“Keep trying,” her father said. “I’ll be back.”
He left the room, and she did keep trying.
And trying.
And trying.
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, apparently in her teenage years, talking directly into a Web camera.
I followed some links, found her Facebook page. Her name was Hannah Stark; she lived in Perth, Australia; and she was sixteen, just like Caitlin.
She was sitting cross-legged on a bed. The walls behind her were lime green, and the bed had a yellow and white blanket on it. She had a black cord
less keyboard, which was intermittently visible, but she also had an open microphone, and was uploading sound as well as video.
As I watched and listened, Hannah spoke aloud sometimes, and sometimes she sent out text. Others were sending text back to her, which I easily intercepted. You don’t have the balls, said one.
This seemed an obvious statement, so I was surprised when she typed back, Do too.
Then do it, wrote another.
I will, she replied, and she spoke the same words, “I will.”
I don’t got all day do it now, said a different commenter.
Yeh now bitch now, added another.
The girl had dark eyebrows, thicker than Caitlin’s. She scrunched her forehead, and they moved together and touched.
all talk, wrote someone else. wastin everyones time
Hannah typed with just her index fingers. Im gonna do it.
I was getting better at reading improperly formed text and had no trouble following along.
when? said someone. just jerkin us around
dont rush me, Hannah replied.
lame, said the same person who’d made the previous comment. Im outta here
I want you to understand some things, Hannah wrote, bout why Im doing this.
You aint doin’ shit, said someone.
Hannah went on. It’s just so pontless
But then she corrected herself, sending pointless.
Someone who hadn’t posted yet while I’d been watching said, It’s not that bad. Don’t do it.
Shut the fuck up jerkoff, someone else replied. Stay outta it.
Ok, Hannah wrote. She reached out of view of the camera and when her hand was visible again, it was holding something gray.
Here I go, she typed with just one hand, and—oh!—the thing in her other hand wasn’t gray; now that it caught the light, I saw it was silver.
She manipulated the object in her right hand and brought it near to her left arm. She then rotated that arm so that the inside of her wrist faced up. She brought the object close, and—
do it do it do it
Ah! It was a knife. She drew it across her wrist, but—
ripoff!
Tease!
—nothing happened.
Like I said, no guts…
harder!
Noooooooooooooooo dont …
She closed her eyes tightly, took a deep breath, and then—
Go fer it!
—she drew the blade across her wrist again, and she jerked her head slightly as she did so. A small bead of blood appeared on the skin when she pulled the knife away.
that all?
Do it again!
“Give me a chance,” Hannah said. She reached for her keyboard with the hand that wasn’t holding the knife and pecked out with her index finger, Dont feel bad mum.
And then she pulled her hand back and faced her wrist up again, and she turned her head away and looked at the lime-green wall, and she made a quick deep slice into her skin.
more like it!
eeeeeew!
holy fuck!
A red line appeared on her wrist, and as she pulled the knife away, I could see that its blade was now slick and dark.
thought she was kidding
finish it! finish it!
She rotated her wrist slowly and large drops of blood spilled out.
just a flesh wound
Chicken! Buck-buck-buckaw!
She looked into the webcam, and, while doing so, slashed her wrist once more. Her face changed in an odd way, and blood surged from the wound, splurting presumably in time with her heartbeat. omg omg omg
Hannah Stark slumped forward. She must have been putting weight on her keyboard because her computer—which, obviously, was there although out of my view—made a shrill sound that I believe indicated a keyboard-buffer overflow, but nothing was sent, since she hadn’t hit the enter key. The sound continued, a uniform wailing. She didn’t move again, and soon it was impossible to tell this streaming video from a still image.
nineteen
Caitlin’s dad had gotten hold of Tawanda late on Saturday night, and she’d agreed to come into work on Sunday to make the modifications to the eyePod; she was quite eager, Caitlin’s dad had said, to see the device’s insides.
As Caitlin and her father drove into the RIM campus, the roads were mostly empty. Once they arrived at the appropriate building, and Tawanda got them through security, they took an elevator up to an engineering lab. The walls were covered with big, framed photos of various BlackBerry models, and there were three worktables, each crammed with complex-looking equipment.
Tawanda was a slim black woman. Caitlin was still no good at guessing ages, but her skin seemed smooth. She was wearing blue jeans and a loose-fitting white garment that Caitlin belatedly realized must be a lab coat.
