the closing verdict, the capability-map row, and the live evidence

The three blockers yesterday's English walk found are closed and each proven on
a live system. The verdict is deliberately 'nothing known now stands in their
way' rather than 'the walk passed': fixes are not a journey, and the hour has
not been re-walked by a stranger on a fresh install.

Also filed: the HP demo box answers on no route this session has (R-601), the
cookie-vs-session language instrument trap that would have had me fix R-598
twice (R-602), and the apostrophe that silently never matches a rendered page
(R-603).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0159rPz1ZhFKsS53msqPYxtS

STATUS.md

@@ -1,5 +1,55 @@
 # STATUS — what works, what's broken, what's next
 
+**Updated 2026-09-21 — the one screen that stopped an English speaker is fixed, and I watched it work.**
+
+> **Ready for an English-speaking tester: yes — nothing known now stands in their way.**
+> Ready for a Hungarian volunteer: yes, unchanged.
+
+**What I fixed.** All three things yesterday's walk found.
+
+1. **The page where you type the code from your e-mail.** It was English; its answers were Hungarian.
+   Now the whole page answers in your language. Type the code wrong and an English household reads
+   *"Wrong or expired code"*. Five wrong tries and it says *"Too many attempts — try again in 15
+   minutes."*
+2. **The code in the e-mail.** An English household now gets **English words** —
+   four ordinary English words joined by hyphens, instead of `képző-szkítia-ásatás`. You can read it down a
+   telephone. **It is four words instead of three, on purpose**: the English word list is smaller, so
+   a fourth word keeps the code at least as hard to guess as the Hungarian one. Never weaker, and a
+   test does that sum every time rather than trusting me. Hungarian households see no change at all.
+3. **The Backup page's warnings** — the ones that say whether your files are really safe — follow
+   the language now, and the English says exactly what the Hungarian says: it protects against bad
+   files, **not** against a broken disk.
+
+**How I know.** I watched the real box answer in both languages, and the two e-mails sit one day
+apart in the same inbox — yesterday's Hungarian code and today's English one, same message, same
+subject. The Hungarian pages are byte-for-byte what they were; a check proves that on every push and
+I proved the check works by breaking one full stop on purpose.
+
+**One thing proved itself by accident.** My own wrong guesses in Hungarian locked out the English
+page too. That is right: the lock counts the person, not the language, so nobody gets extra tries by
+switching.
+
+**Honest limit.** I fixed and proved three things. **I did not re-do the whole first hour as a
+stranger on a brand-new machine** — that is the walk that turns this from "nothing stands in the way"
+into "someone did it". It is worth doing before you hand a box to a real English tester, and it is
+also the walk that would show the two Backup warnings on a screen rather than in a test.
+
+**Also found, needs you.** **The HP box is switched off or unplugged** — it answers on nothing I can
+reach, and the network says it has been dark for a while. It is a physical machine, so it needs a
+person. Nothing depends on it today; it just means we have one demo box running, not two.
+
+**Rows.** Three closed, three opened.
+
+**Needs you — one decision, no rush.** Whether to raise the box floor to today's version (0.259.0).
+Everything already works without it; it only means every box gets these fixes instead of just the
+demo one. This is the same decision that was waiting yesterday, now one version further on.
+
+**If you do nothing:** nothing breaks.
+
+
+## Previous note
+
+
 **Updated 2026-09-20 (late) — I installed a box from scratch and used it as an English speaker. It almost works.**
 
 > **Ready for an English-speaking tester: NOT YET — one screen stops them.**