Dan Kaminsky Launches iPhone App To Hack Colorblindness
In 2008, security researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered and helped develop a patch for one of the most fundamental flaws ever found in the infrastructure of the Internet. Lately he’s been working on a fix for a very different infrastructure problem: the faulty photoreceptors in my eyes.
Like close to 6% of males, I suffer from anomalous trichromacy, also known as red-green colorblindness. “Suffer” is probably too strong a word–the extent of my sight problem is that I can’t tell some shades of red, green, and brown apart. One example: red and brown M&Ms look (depending on the light) almost exactly alike.
Kaminsky isn’t colorblind. But when he went with a friend to see the Star Trek movie last year, he was amazed to discover that his friend couldn’t see that one character in the film had green skin. “He thought she just had a very deep tan,” says Kaminsky. (Come to think of it, so did I.) About 14 months of on-and-off development later, Kaminsky on Wednesday launched DanKam, an augmented reality app for iPhone and Android that aims to offer a quick fix for situations where colorblindness causes ambiguities.
