My weird piece of EDC

Im back with a quick little post about something I cary with me everywhere I go, EDC (Every-Day Carry) if you will.

How this started

Earlier this year, my friend @hyperliskdev showed me a piece of “fake ID” he was given as a joke. After some experimentation, he noticed that, upon tapping it to his phone, he would get an error message about an un-formatted card.

After hearing of this, I opened up NFC Tools on my phone and started playing. We had quite some fun with various settings and data, and I decided that I wanted a card too. I send a message to someone that I knew worked with these, and got myself 4 to play with.

Shenanigans

Upon figuring out how to write to @hyperliskdev’s card, we started out simple. We sent bits of text to eachother, and I eventually sent him a copy of my contact information, and bitcoin address. Then, came the real fun..

By setting the data type to external link, and the content to this totally not suspicious URL, we now had the perfect tool for derailing a lesson. An automatic Rick Roll card. Upon tapping this card to a phone, the youtube app would auto-play Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. After this discovery, people started asking to buy pre-configured cards from me 😆.

After this came even more fun ideas:

• Enabling flashlights
• Rebooting phones
• Calling phone numbers
• Sending texts
• Filling phones with fake contacts

Practical use

I don’t actually carry my cards around for messing with people but instead, use them for things like:

• Cloning hotel access cards (being in a room of 4 with only 2 cards)
• Creating login cards for school printers (so I don’t have to log in manually)
• Sharing small amounts of data and links between phones
• Giving my contact info to people

Thanks to the NFC Tools app, pretty much everything is 3 taps and a swipe away. I strongly recommend picking up some cards for yourself if wou work with a large number of NFC-compatible systems.

A/N

Occasionally, I either have nothing in the works, or am working on some very boring and technical projects, so I look to post some fun content like this. Currently the latter of the options is true, and I wanted a quick break from writing networking code.

Let me know what you think of this type of content!