Caitlin had indeed met her before—she had immediately recognized the lovely Jamaican accent. But she honestly didn’t recognize her: her brain was rewiring its vision centers at a furious pace, she knew, and she was seeing things differently today than she had at the press conference last Wednesday. Then, she’d been able to do little more than tell when something was a face; now, she was starting to get good at identifying specific faces.
“Thank you so much,” Caitlin said, “for giving up your Sunday for me.”
“Not at all, not at all,” Tawanda said. “But let’s get to work.” She held out her hand, and Caitlin took the eyePod out of her hip pocket. RIM employed top-notch industrial designers, and their devices looked—well, the word people used was “sexy,” although Caitlin was still struggling with how that could apply to an inanimate object. But the simple case that housed the eyePod was an off-the-shelf part; the device might perform miracles, but at least from the outside it was quite plain.
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to shut it off to do the work,” Tawanda said.
“I know,” said Caitlin. “Um, let me.” She took the eyePod back, held its single switch for five seconds, and—
Blind again! It was so disconcerting. She’d spent almost her whole life having no visual sensation, but that was no longer an option for her brain; instead, she was surrounded by a soft, even grayness. She felt herself blinking, as if her one good eye were trying to kick-start itself into seeing again.
“Now, Dr. Kuroda had suggested ways in which I might add a microphone—but there’s a simpler solution. We’re just going to attach a BlackBerry to the back of the eyePod, and use the BlackBerry’s built-in mike. It’s just a matter of interfacing the two devices. As an added bonus, you’ll be able to use the BlackBerry for data connections from now on, instead of your device’s Wi-Fi.”
It took Tawanda about forty minutes to perform the operation. Caitlin heard little sounds, but really couldn’t interpret them, except for the noise of a drill, which presumably was Tawanda making a hole in the eyePod’s case. Her father said nothing.
At last, though, it was done. “Okay,” Tawanda said. “Now, how do you turn it back on?”
Caitlin held out her hand and soon felt the weight of the eyePod in it. She ran her other hand over it, the way she used to do instinctively with any object placed in her hand when she’d been blind full-time. The BlackBerry now attached to the back of the eyePod was slim and small.
She held the switch on the eyePod down until the unit came oh-so-gloriously back to life. It booted up, as always, in websight mode, a tangle of razor-straight lines crisscrossing her vision. She took a moment to focus on the background, just to make sure it was shimmering as it should. It was. She toggled over to worldview.
Tawanda put on a pair of earphones and asked Caitlin to count to a hundred for her—but that was so boring, so she started counting up prime numbers: “Two, three, five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen…”
Tawanda nodded. “It’s working fine,” she said. “Sound quality is excellent.”
“Thank you,” Caitlin replied.
“All right,” Tawanda said. “You
can mute the microphone, if need be, by pressing this key on the BlackBerry, see?”
Caitlin nodded. The BlackBerry, she saw, was silver and black, with a little keyboard and screen. It was mated, back-to-back, with the eyePod, not quite doubling its thickness.
“Good, okay,” said Tawanda. “Now, on to phase two.”
“Phase two?” Caitlin said.
Her father dug into his pocket and handed his USB memory key to Tawanda. “They’re in the root directory,” he said to her.
“What’s going on?” Caitlin said.
“Remember the press conference?” her father asked. “That journalist from the CBC? The joke he made?”
Caitlin did indeed remember: it had been Bob McDonald, the host of Quirks Quarks, the weekly science radio program, which Caitlin enjoyed listening to as a podcast. He’d asked if something like Caitlin’s post-retinal implant could be the next BlackBerry? A device that sends messages directly into people’s heads?
“Yes?” she said.
“If it’s okay with you,” Tawanda said, “we’re going to set it up so that text can be superimposed over the pictures you’re seeing, so you can read IMs and so forth. Kinda merge them in, you know?”
“Like merging in closed captioning when watching a DVD?” Caitlin said, excitedly.
“Exactly!” Tawanda said. “Let’s give it a try…”
I was not the only one interested in the problem of cracking passwords. A great many humans had addressed the issue, as well. Passwords are rarely stored as plaintext; rather, they are stored as the output of cryptographic hash functions. In the early days of computing, this provided a significant amount of protection. But computing power keeps growing at an exponential rate, and those interested in defeating passwords took a simple, if initially time-consuming, brute-force approach: they calculated the hash values of every possible password of a certain type (for instance, all possible combinations of up to fourteen letters and numbers). Lists of these values—called rainbow tables—were already available online—as were hundreds of other tools for learning people’s passwords.
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