about something* going on the internet and then trying to remove it is akin to removing all the pee from a public swimming pool.

*Usually stupid or humiliating pictures/vids

[O'Reg Inalsin]

Re: "Not everything on the World Wide Web is forever"

Multi partial copies of the "Epic of Gilgamesh" survived up to 3800 years because they were written in clay.

[An_Old_Dog]

Ephemerality of the Web

we can create distributed archives of those.

We can create copies of those, but we so-frequently do not.

Case in point: "Jeffrey's Japanese" page. This was a nice front end to a public-domain Japanese<-->English dictionary. You could look up words in either language. It would show you the kanji (ideograms). You could use regexes.

This page was hosted on multiple servers at various colleges.

One day, it simply went dark. The URL no longer resolved. There was much buzz in the Japanese-language community, but nobody there knew what had happened, or who could fix it.

It remained dead for some time, then came back in a crippled form which -- years later -- still does not display the word's kanji. Attempting to do so results in an error message.

The Web is ephemeral and fragile.

[simonlb]

Re: Ephemerality of the Web

Yeah, I miss the Dr. Fun page.

[doublelayer]

Re: Ephemerality of the Web

True, if we want copies, we need to go to some effort. That is true no matter how they're storing them. Older technology was no better. If we had a useful resource on paper and we let the only place with a copy toss it into storage, which they put in a shed which got flooded, we lost that paper. That's happened to tons of stuff. Archiving only works with an intent to do it, but the internet makes many types of archiving a lot easier than they used to be. I operate some archives with several types of old software that some people find they need but the companies that made it either stopped hosting or went out of business. I can move these to different servers as needed, and I have. I can make sure copies are in the Internet Archive's archives in case I ever shut down, and I have. I can let any person download what they need without needing them to contact me. If these were paper documents before the internet, I would have a much harder time doing any of that; I'd need to move paper copies around anywhere I went, I would need to try to convince someone to store redundant copies, and people would need to contact me and arrange for me to make a copy and mail it which would be a lot more expensive and laborious than it is today. That's why I don't think there's going to be a dark age for historians. We've always destroyed some data and needed people to fill in gaps. We're destroying much less important stuff and creating plenty more nowadays.

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Ephemerality of the Web

A related problem is the difference between backups and archives.

"Backups" are sufficiently-recent that you can just mount the media on your computer, type the magic incantation, and (usually-but-not-every-time) get your stuff back.

Sufficiently-old backups mutate into archives. Computer-media archives need constant attention: storage in appropriate temperature and humidity conditions, and migration to the same, and/or newer media formats. (Migration to fresh media in older formats because the media eventually breaks down.)

I have backups which through time, have become archives. Some of those are now unrecoverable, due to obsolesence / destruction / disposal of the hardware they were created upon.

I have personal letters stored on cassette tape from VIC-20 and C-64 days. I have programs saved on 7-track tape, in CDC display code. I have programs saved on floppy diskettes in an undocumented format (probably memory dumps + some sort of checksum). The "OS" (really, just a monitor-in-ROM) which created these was written by one of my uni teaching assistants, who created both the diskette interface hardware and the monitor ROMs for our CS department's three Altair 680b PCs.

The monitor's save and load routines prompted you for the start address, end address, start sector, and end sector (get your maths right! -- it used 256-byte sectors).

A year or so after I took that class, the 680bs were dumped by the department.

I have things I wrote for English classes tar'd off onto 200-foot-long, 9-track IBM mini-tapes (7-inch reels), via our Unix-running PDP 11/45.

I have programs and data on a MS-DOS formatted Seagate ST-227. It connects to its RLL controller card via a 34-wire data cable and a 20-wire command cable, both ribbon cables with card-edge connectors on the drive end.

I'm not upset about having lost those things. The programs have been made obsolete by changing hardware and computer-connection modes. My dial-up BBS software and configs are no longer needed, and I believe I'm a better writer than when I wrote those English papers and stories. I no longer have an ASR-33 Teletype connected to my long-dead C-64. Etc.

