Watch

And at last the penny dropped, and she ceased to see the individual dots and saw instead the letters they represented, and—and—and—yes, yes, yes, more than that, she saw the words they spelled, taking in whole words at a glance. Good-bye, C-a-i-t-l-i-n; hello, Caitlin!

When her father returned, she proudly read aloud, “ ‘At first I was as incapable as a swathed infant— stepping with limbs I could not see.’ ” She was reading as rapidly as JAWS did when she had it set to double speed. “ ‘I was weak and very hungry. I went and stared at nothing in my shaving-glass, at nothing save where an attenuated pigment still remained behind the retina of my eyes, fainter than mist.’ ”

Her father nodded, apparently satisfied.

“What is it?” Caitlin asked, gesturing at the screen.

“The Invisible Man,” her father said.

Right. Caitlin had read a lot of H.G. Wells—it was easy to feed Project Gutenberg texts into her refreshable Braille display—but she’d never made it past the first chapter of The Invisible Man; the notion of invisibility had been too abstract for her when she’d been blind.

She realized that she shouldn’t be surprised that her computer could display Braille on its screen; the system had Braille fonts installed for use by her embossing printer; the Texas School for the Blind gave away the TrueType fonts.

“You’ll still have to learn to read Latin characters,” her father said. “But you might as well leverage the skill you’ve already got.” He did some more things on the computer. “Okay, I’ve set Internet Explorer to use Braille as its default for displaying Web pages, and left Firefox using normal fonts.”

“Thanks, Dad—but, um…”

“But you can read Braille just fine with your fingers, right?”

She nodded. “I mean, it is cool to do it with my eyes, but I’m not sure it’s better.”

“Wait and see,” her father said. He fished something out of his pocket, and—ah! The distinctive tah- dum! sound of a USB peripheral being recognized: it was a memory key. “Let me copy the Braille fonts,” he said. “We’ll need them tomorrow.” And when he was done he headed out the door—with Caitlin wondering, as she often did, just what was going through his mind.

eighteen

LiveJournal: The Calculass Zone

Title: Zzzzzz…

Date: Saturday 6 October, 11:41 EST

Mood: Exanimate

Location: Lady C’s Bedchamber

Music: Blind Guardian, “Mr. Sandman”

I wonder if Canadians call them “zees” when referring to sleep? “Gotta catch me some zees,” we say down South, and “zees” sounds like soft snoring, so it makes sense. But “need me some zeds” is just crazy. No wonder they lost the War of 1812 (you would not believe what they teach in history class about that war up here, my American friends!).

Anyway, whether they’re zees or zeds, I need a metric ton of them! Just gonna get my poop in a group for tomorrow, then hit the hay, eh?

* * *

I had indeed enjoyed watching WarGames through Caitlin’s eye. The part of the film that interested me the most was the young hacker’s attempts to compromise password-protected systems. Early in the film he got into his school’s computer, in order to change his grades, by consulting a list of passwords kept hidden on a sheet of paper taped to a desk’s slide-out shelf. Later, when he was trying to compromise NORAD’s WOPR computer, he set out to learn all he could about its programmer, Stephen Falken, in hopes of figuring out what password Falken might have used; the correct term, it turned out, was the name of his deceased son, Joshua.

Those may have been effective password-defeating techniques back in 1983, when that film came out, but according to the online sources I’d read, many people were now careful to choose harder-to-guess passwords. Also, many websites forced them to use strings that included both letters and numbers (in which case, more than half of all people simply appended the number 1 to the end of a word; the world’s most common password was, in fact, “password1”).

Still, in my attempts to learn more about her, I had tried 517 terms that seemed reasonable to access Caitlin’s Yahoo mail account, based on analyzing her writings and what I already knew of her, but none of them worked. Had Caitlin always been sighted, the task might have been easy—but she never looked at her keyboard as she typed.

Among the terms I tested were Keller (her idol), Sullivan (Keller’s teacher), Austin (the last city she lived in), Houston (the one she’d been born in), Doreen (her middle name), and TSBVI (the school she’d previously attended).

Passwords were case-sensitive (in fact, I was pleased with myself for noting that the password the hacker in WarGames had seen written down was “PeNciL” in mixed case, but the one he entered into the school’s computer was “pencil,” all lowercase, and so should have been rejected). And even for a short word like “keller,” there were sixty-four possible combinations of upper and lowercase letters one could use in rendering it: KELLER, Keller, kEller, keL1Er, and so on—and most systems will only give you a limited number of tries to enter the password, then refuse to take any more for a few minutes.

Clearly, I needed to find a better way to get past password prompts than what was depicted in that old movie—a way to get past any password or to decode any encrypted content.

And so I set my mind to it.

But even so monumental a puzzle was not enough to keep me fully occupied. I did not make the mistake of trying to multitask again, but I did switch my attention between what Kuroda Masayuki was doing—trying to let me access more obscure forms of video encoding—and watching videos in the format I already understood. Most of the videos I had access to were recorded: the images showed things that had happened in the past. The codec Masayuki had developed let me absorb the content of those essentially at the speed at which I could download the files—which was much more efficient than watching them play back at their normal speed.

Now that I could access sounds, I needed to learn to understand spoken language. I worked my way through an online dictionary that had recorded pronunciations; it offered both a male American voice and a female British one saying the same words; it took me about twenty minutes to assimilate all 120,000 words in each of the two voices.

I then watched some online newscasts, choosing those because I’d read that they were mostly presented with clear diction and even tones. I soon found that I could understand 93% of what most of them were saying. Sometimes, they used words that hadn’t been in the spoken dictionary—most often, proper nouns. But from the dictionary I’d learned the symbols used to render words phonetically, and I had little trouble converting most unknown phrases into those symbols, and then those symbols into a best-guess text rendering, which I fed into Google or Jagster, or matched against the content I’d absorbed from Wikipedia. When I guessed the spelling incorrectly, the search engines usually asked me “Did you mean…? ” and proffered the correct term.

I moved on to more general recordings with lots of background noise, but, even with those, I soon had the ability to recognize at least seven words out of every ten.

I found there was something appealing about live video—about seeing things that were happening right now, especially while Caitlin was sleeping, as she currently was, and her eyePod was off. I linked from site to site, peeking out at the world in real time.

The live video I was looking at now was, in many ways, fungible with thousands of others: a female human,