“I AM HERE TO HELP CREATE A MERIT ORIENTED SOCIETY” Clipping, Prof. S. Javed Ashraf, ‘Daily News’, Karachi, 28th June, 1986
MESSAGE: DEDICATED TO ANONYMOUS COMBATANTS OF KNOWLEDGE
مکتب علم الل مہد منل لحد Learning continues from birth to death
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“I AM HERE TO HELP CREATE A MERIT ORIENTED SOCIETY”
– Professor S.J Ashraf Clipping, DAILY NEWS, KARACHI
28th June, 1986
Professor S.J Ashraf a computer expert, is the author of several papers in the International and Pakistan Academy of Science Journals. He has given talks in various organisations and institutions of Karachi on specialised topics related to artificial intelligence, complex system management, decision support systems etc. He belongs to the FBCS (fellow of the British Computer Society) and the FSS. (Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society). He is also a consultant to the British Computer Society.
Presently he is the Director of the (ICS) Institute of Computer Science which is an independent non-profit, educational institution managed by the BCCI Foundation for Advancement of Science and Technology. The Institute was established in 1984 to provide professional education in computer science and engineering. The establishment of this institute gives a tangible form to the foundation’s desire to provide an excellent learning environment for talented young men and women. According to Professor S.J. Ashraf “I am here to create a merit oriented society.” ICS is affiliated with the University of Karachi.
In an exclusive interview with the ‘Star’ he talks about the computer science as an important emerging discipline for technological strength of developing countries.
Q. There are many computer languages such at COBOL. FORTRAN, PASCAL, BASIC, ASSEMBLER, etc and so many data base package (i.e., ORACLE/ INFORMTX) for computer science student to team which of these is the most practical?
A. The names of such languages are now fast disappearing. The present languages are 4, GL which has the power increase the productivity of the programme and to lock things away in its memory without much problem. SQL, DS, IBM ORACLES. These are the future languages for the world data base elementaries.
Q. Why are we behind in computer science in this country?
A. The reason was the non-availability of the knowledge, and the non-availability of resources, some people can promote it in their own way, but actually they are making it into commercial deal. But education at least in a Third World country like Pakistan is not a commercial venture, and that’s why I really doubt if computers can be useful at the real expertise level. Maybe they are useful to introduce the subject but real expertise is beyond their scope. I don’t think these are serving the purpose to enable us to compete in the world market.
The academic universities are failing to provide the right requirements.
Q. Why is it so?
A. Because there is lack of commitment, a lack of resource and a lack of knowledge.
Q. How would you suggest that computer science be introduced is educational institutes.
A. I would love to, this is a fantastic idea. I have been attending various seminars to create a different thinking. The mentality of today’s generation is different from that of the older ones. It is easy for today’s generation to grasp a figure or a concept in its lotality. The second analogy is that when we were students in 1959, set theory and modern Algebra was the part of M.Sc course, and now this has become a part of the school syllabus. I have asked the government to introduce computer science into schools but the teachershave to be trained first. Even the private schools are not doing much they are just telling the boys and girls to team about computers. The syllabus are not there. At the moment they are just proposing and supporting something, without having a definite direction.
Q. The computer is a vendors market who claim different facilities in their products. Is there many independent institute to test these and provide guidance for small users?
A. In this country no, but in other countries there are. I will just give an example there are two levels of Third World countries, one that have opted for the strategic needs including nuclear power, and one that have opted for strategic needs in information technology. I happened to be in China two years back on a long assignment, I noticed that all the material which was coming for educational purposes had to go through a set up like we have here ‘Muqtadara’. Computer organisations and separate ministries are there for this purpose.
If we need something then original work has to be done, and Urdu has to go in the operating system not as in the patchy way many people are trying to do. The solution is there but the operations system is not present. And then every supplier or vendor has to provide the things, because it is growing so fast there should be a full-fledge department, which does not exist here.
Q. Has no suggestions be given to the government by any private sector so far?
A. I don’t know, because the government very rarely invites us for some sessions but I don’t think that suggestions carry so much weight for them. Either it is to be done real technology, or else it would remain superficial. Solutions would never be long lasting because things are changing very fast, for instance no standard digitisation exists which is acceptable to words in Urdu.
Why not take Arabic and Arabic related languages together because the Quran is read by much more people. Written version of the Quran for us is different for Arab students they have ‘Khat-e-Koofi’ which does not have Aarabs and other things and our Quran has all the Aarabs on it, but no infrastructures exist here. I tried to meet every person who is doing something in this regard. Dr Farman Fatehpuri is doing his work in isolation but it needs collective venture with information technology, only then we can be able to benefit the masses.
Q. What is a computer virus?
A. The virus is named for its ability to spread from program to program, file to file, in a computer system or network. Attached to a program such as an electronic spreadsheet or word processor, a virus enters the computer’s memory when the program is activated. There the virus lurks, examining data and software as they are loaded into memory and attaching a replica of itself wherever it finds none. Contaminated programs and data files infect any computer that uses them, spreading the virus like an epidemic throughout a system or network. Once the disease has spread, the original virus and its clones can go to work executing whatever instructions they carry. A virus can be programmed like a logic bomb, for example, to erase files on a certain date or even to cripple the whole system.
