Security researcher Dan Kaminsky has introduced a mobile app that processes images for users who suffer from red-green colorblindness. The utility, titled DanKam and available for iOS and Android, attempts to overcome the condition by processing images through several color-shifting schemes. Images can be taken in real-time from the device's camera.
Mobile app development is new territory for Kaminsky. Since finding a bug in the Domain Name System (DNS) protocol in 2008 that would allow malicious hackers to invisibly redirect Internet’s traffic, he rose to cybersecurity rockstar status advocating a more secure version of DNS known as DNSSEC. After the “Kaminsky bug” blowup, he left his position as a penetration tester at security firm IOActive to join the incubator Recursion Ventures, but has since left that firm, too, for another stealthy project called Dan Kaminsky Holdings.
“I like fixing things,” he says of his side project. “I’ve been doing a lot of things to fix the Internet, trust, passwords, safety and security. It’s nice to have a project that’s not quite so complicated.”
Kaminsky isn’t the first to think of an app for addressing colorblindness. But unlike DanKam, most of the more than a dozen other apps simply allow the user to click on an image to identify a color. Colorblind users may also want to check out another, free app that offers real-time imaging called Chromatic Glass.
Kaminsky points to the work of Mark Changizi, who writes that humans were actually red-green colorblind as a species for thousands of years, and developed the ability to differentiate the two colors as a way to judge the health of their fellow humans based on skin tone and blood flow. Kaminsky says that may mean a variant of DanKam could someday be used as a health assessment tool.
“This is an interesting tool that will help people live their lives and get around better. In the future it may be an interesting medical application,” he says. “If nothing else, I like the fact that it has nothing to do with DNS. Absolutely nothing.”
source: forbes.com/
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