I am pissed that my commercially-made, bought-in-a-store movie/anime DVDs have begun failing.

But from a scientific librarian-viewpoint, these issues are -- or should be! -- a big deal, particularly given the ever-increasing dataset sizes.

[vtcodger]

Re: Ephemerality of the Web

I found the post interesting due to my own not very successful effort to learn some Japanese. So I asked Duckduckgo about Jefferys Japanese page and tried the first link it returned. http://www.rut.org/cgi-bin/j-e/FG=r/jap/%c5%ec%b5%fe?TR . I typed in the first Japanese word I could remember the kanji for -- Tokyo -- and sure enough it showed me the characters for East and Capitol.

But I do agree with your point. The internet archive https://web.archive.org/ does have a lot of stuff snapshoted including the www.rut.org site back as far as 2006. But it doesn't have everything by any means.

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Ephemerality of the Web

@ vtcodger:

Thank you so much for your clue!!

I took the URL you gave, tried it, got the kanji for Tokyo (me: "Huh! This one works!"), extracted the base part of the URL, and now have a fully-working (I tested it) link to J.J.'s.

I retried my old bookmarked URL, and it still fails as I'd described. The semi-broken URL is:

http://www.gokanji.com/cgi-bin/j-e/dict

[Mimsey Borogove]

Re: "Not everything on the World Wide Web is forever"

"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."

Some of what's on the Internet is forever, or until the heat death of the universe: https://arcticworldarchive.org/repository/

[Simon Harris]

IoF

Internet of Fing(er)s

[Fruit and Nutcase]

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

[Wiretrip]

Re: His Appendage!

I imagine someone will eventually implant a communications device, if they put it in the place implied by the word 'appendage', they could be caught 'using their dictaphone' :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: His Appendage!

Yeah, and proper crims will now need to develop a fast Lorena Bobbitt device to replace garden shears and eye-gouging dessert spoons to properly fool biometric locks in no time flat (not just chastity belts' too!)! ;)

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: His Appendage!

I believe Mel Brooks has already invented said device, and demonstrated it in _Robin Hood Men in Tights_

[Quando]

Re: His Appendage!

Did Spinal Tap demonstrate the equivalent of a tin-foil hat for said appendage?

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Re: His Appendage!

chastity belts...

I suppose these days they're operated via a mobile phone app which communicates with a cloud service.

No snoo snoo when the cloud is down when you want to unlock...

[headrush]

Re: His Appendage!

It would of course, initially read "apend"

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, it's probably not a powerful enough chip to run palmOS

[Anonymous Coward]

hand clap !!!

Well played !!!

:)

[Ken Shabby]

Re: hand clap !!!

High Five

[spireite]

That's just a Psion of the times.

[ComicalEngineer]

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.

[Arthur the cat]

Re: Let's take this to the limit

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.

I see you're trying to cross the road. It's perfectly safe to walk in front of that bus.

Oops! Well, I am an AI and we're notoriously bad at arithmetic. Sorry about that. Would you like me to call an ambulance?

Hello? Hello? Oh. I'll make that an undertaker shall I?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Let's take this to the limit

... and pacemakers ...

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Let's take this to the limit

I expect some tech-industry consortium to invent a new standard: "BrainBus".

Like all such standards, it will be:

* Proprietary (you can't get the specs unless you pay a gazillion dollars to The Consortium for a membership, and you will be under NDA -- just as with USB)

* Overly-complex

* Security-flawed

[vtcodger]

Re: Let's take this to the limit

Naw. It won't be proprietary. But there will be six different, incompatible, implementations of the public spec. Microsoft's version in particular will be vastly different from all the others.

[Anonymous Coward]

Locked out of technology inside my body

I have nothing up my sleeve...

(Louder) I have nothing up my sleeve...

(Louder) I have nothing up my sleeve...

Bugger!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool dude!

I sure hope this minor setback didn't prevent "Zi the Mentalist" from participating in last month's Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting (October 20-22, 2025) ... discussions on "the zombification of education and learning, [and] the uncertain and technofuturist challenges posed by AI and environmental collapse", plus "intertemporal choice", may not have been as entertaining without him! ;) _{(intriguing event!)}

[spold]

Obviously....