A virus is so small, occupying the space of only a few hundred bytes in memory, that it can remain virtually invisible among the hundreds of thousand of coded lines contained in a typical program for a big computer. It is also surprisingly easy to create. Any decent programmer can write a virus in six hours,
A novice can write one in 20 hours with assistance and 30 hours without assistance.
The first public alarm about viruses was sounded in 1984 by Fred Cohen, a University of Southern California researcher. He told an international conference on computer security of an experiment during which a virus he had created was able to infect a widely used computer system in a period as short as five minutes. In another experiment, he showed that even a special operating system designed for military security is vulnerable to viruses. Stepped-up research in computer security may bring the development of new mechanisms – perhaps even a kind of programming “vaccine” – effective against the virus and other menaces. But in the foreseeable future, Cohen concluded, protection against an epidemic of viruses could be achieved only by isolating the computer, just as a doctor might confine a vulnerable patient to keep disease at bay.
Q. If we replace boot area or fat area of defected floppy with other diskettee (free from virus) can then the virus be eliminated?
A. Nobody can guarantee it, because the virus effect are not in one go in many times you might have heard 23rd March virus, 15th December time bomb was there, because if the virus mix with a time bomb or mix with something else you cannot scan the whole disc again and again it is an expensive solution so there is no guarantee.
The most common types of viruses are the boot sector viruses (BSVs). The boot programme is the start up programme and is loaded before any other programme. It resides on the boot sector, which is the first sector on the diskette. The BSV replaces the boot sector with part of its code and moves the original boot sector with the rest of its code to a different place on the diskette. So every time the diskette tries to boot up, the virus code runs first then passes control to the original programme. The virus code copies the virus to another file on another disk and so it repliactes itself.
The other types of viruses are direct action file viruses which attach themselves to COM & EXE files and are run before them. The indirect action file viruses work by controlling the interrupts.
The viruses usually first check to see if a file or disk is already infected, if so then it avoids re-infecting it otherwise the files would grow too large and the virus will be noticeable prematurely.
Some viruses are regarded as benign (e.g. Brain & Italian) because they are not made to destroy any data directly but it would be highly utopian to think that any virus is totally harmless. The reason for this is that a virus is a low level programme and so is the operating system, thus as the OS operates the virus is alive in the background and under such a circumstances a clash is highly probable. Therefore a virus should be removed as soon as it is noticed and should not be allowed to remain in the system.
A brief description about some of the common viruses is
” Brain ” appears as the volume label in an infected disk. Another sign of the presence of this virus is the appearance of 3K of bad sectors. Normally when DOS format finds a defective sector it marks the entire track as bad. Thus the minimum space that can be marked as bad sectors (genuine bad sectors) is 5K and not 3K. The 3K of ‘fake’ bad sectors are used by Brain for its own code. Marking its own code area as bad ensures protection because DOS does not use the bad sectors of the disk for data storage. The bad sectors are also used to store a copy of the original boot sector which brain replaces with its own boot. Once Brain has infected a disk it puts its own two byte signature in the boot area which prevents it from copying itself on that disk again.
Brain has an interesting camouflage mechanism. If Brain is active and an attempt is made to look at the boot sector, it will appear perfectly normal. This is because the virus instead of showing the infected boot, shows the copy of the original boot. However if the computer’s memory has not been infected then a peep into the boot sector of an infected disk will reveal the following message:
Welcome to the Dungeon
(c) 1966 Brain & Amjads (Pvt) Ltd (etc, etc, etc).
ITALIAN
Also known as the “bouncing ball” virus because every half an hour it triggers a dot that bounces around the screen passing through or being deflected by the text, and rebounds off the edges of the screen. Thus activity is non-destructive but occasionally it may mess up the screen display.
It leaves the two copies of the FAT different from each other. Italian has infected your disk if running the DOS chkdsk command gives 1K of bad sectors. The filenames “IBMBIO.COM” OR “IO.SYS” will be missing from an infected boot sector.
STONED
Once in 32 boot-ups the message “Your PC is now stoned” is displayed. It causes no intentional damage. On 360K floppy disks will cause trouble if the number of files exceeds 96. The reason being that Stoned replaces the original boot sector with its own boot and puts a copy of the original boot on the last sector of the directory. The infected boot has the message:
“Your PC is now Stoned!
LEGALIZE MARIUANA!”
THE 1701 VIRUS AND THE 2086 VIRUS (FU MANCHU)
Both infect COM files which grow by 1701 byte and 2086 bytes respectively. 2086 infects EXE files also. When 1701 is triggered it creates a spectacular “ailstorm” effect with accompanying sound effect in which the letters on the screen fell down in a heap. After October 1988 the virus run random number generator at evenly spaced intervals and the “hailstorm” is triggered when a particular number is generated. In the case of the 2086 virus if you reboot using ctrl-alt-del, the virus prints the message “The word will hear from me again!” before rebooting.
DENZUK
Denzuk is a boot sector virus. The infected boot bears to telltale messages. Any attempt to reboot using ctrl-alt-del results in the Denzuk logo being displayed. The logo is the world “DEN ZUK” written in large red letters whose pixels move in from the sides until they merge. Denzuk can be detected by checking the volume of the disk which will read “Y.C.I.E.R.P”. This virus does not infect disk already infected with Denzuk, if it sees that the victim disk is infected with an older version of itself it updates it. If it comes across a disk already infected with Brain it upgrades the disk from Brain to Denzuk. In addition to its own signature, Denzuk puts the Brain signature on the boot to prevent Brain from infecting a disk that has been infected by Denzuk.
Q. You have done work on computerization of Islamic Law of Inheritance. What exactly does it means?
A. The Islamic Law of Inheritance prescribes the mode and manner of succession of a deceased muslim. The existing Islamic inheritance system is an outcome of centuries of efforts by the Muslim Jurists. The system renders the perfection as it adequately caters for all possible situations of family heirs tree of a deceased Muslim. The complexity of real life situations influx application intricacies. The Islamic inheritance primarily provides vides rules and meta-rules to deal with the vast situation variabilities. The situation identification for applicability of a rule is one area, and invoking the rules combinations for computing the share awards to the Class-1, II and III situations forms an area where the computerization could be helpful in view of the multiplicity of interrelationships of the heirs.
Some of the variation complexities include the situations generated due to the variability of parental relationships, namely, consanguinity, real and uterine at siblings levels, maternal and paternal higher family tree nodes of uncles and aunts, false, and true at lower and upper nodes of grandparents and grandchildren, and male/ female variability of heirs. The variety of heirs inclusions, exclusions, residuaries, and sharers and the peculiar needs for computational checks and controls, namely ‘increase’ and ‘return’ accrue intricacies.
The complexity goes in manual applications due to the dynamics of traversity of the family tree and variety of rule trees, which is the vehicle of the inheritance shares distribution mechanism. The system goes on distributing a fraction into tiny fractions and the computational accurancy also forms constraints. Characteristically the Islamic inheritance system acquired some mechanisation through the historical course by its rule structures and fractional computations. However, with the advent of the informatics conceptual sophistications and electronic devices to manipulate the knowledge and arithmetic, the computerization of this application area will open the new dimensations and strength for the Islamic Law and Inheritance in particular and Islamic Order System in general.
The common users will get an easy operational access through these discoveries for their guidance and conversational convincibility in situations at hand. There are various other advantages of such applications which include the following conceptual and functional gains.
On the logical inferencing side which is the creative power of rationality for complicated inferencing in the course of decision making of all walks of life the advancements are emerging out through the stages of sylogistic logic, boolean Logic, and now temporal, modal, spatial, and fuzzy logics as a power for logical inferencing. To keep pace with these logical advancements the exposure of knowledge based systems like Islamic Inheritance will give a new level of refinement for required inferencing.
The continued discoveries in medical and other sciences are creating new situations for attentions of Islamic order system. To accommodate the emerging needs, the existing infrastructure on information technology base will be a ready platform to test and study the expansion of new rules.
On the functional side the computerization of the Islamic Law of inheritance is a strong tool for several applications like, jurists supports for their acceptability dialogues and economy of then efforts and time on exercises of repetitive nature, legislative bodies for controlling and monitoring the law systems social scientists for evolution and strength of the social structure, and other variety of users which include the land and property record system.
The strength for common users of computerization of Islamic Law of Inheritance lies in its explanation facility for ‘why’ and ‘how’, also to compare and trace any applicability disagreements of various laws.
The strength for other typical users lies in its capability of examining the rules consistency, completeness, effectiveness, redundancies, conflicts, and unifications for more generalized rules and meta-rules.
The system so designed and implemented is named, ‘Islamic Law of Inheritance Expert System’, (ILIES), which is expected to achieve the following advantages further to what is described above;
– ILIES can be a counsellor to knowledgeable users specially to jurists.
– ILIES can relieve the domain experts from the tedious exercise of rightly selecting the applicable rules and computational drills for distribution of heirs shares in various situations.
– ILIES can be used in exercises of academic nature of the Islamic Law of Inheritance for the high seat of learnings of this specialised area.
– ILIES can be used to simulate various situations for a person who is planning to distribute his wealth and property after his death for purpose and objectives of this choice.
– ILIES is an integrated application of a part of Islamic Order system and modern technology.
– ILIES would provide a base for future information technology developments using fifth generation tools of the information technology and Applied Artificial Intelligence evolutions.
– The ILIES existing status is a prototype which can be used to develop a more comprehensive system package Expert System to make it more viable for variety of users with the participation of domain experts of various fields.
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