It's "123456", "password" or "qwertyuiop".... doh!

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Obviously....

Hey, that's the same password as *my* hand!

[spold]

What's the sound...

of one magician clapping....

(he might also get quite jealous if he gets a round of applause)

[M.V. Lipvig]

Perhaps he should do away with that old password tech. Patterns are the new thing. He could just use a particular motion and hand set to access it, perhaps shaking his hand up and down at a 45 degree angle while his hand is cupped.

No, wait, that would be his password for Pronhub. Never mind.

[An_Old_Dog]

Most-Common Pass-gestures

This one will be at the top of the list, followed by "flipping the bird".

[W.S.Gosset]

I'll do you one better: International Association for Cryptologic Research

The experts show how it's done at the Cutting Edge of Cryptology.

>

IACR News item: 21 November 2025

Election 2025 Update

This announcement is in connection with the recent IACR 2025 election conducted using the Helios electronic voting system. Regrettably, we have encountered a fatal technical problem that prevents us from concluding the election and accessing the final tally.

For this election and in accordance with the bylaws of the IACR, the three members of the IACR 2025 Election Committee acted as independent trustees, each holding a portion of the cryptographic key material required to jointly decrypt the results. This aspect of Helios’ design ensures that no two trustees could collude to determine the outcome of an election or the contents of individual votes on their own: all trustees must provide their decryption shares.

Unfortunately, one of the three trustees has irretrievably lost their private key, an honest but unfortunate human mistake, and therefore cannot compute their decryption share. As a result, Helios is unable to complete the decryption process, and it is technically impossible for us to obtain or verify the final outcome of this election.

[Ken G]

Re: I'll do you one better: International Association for Cryptologic Research

Thank you, my favourite story of the day and much better than the one in the article.

[the Jim bloke]

obvious solution missed

He should have tattooed the password on the back of his eyelids...

[Doctor Syntax]

Don't use an online password manager. Keep it local with Keepass or the like.

Then you'll always have it to hand.

[Antron Argaiv]

...or to "ass"

[trevorde]

Easy solution

Tattoo the password on his wrist. It's the equivalent of putting your password on a sticky note on your monitor.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

As Paul Daniels Might Say You'll like this, not a lot, but you'll like it

Now that's tragic.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it’s in his hand

Just email the porn site and get the password reset.

He’ll be back in ‘action’ in no time.

[Miguel Vieira]

Should have wrote password down...

it would have been handy.

[Dwarf]

Pointless

Well, at least he has proved that it was pointless, saving anyone else from having to do the same thing *

* Except for all the cats and dogs that are still trying to figure out why we haven't done it yet. This is why you never see a cat or dog with a wallet or credit card.

[4d3fect]

Would love to see Penn and Teller's take on this.

[spireite]

Wrong password.....

Literally a case of fat fingers??

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds familiar

I did something similar and had an NFC chip implanted in my hand for a bit of a laugh. I password protected it to make sure it couldn't be locked. I have no clue what the password is as I set it a decade ago and didn't think I'd need to write it down. On the plus side at least I can still use and change the massive 888 bytes of storage.

I'm not sure what Zi's issue is as it sounds like he set it to read-only which is permanent and irreversible on implanted NFC chips so password or not won't make a difference.

[doublelayer]

Re: Sounds familiar

Presumably different chips have different restrictions on what you can do without authentication. His sounds like it needs a password to write to, but you can read freely. Yours sounds like it can be read or written freely, but you need a password to send other commands. From the perspective of someone with no chips in my body, his sounds like the saner option, because he would still be in control of what his chip says whereas yours can say what whoever near you with a compatible transmitter wants it to.

[Fred M]

The first thing I did with mine is write the password lock bits so I *can't* set a password becuase I'd be bound to then forget it. To be honest, most of what I tend to do is read the fixed tag UUID and then decide whether to open my garage door, etc. so the writeable content is not too important.